Take this recent case in San Francisco as an example:
In order to include a toy with a meal, restaurants must now comply with city-generated nutritional standards. Those are standards that even the "healthier" Happy Meals McDonald's introduced earlier this year don't come close to meeting. (As SF Weekly noted in January, the school lunches our children eat aren't healthy enough to qualify, either).It isn’t so much that they failed to force McDonald’s not to offer toys along with Happy Meals, that is funny enough but what really tickles me about this is how stupid the original premise is.
And yet it seems McDonald's has turned lemons into lemonade -- and is selling the sugary drink to San Francisco's children. Local McDonald's employees tell SF Weekly the company has devised a solution that appears to comply with San Francisco's "Healthy Meal Incentive Ordinance" that could actually make the company more money -- and necessitate toy-happy youngsters to buy more Happy Meals.
It turns out San Francisco has not entirely vanquished the Happy Meal as we know it. Come Dec. 1, you can still buy the Happy Meal. But it doesn't come with a toy. For that, you'll have to pay an extra 10 cents.
I remember loving Happy Meals as a child, but I don’t have any recollection of ever caring much about the crappy toys. At best I would play with the Happy Meal toys in the car ride home. If the toys didn’t come with the meals I don’t think I would have even noticed.
I suspect that I am not unique in this. Some children may have cared about the toys more than me, but I really doubt that many children liked the Happy Meals for the toys. The Happy Meals were good in of them selves. So the whole concept of stopping child obesity by forbidding toys be sold with unhealthy food is pretty much guaranteed to have a nil effect.
The fact that the policy failed even to stop the toys being sold with the meals is just icing on the cake.