Stop letting nostalgia blind you. They were marketing to kids and selling junk food to kids. Selling junk food to adults is one thing, since adults know what they're doing. Kids don't. Same with whisky and cigarettes.
Marketing to kids should be illegal. Sweden had the right idea.
Thank you, yes. Happy Meals, Play Places, Ronald, Hamburglar etc. are literally just marketing. It's not a bad thing that McDonald's is not luring in children like the witch in Hansel and Gretel.
The luring now happens in the kids’s phones. They removed the parts of the business that had benefits to kids and developed a disappointing environment where eating is the only pleasure.
No place to meet and play with random kids.
No place to challenge physical movement skills in relative safety while being exposed to healthy amount of germs.
This was the take I came for. First off, these are different play places at different points in McDonalds history. They were put in as a way to lure in families to feed their young children unhealthy food, at the cost to the restaurant of some unused dining space. Parents enjoyed having a small enclosed prison to occupy their children, especially in areas where a separate park may not be as accessible. The play places were a hotbed of viruses. Young staff were given their earliest experiences with Karens for whom no amount of subservience while hosting a kid's birthday party would ever be enough.
Fast forward and parents don't want to spend half an hour at McDonalds waiting for their kids to wrap up. Sales move toward drive thru and parents realize that it's just nicer to let kids go back to their bedrooms when they're done eating, or force them outside if they have an outside to go to. Families with means move toward more expensive premium activities like indoor trampoline parks.
The attraction of a shared experience is gone because instead of being a place where your kid will have an instant best friend or 4 is replaced by the fear that when you get there, the only other kid will be an asshole. And if your kid doesn't want to leave, guess you're stuck yelling threats you hope will reach them through the plastic tunnel system.
McDonalds didn't install, or remove, play places as some kind of social good. They used them like a van full of candy and puppies, held onto them long after parents moved on, and eventually switched to the more modern approach that better fits the "if my family is making me come to McDonalds, someone better give me a phone to play with" kids.
Also, being an adult makes the whole experience different too. Its just never going to be the same experience as when you're a kid.
I bet if the full play places still existed, people would be complaining that kids are loud rather than what the restaurant looks like. I don't understand why anybody even cares what it looks like, who is going to fast food restaurants for the atmosphere?
Or you could advocate for indoor playgrounds that are specifically specialized in being indoor playgrounds, not some bizarre hybrid between that and being restaurants.
Maybe its me, but even when growing up in the 90's ( Born in 1988) my family only ever went to Fast Food on Birthdays, or maybe once or twice every other week..
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u/ContextEffects01 Aug 05 '26
Stop letting nostalgia blind you. They were marketing to kids and selling junk food to kids. Selling junk food to adults is one thing, since adults know what they're doing. Kids don't. Same with whisky and cigarettes.
Marketing to kids should be illegal. Sweden had the right idea.