Top 10 Awful Facts About McDonalds 10. They Ran the Original Owners Out of Business
Just to Spite Them Though today McDonald’s is known for being
a ridiculously powerful global company with more outlets than the Nikola Tesla museum,
it didn’t start out that way. The original owners, the McDonald brothers,
were so adverse to the idea of franchising their restaurants that in 1961 their investor,
business partner and personal friend of Satan, Raymond Kroc, raised 2.7 million dollars to
buy them out. In this incredibly favorable deal, Kroc not
only bought exclusive franchising rights for the brand, but the rights to the McDonald’s
name as well. The only thing the McDonald brothers got in
return, other than over a million bucks each, was sole ownership of their first restaurant,
which they renamed Big M. But this didn’t sit right with Kroc, who hated the idea that
the McDonald brothers were still out there doing something that made them happy. So as soon as the ink had dried on their deal,
he opened a brand new McDonald’s restaurant across the road from Big M just to run it
out of business. So, two of the men who started McDonald’s
had the last remaining shred of their company run out of business… by McDonald’s. You see, McDonald’s? Its stuff like this that makes people assume
your entire board of directors is dressed like M. Bison from Street Fighter. 9. Their Food Doesn’t Rot, Spoil or Go Bad It’s a commonly stated fact that McDonald’s
food just doesn’t go bad, and there are numerous examples of McDonald’s burgers
old enough to remember the first season of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air still looking
perfectly palatable. As if that wasn’t worrying enough, when
McDonald’s food is left out in the open, even bugs and flies won’t attempt to eat
it. It says a lot when creatures known mostly
for converging around piles of horse excrement won’t touch your food. McDonald’s has always maintained that the
reason their burgers enjoy Ric Flair levels of longevity is because there’s very little
moisture in them. While this is accurate, McDonald’s leavse
out the reason their food contains so little moisture. Luckily, actual scientists not wearing golden
arches on their labcoats have a simple answer. McDonald’s food is laden with so much fat,
sugar and salt that they’re effectively immune to the effects of spoilage under normal
circumstances. Meaning that under the right conditions, McDonald’s
food could outlive anyone reading this and still be edible. 8. Their Fries Contain 14 Ingredients Partly in response to stories about what we
just covered, McDonald’s has made a push to convince the public that its food isn’t
as bad as we all believe it is. In other words, McDonald’s would really
like it if you ignored all those stories about people in its factories handling raw meat
that’s been dropped on the floor without gloves. As part of this push, McDonald’s paid Mythubusters
alumni Grant Imahara the exact amount of money it takes to buy someone’s dignity to stand
in front of a camera and say that McDonald’s make “real” food. But it didn’t take long for critics to note
that even in what basically amounted to McDonald’s propaganda, the company still came out looking
bad when they revealed that their fries contain more chemicals than the Breaking Bad opening
credits. This was made worse when it was revealed that
only McDonald’s fries in the United States contain this cocktail of preservatives and
incredibly metal sounding ingredients, while fries being sold in the United Kingdom only
contain potato, oil, salt and sugar. So if you didn’t already feel bad enough
when eating McDonald’s food, now you have to live with the knowledge that some English
guy is probably eating better McDonald’s at the same time. 7. McDonald’s Salad is Worse for You Than a
Big Mac It’s often said that no good story starts
with someone eating a salad. And that’s true… unless you want to tell someone an amusing
story about how you got super-diabetes by eating McDonald’s salad. We’re not saying that salad is unhealthy,
but the crap that McDonald’s piles onto its salads like dressing and fried chicken
makes them so unhealthy that in some situations you’d be better off ordering a Big Mac. A McDonald’s Southwest Crispy Chicken Salad
contains more fat and calories than a bacon double cheeseburger and fries. In other words, thanks to McDonald’s there
are people out there on diets who are better off ordering a burger coated in cheese, bacon
and an entire second burger than a salad. Which is probably something we should be a
little grateful for, because no other restaurant gives people on a diet that option. 6. They Fought One of the Longest Legal Cases
in History Given that McDonald’s is a terrifyingly
huge and powerful company with enough money to bury any naysayers in enough legal litigation
to ensure that their grandchildren are born holding court documents, it probably won’t
surprise you to learn that McDonald’s was involved in one of the longest cases in English
history. What may surprise you is that not only did
McDonald’s lose this 10 year legal battle, but that they lost against two people. Not two companies or two lawyers representing
multiple people, but two ordinary citizens who didn’t want to let a big corporation
walk all over them. The story started in 1986, when five campaigners
in London began distributing pamphlets outside a London McDonald’s accusing them of destroying
rain forests, targeting children with their ads and exploiting its workers. You know, standard evil corporation stuff. When McDonald’s got wind of this, they immediately
slapped the group with a libel charge. Three members of the group were so afraid
of facing McDonald’s in court that they immediately apologized, but Helen Steel and
David Morris stuck to their guns and told the billion-dollar company to bring it. In the ensuing legal case, in which Steel
and Morris were forced to represent themselves, McDonald’s spent millions of dollars trying
to force the pair to back down, and after a freaking decade in court, they scraped out
a victory. Due to how bad spending millions of dollars
suing two people made them look, McDonald’s refused to collect the 40,000 pounds awarded
to them by the British government, which was good because Steel and Morris openly declared
that they wouldn’t pay up. As if poking the dragon the first time wasn’t
ballsy enough, Steel and Morris then took the case to the European Court of Human Rights,
arguing that it wasn’t fair that they weren’t allowed to seek legal aid while McDonald’s
was free to hire an army of lawyers. The court agreed, ordering the British government
to pay the pair several thousand pounds in damages for being biased towards McDonald’s. So technically McDonald’s won the case,
but they had to spend millions of dollars and a decade in court to do it. By comparison, Morris and Steel spent 30,000
pounds and ended up being awarded 57,000 pounds after appealing. Since Steel and Morris only set out to draw
attention to how awful McDonald’s is, we’ll call that a win. 5. Avoiding Billions in Tax Like any global corporation worth its heart
palpation inducing salt, McDonald’s has used a multitude of loopholes to avoid paying
taxes, all while denying that this is a crime or that they’re doing anything wrong at
all. Amazingly, despite being accused of avoiding
paying billions in tax several times over the last decade, McDonald’s has never once
been found guilty. They’ve pretty much played dumb every time
they’ve ever been accused of avoiding taxes, usually claiming that they’re an honest
company who do pay in a timely manner. Which if true would be the most surprising
item on this list. 4. Paying Rappers to Hype the Big Mac For companies like McDonald’s a more media
and tech savvy audience is a frightening thought, because that audience is slowly becoming immune
to traditional advertising methods. As a result, companies are trying to force
their way into people’s personal space in ever more obnoxious and cringe-worthy ways. Perhaps McDonald’s lowest moment was the
time they tried paying a number of hip hop stars to namedrop the Big Mac in their songs,
and every single one turned them down. Under the terms of the deal, rappers stood
to make around five dollars every time a song mentioning the Big Mac was played on the radio. Despite this being a potentially lucrative
offer, no rapper was willing to take McDonald’s up on it. That becomes doubly sad when you realize that
hip hop artists are the biggest sellouts in the music business, and yet not a single one
was willing to admit they ate at McDonald’s for an easy couple million dollars. 3. They Haven’t Tracked Sold Burgers Since
the ’90s For years, one of the ways McDonald’s advertised
its ever-growing success was the small signs that sat above their restaurants that proudly
announced how many customers had been served worldwide. Over the years these signs went from one million,
to a billion and eventually 99 freaking billion, at which point McDonald’s stopped keeping
track because none of the signs they’d installed could count that high. As a result, all signs have simply read “billions
and billions served” since 1994, because McDonald’s decided that would be easier
than installing a brand new sign on every restaurant every couple of years. But maybe eventually they’ll hit the trillions
mark, and we can get some ominous new signs. 2. The Fillet-O-Fish was Almost Replaced by an
Awful Burger It’s a fairly well-known fact that the Fillet-O-Fish
was added to the McDonald’s menu to lure devout Roman Catholics, who traditionally
don’t eat meat on Fridays, into a struggling McDonald’s located in a heavily Catholic
suburb. After it proved popular enough to save that
particular restaurant, McDonald’s made it a permanent menu fixture. What’s less well known is that when the
Fillet-O-Fish’s creator first pitched it to Raymond Kroc, he didn’t think it would
sell and was already in the middle of introducing something called a Hula Burger, which was
literally just a slice of pineapple on an uncooked bun. It was only because the Fillet-O-Fish’s
creator suggested a friendly competition between the two burgers that the Fishwich was given
a chance to prove that it kicked way more ass than a slice of sweaty pineapple on dry
piece of bread. 1. Ronald McDonald Actors Weren’t Allowed to
Tell Kids Where the Food Came From Ronald McDonald has been relegated to a tertiary
role in McDonald’s advertising ever since the company wised up to the fact that most
people think clowns are creepy as hell. But a few decades ago, Ronald was one of the
most recognizable and beloved food mascots on Earth. His appearance could cause 20,000 kids to
descend on a restaurant for a chance to meet him. Despite being the literal face of McDonald’s,
actors playing Ronald couldn’t be seen eating McDonald’s food in case it smudged their
make-up. Even worse, actors donning the red fuzzy wig
weren’t allowed to tell children what McDonald’s food was made from, and were on strict orders
to say that McDonald’s burgers and fries were grown whole and picked from a field if
any child asked, rather than saying they were actually made of grimy cow flesh some Chinese
guy scraped off the floor. Just in case anyone reading this thinks we’ve
been unfair by repeatedly calling McDonald’s an evil company, here’s a quote from Geoffrey
Giuliano, one of the actors who played Ronald McDonald, to close this piece.
