>I, for one, will NEVER stop eating McDonald’s. You have my word.
Uh... hail marketing! Nothing quite like getting nostalgia exploited for corporate profits. But hey, its important to support... uh... 'retro gaming?'
The anti-corporatism shtick is so lame. Just because something is done by a massive corporation doesn’t make the thing bad. Just because something is an advertisement doesn’t make it bad.
I think this is pretty cool. Maybe I’ll buy some McDonalds today too.
One time I asked for McChicken sauce packets and they gave me three. I said, "Wow, three for free!" and the nice friendly McDonald's worker laughed and said, "I'm going to call you 3-for-free!".
Now the staff greets me with "hey it's 3-for-free!" and ALWAYS give me three packets. It's such a fun and cool atmosphere at my local McDonald's restaurant, I go there at least 3 times a week for lunch and a large iced coffee with milk instead of cream, 1-2 times for breakfast on the weekend, and maybe once for dinner when I'm in a rush but want a great meal that is affordable, fast, and can match my daily nutritional needs.
https://www.mcdonalds.com/ca/en-ca/product/mcchicken-sauce-p...
Miracle Whip ingredients: water, soybean oil, sugar, vinegar, modified cornstarch, egg yolks, salt, mustard, spices, potassium sorbate, calcium disodium EDTA, dried garlic.
Thankfully you don't have to be too concerned. It's for the same reason Miracle Whip doesn't actually call itself mayonnaise, and Hellmann's Real Mayonnaise does. Mustard, garlic, etc., are not mayonnaise ingredients.
So it's still a mystery why McDonalds doesn't just call it Mayonnaise when the ingredients are pretty much identical to every other mayonnaise out there, including Hellmann's REAL Mayonnaise.
Maybe it's one of those "It's only X if it comes from the X region" type issues. It just makes it sound suspicious for no discernable reason. Like buying a bottle of "Wet 'water' style beverage."
You probably already know this, but fast food 5 times a week is basically putting in a request for health problems.
e: Wow, I got sniped big time.
Huh. My experience with McDonald's: never met daily nutritional needs, no longer affordable and struggling to be fast.
Living is all about understanding trade offs and making informed decisions. Just because plants don't scream when you kill them doesn't mean a plant-only diet is without negative effects as well.
And a fourth option, it seems. However dark.
My source for this is an elective class I took at Oregon State University a few years ago, taught by a professor who is deeply involved in fishery research and management. So perhaps he was biased, but from what he presented I was thoroughly impressed with the sustainability practices of the seafood industry. One of my big takeaways was that wild Alaskan halibut in particular (which is what McDonald’s uses) is among the best seafoods, and one of the most sustainable foods in existence.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypress_Island_Atlantic_salmon...
Those are very good points that I neglected to mention, and my professor spent a lot of time discussing them. One of the main points of the class is that seafood sustainability is extremely dependent on the species of fish and the country of origin, and so it’s important to do research on where your fish is coming from. I don’t remember a lot of details anymore, but I do specifically remember that most stuff from Alaska is excellent, and shrimp is awful in terms of ethics & sustainability.
They did something cool and now you want to give them money. Why is that?
Maybe there's merit in asking why I think it's cool to begin with (and in this case I hardly think mcdonalds is responsible for people who like gameboy games), but there doesn't seem to be much to gain in asking myself why I want to spend money on things I like. What else should I spend my money on?
They made a Gameboy game and now you're buying hamburgers.
If you're doing a 'vote with your wallet' thing to try to convince them to make more retro games that at least makes sense, even if id argue it's a little naive, but that's not even what were talking about. They made a videogame and now people are pledging to buy their hamburgers.
I’m enjoying the corporate apologetics personally. I’ve heard there is a Christian resurgence among the youth, and this makes me wonder if there will be a resurgence of pro-capitalism sentiment as well. Ideas, values, culture: it all evolves with time.
McDonalds obviously made the game in the hope that it will sell more hamburgers. If you buy a hamburger, their strategy worked, which means they (and other companies that are watching) have a reason to do similar things in the future.
What’s weird about incentivizing behavior you like in the hope that you get more of that behavior?
If their competitors copycat McDonalds' marketing, they totally didn't get that message, because by the time they clone it, the uniqueness McDonalds demonstrated does not apply to them - they've made a copy, or even a shadow of what came moments before. The edge McDonalds had is their cliff to behold unless they find something unique to counter with.
Back in the edgy days, I never thought I'd find blanket-corporate-hatred becoming quite so lame, to the point of even taking on its own corporate-style blandness, in the 2020s...
Corporate blandness has infected us all; from my reference frame you’re just some bland text on a corporate website that silences spicy discourse.
Are others lame or is that all you feel given hypernormalized routines?
Look at the rebels willing to risk going against this thread by eating McDonalds; highway to the danger zone.
How bold
I was just thinking of the last time I was waiting in my car at the McDonald's drive-thru with the rest of the proles, and a friend called. When I told him where I was, he had let out an involuntary "ugh" sound, and expressed that he can't believe I eat that garbage, let alone support that corporation. This particular friend owns a business that serves billion-dollar corporations, lives in a $1.2M house, drops $200 on bottles of wine at fine restaurants (where he's known for showing up in Transformers pajama bottoms) and grows almost all his own vegetables. Bernie stickers all over his (multiple) Subarus.
I guess "privileged commie" was a bit of wry shorthand, but it's not that much of a stretch.
Also hi from Portland
The thing I love most about Portland is that you can have these intellectual debates almost everywhere you go, really get to hear other people's thought processes based on their personal situations, and understand where they're coming from. I'm by no means a hard-liner; but I spend half my time out in Newberg which has an entirely different set of baked-in assumptions and priorities. I'm as likely to get into deep debates with people there as I am here, but far less likely to get into interesting theoretical territory. At least this place still has the ferment, the ideological exploration and experimentation of one of the 1920s capitals of Europe, as opposed to the stochastic but rigid normie-core preference structure of everywhere else in America. I appreciate that.
So yeah, greetings from inner southeast ;)
> Just because something is done by a massive corporation doesn’t make the thing bad
I don't think anyone was saying this. Some airlines plant trees. That doesn't make planting trees bad.
But massive corporations (with maybe ~1% or fewer exceptions) don't base their practices on anything remotely resembling bad or good, and this leads them to profit-seeking behaviours that harm people on an individual level (which I think is a "bad" thing), as well as the planet, the environment, the economy, their competitors.
McDonalds is not a good or ethical company. The corporate apologism is "so lame".
Moral objectivism is more popular than moral relativism.
ie Some good does not outweigh lots of bad.
> Their profits pay pensions of the ordinary people. How is that not a good thing?
It's difficult to take your comment as anything but raw trolling, as it intentionally chooses to strawman limited benefit by ignoring obvious consequence.
Exactly - they base it on profit and people who think this is good react accordingly
Then you misunderstood the comment in question. It was quite clearly saying this. We're reading an innocuous blog post, and this person is aping reddit /r/hailcorporate language to vilify a marketing ploy by McDonald's, "exploiting nostalgia blah blah blah."
You're right, they are not a good or ethical company. If it's corporate apologism to disagree with this complaint about "exploitation" of nostalgia, count me in as an apologist too. This doesn't register on the list of corporate misdeeds for me to be mad about. I'm more upset with "flushable wipes" that end up clogging local sewage systems.
The point I get is not that "advertising from any large corporation is Bad" but instead that advertising from a corporation whose operations are Bad is Bad (because that specific corporation is Bad). It reads to me as an uncharitable take that OP is saying "making retro video games is Bad" (because large corporations are Bad) when I read "McDonald's being McDonald's is Bad" (because McDonald's is Bad).
(where Bad = "not good or ethical")
I agree with your point. McDonald's value meals have been a staple for low income households for a long time, and from what I hear the app provides daily deals that can mean the difference between someone going hungry or not.
Of all the corporations a person could get mad at, choosing one that is well known for feeding low income families is an odd choice.
The behaviour you’re describing as profit seeking is also really just value seeking, as in providing something that their customers value. I don’t think there’s substantial moral consequences one way or the other for a company to do this, but there’s nothing wrong with enjoying or commenting on a corporation providing a product that you value.
Like Winston at the Chestnut Tree Cafe
Those kids on the streets protesting most recent excesses of multinational corporations? The hoodies and Guy Fawkes masks they're wearing, the signs they're holding, the chains they're rattling - all bought on Amazon, happily providing specialized merch for the "fuck the system" market niche. And what do those kids achieve? Mostly they generate attention that moves newspapers and keeps millions glued to where they can be best exposed to ads. Etc.
Yes, the suits love the anti-corporate movements. They are a quite profitable form of entertainment.
You can hold an illegal gay rave under a bridge, and in response mainstream media figures will write articles demanding the permit process be made easier, then McDonald's will retweet photos of your ravers eating a meal the morning after. This is...okay, I guess. Social permissiveness is the circus, and it's still good even though our share of the bread is constantly shrinking.
If you feel slightly put off by the memes you see and/or discourse around them, it's sort of by design. It's meant to differentiate.
I've only recently realized this though (as I've expanded my perspective), and I think for the most part, this is something that largely happens subconsciously. If you ask someone gen z or younger, they won't know what you're talking about if you ask. That's mostly because your baseline of edginess/weirdness is defined by relative experience, and someone who's grown up perpetually online is likely to be skewed much more differently than someone who hasn't.
Plenty of people will have plenty of issues with a major corporation. But it's worth pointing out that McDonald's is one of the most prominent fast food chains which has no problem with animal abuse in terms of products from horribly treated livestock animals. They have trouble even making their french fries livestock-torture free .
Maybe this issue doesn't personally matter to you, but it does create a huge problem for a company that does something so shamelessly unethical.
They haven't cooked their french fries in beef tallow since 1990.
No one needs to "support McDonalds", and no one needs to be encouraged to. It'll do fine.
> Say "McDonald's" to end commercial
> "McDonald's!"
[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sony-patent-mcdonalds/
Who knows, perhaps one day we'll look back on modern day fast food ads and consider them equivalent to cigarette ads.
There are a lot of autists on social media, sadly not excluding HN.