The sad clown: McDonald's profit slumps, sales fall worldwide

McDonald's profit slumps, sales fall worldwide

Thirty percent if I'm remembering this morning's news story correctly.  80% if I'm not.  The chicken factory scandal probably hurt McDonald's worst here in Japan.  Here, food safety scandals remain in mind for a long time after the last bit of chicken scrap has been scraped off someone's boot and thrown in with the meat going into the McNuggets. 

My wife and I eat at Makku maybe once every other month when we're both too run down from work to dress up enough to make an appearance at MosBurger.  In the time since the Chinese chicken factory scandal and now, we've eaten Makku three times and not once has she ordered anything with chicken.  Of course, in the months before the scandal, not once was she served anything with chicken.  At least, not chicken as it's commonly imagined.  A bird with feathers and a beak.  As opposed to some all-breast, no-beaked, featherless monstrosity quivering with pseudo-life inside a metal box with thousands of others of its genetically-spliced and heavily-hormone ilk.

Living free of McDonald's shame was nice, while it lasted.  Back in the US, I often wore a disguise or at least sunglasses and bag over my head to pick up a couple of large orders of fries.  For the longest time, here where there's a McDonald's approximately every 30 feet or so, I could freely indulge in my fry addiction along with a few black-suited office workers pecking away on both hamburgers and laptops because work doesn't cease even when you're away from the office on a dinner break, and dozens of high school girls who only dined there so they could spend hours after their meals perfecting their make-up using elaborate tackle-box like kits full of beautification powders, creams and stainless-steel tools.  Plus the occasional homeless person, who would sit with me to ply me with some mangled English and touch me up for a few yen.

Now there is nothing McDonald's can do right as far as consumers are concerned.  I'm told by my wife McDonald's fries have "seventeen different chemicals" in them.  One of those chemicals is no doubt some kind of sodium compound and the rest simulate the taste and texture of something vaguely potato-like.  Saturated with the products of advanced food science, my corpse will last uncorrupted for thousands of years, a monument both to my own amazing life and my poor culinary habits.

A saint for the Fast Food Age.