Friday, October 5, 2012

Is McDonald's abdicating their childrearing responsibilities?

    I don't know about where you live, but in this town, two of the McDonald's restaurants or stores or whatever they're calling them now have been torn down in order to be replaced in exactly the same place. One of these locations already had this happen once in the last 15 years or so, which seems doubly weird.
    The new stores or restaurants or whatever don't seem large enough to have an indoor children's play area. I might be mistaken of course, but I wonder if McDonald's is going out of the daycare business. A cursory glance around the Internets indicates that there have been lawsuits about the lack of cleanliness in the play areas. I guess it might be that they decided there's more risk than payoff. Or it might be to do with the locations themselves; one is downtown while the other is next to the fort. Perhaps they don't think there are any kids there.
    I stress that the concern about McDonald's abdicating their responsibilities is entirely tongue-in-cheek, though I AM curious. I seem to recall a Paul Reiser movie about divorced dads that largely revolved around the McDonald's play area. (The movie, not the dads.) I'm not sure that it would be a bad thing for McDonald's to stop having play areas, or for that matter a good thing. But if it stops future Paul Reiser movies, well, I'm all in favor of that.:)

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