Toy Hummers in Happy Meals: what a stupid, lame-ass promotion. What is wrong with their marketing people? This sends a very wrong message and underminds the efforts of troops fighting in Iraq. Send your men off to die to protect oil, and do nothing to encourage a more reasonable allocation of the resource on our end. Shame on McDonald’s, yet again.

If anyone has any examples of McDonald’s using (or looking into using) alternative energy, please post them over at revenergy.com.

Hello James:

Thank you for contacting McDonald’s to share your comments about our recent Happy Meal toys. I’m sorry you were disappointed with the theme of this Happy Meal.

You may be interested to know that our Marketing staff reviews several different criteria when designing toys — playability, durability, safety, quality and popularity with children just to name a few. The latter is always a challenge given the number of Happy Meal toys we offer every year. We often offer toys from kids’ favorite television shows, retail toy lines and movie or television characters.

Please know that we would never intentionally upset our customers. Your comments are important and have been shared with our Marketing staff for their review. They’ve assured me they will consider your feedback when planning future Happy Meal offers.

Once again, thank you for letting us know how you feel. We hope you’ll enjoy our future Happy Meal promotions.

Damien
McDonald’s Customer Response Center

Good idea on the comment, James. Would love to know if you get a response –

Hello – Just wanted to provide some feedback on your new happy meal program that offers mini-hummers to children. I hardly know what to say. At a time when the national focus is on energy conservation, heat waves potentially due to global warming, a war being fought, on some level, to protect our strategic national interests around oil, why, oh why, would you provide toy gas guzzlers to our children? What Director or VP of Marketing ever thought this was a good idea? How much money did Hummer have to pay you to cloud your judgement. I thought you were trying to change people’s perception of you having a negative impact on the health of our nation’s people and now you link yourself with a product that in many ways epotimizes what is wrong with our culture of consumerism. Well, perhaps this partnership is more brand acretive than I previously thought. Congrats. I won’t be giving you anymore of my business.

My two cents (the last you’ll be getting),
James

Here’s what Grist had to say about it:

Sometimes a story comes along that so perfectly captures a culture’s pathologies that it should be put in a time capsule, so future generations … oh, right, there won’t be any future generations. It seems that, according to fast-food behemoth McDonald’s, this is a “Hummer of a Summer.” A new series of TV and radio ads depict happy families on their way to fatten their children and clog their arteries at McDonald’s in GM’s gas-guzzling Hummer. When they arrive, soon-to-be-obese boys can choose from eight different toy Hummers with their Happy Meal (happily, girls can learn their proper gender roles from Polly Pocket fashion dolls). Charlie Miller of Environmental Defense thinks it’s kind of a bummer of a summer: “Anything that sends a message to kids that these are the cool vehicles to buy is the wrong message.” At today’s prices, it costs about $96 to fill up the gas tank of a Hummer H2 — but don’t worry, a double cheeseburger’s only a buck.

..,be bold