On Unintended Consequences and Happy Meals

PHUTATORIUS
Supervisors in Santa Clara County, California participated in America's great experiment of "laboratory federalism" last week by enacting a law that prohibits restaurants from providing toys with children's meals, unless the accompanying food meets certain nutritional standards.

Wow.
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The regulation, which for the sake of shorthand we'll call "the Unhappy Meal Law," only applies in areas where the county supervisors are the sovereign local authority — i.e., only in those pockets of land in Santa Clara County that are not incorporated into a city or town (which of course can pass their own laws). Thus, rather than entirely beat back the hordes of junk plastic movie tie-in action figures past the county lines, the law only makes Happy Meal toys a little less ubiquitous in fast food restaurants in the county. This will, of course, cause great confusion and consternation among Bay Area five-year-olds, who absent access to a GPS device, a county map, and an understanding of California's principles of local government and jurisdiction, won't know on a given day whether, where, or why they won't be getting a Mermaid Barbie doll with their cheeseburgers. And it's just this sort of random arrangement of cause and consequence that, according to behavioral psychologists, leads to "learned helplessness" and depression.

But hey — at least our kids won't be obese. At least that's the thinking, as county supervisors, applying the "Joe Camel principle," have concluded that Happy Meal toys draw children to fast-food restaurants, where they become tracked into the habit of eating unhealthy food.

Needless to say, I have some thoughts on this subject. Four fingers of thoughts, in fact:

☞ McDonald's introduced the Happy Meal in 1979. I remember when this happened. My father took me to McDonald's every Saturday. It was one of my favorite things in the whole world. Then one day I got to McDonald's, I read the menu, and I realized that not only was I going to get a burger and fries for lunch, but I was going to get a toy, too. And McDonald's became even more awesome.

Because I went to McDonald's, as a child, both before and after McDonald's launched the Happy Meal, I can count myself as something of an authority on the drawing effect of Happy Meal toys. As I recall my state of mind in the Pre-Happy Meal Era, I always frickin' wanted to go to McDonald's for lunch. And of course, in the Happy Meal Era, I always frickin' wanted to go to McDonald's for lunch. Check my math, Mithridates, but as I calculate this, the net drawing effect of Happy Meal toys = 0. Zero.

☞ Whether or not I actually did go to McDonald's for lunch as a child was a question that turned not so much on what I wanted to do, but on what my parents wanted to do. And of course, now that I'm fully grown with children of my own, I'm the one who gets to make the call on whether my children get to go to McDonald's. So now that we've dispensed with the notion that Happy Meal toys make children marginally and meaningfully more interested in McDonald's, it seems worthwhile to cover the effect of the toys on parents' decisions.

OH MY GOD LET'S PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE GET RID OF THE HAPPY MEAL TOYS SO I CAN EAT MORE BIG MACS WITHOUT JUNKING UP MY HOUSE!!!!

[deep breath]

Yes, um, where were we? Oh, right: I always frickin' want to go to McDonald's for lunch. But if I'm with the kids, then they're of course going to come along, and that means I'm going to bring home more godawful nine-cent hunks of plastic that will, without fail, find their way into my bed, into my bathtub, under foot as I walk through the dark into the bathroom, between couch cushions for me to sit on. So yes, if anything, the Happy Meal toys actually reduce my interest in taking the kids to McDonald's. Seriously.

☞ Anyone who has actually given a child a Happy Meal knows that the accompanying toy actually reduces the amount of food the child will ingest. The logic is simple: if you give a kid a big pile of greasy, delicious junk food, he'll eat it. If you give the kid the same big pile of greasy, delicious junk food and a toy, he'll find himself torn between eating the junk food and playing with the toy. If you withhold the toy until the kid is done with his lunch, he will in most cases prematurely declare the lunch finished and actually allow you to throw out his McNuggets and fries so that he can get a crack at the toy.

I've seen this dynamic at work: just today I took The Boy to McDonald's. No toy, I said, until we got into the car. The Boy ate one McNugget and insisted that lunch was over. I told him that we were going to sit for a few more minutes ("for our digestion") before leaving. If he wanted to have some more lunch during that time, he was welcome to do so. The Boy ate two more McNuggets and a fistful of fries. Q.E. freakin' D.

☞ Finally, consider how McDonald's might respond to the Unhappy Meal law. If McDonald's accepts, as Santa Clara County does (and I don't), that Happy Meal toys make their restaurant more attractive to children, and therefore families, then they'll have to find some other way to market to children. Deprived of the ability to offer collateral inducements, they'll have to beef up (pun intended) their food offerings. And since it's axiomatic that food is more appealing when it tastes better, and that the worse food is for you, the better it tastes — well, McDonald's now has an incentive to make its food even greasy, junkier, and more delicious. And/or cheaper.

I could talk more about how a county restriction means city kids get toys and country kids don't, how the Unhappy Meal law seems entirely predicated on the suggestion that parents don't know how to say no to their children, and so on. But it ought to be enough to note that either the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors don't have kids and never were kids, or they just didn't think this one through.

That Godawful Filet o' Fish Ad

PHUTATORIUS
Here's how this sort of tragedy happens: Somebody at McDonald's decides to cut the chain's losses to the Lenten beef embargo and emphasize the Filet o' Fish sandwich. There's a meeting. Advertising geniuses sit around a big table, and someone asks, "All right what do we know about fish? What's funny about fish?



And someone mentions that old Billy Bass toy that sings "Take Me to the River."
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Boom! Done. The meeting's attendees decide, as one, that America hasn't yet wrung the last few drops of thud-headed glee from the singing-fish-on-the-wall novelty. Or maybe they conclude that enough time has passed since that item was first popular to permit its reintroduction to a whole new generation of slack-jawed children who had never seen it. In any event, once they latched on to the singing-fish motif, they had their commercial.

It doesn't matter that the resulting ad spot is logically impenetrable and a complete non sequitur. The fish intones — and I quote:

Give me back that Filet o' Fish!
Give me that fish!
[repeat]
What if it were you hanging up on this wall?
If it were you in that sandwich,
you wouldn't be laughing at all!

All of this is, on its face, incomprehensible gibberish. Vacuity of the first order. The fish wants his Filet "back" and calls upon us to think about how we'd feel if we were in the sandwich. But of course the fish isn't in the sandwich. Part of the fish could be in the sandwich, but this much is hardly apparent: the singing fish in fact resides on his plaque, perfectly intact.

Now I suppose the filet could have been cut from the side of the fish that is affixed to the plaque, and that the fish's apparent "completeness" is merely the result of an extensive undertaking of reconstruction-through-taxidermy. Thus might the fish simultaneously subsist on the wall and in the sandwich.

But what of the fact that the fish is calling for the return not just of a "filet," which we might interpret to mean a demand that a cut of meat be restored to him, but he also cries to be given back "that fish?" What fish? Is there another fish in play here? I suppose certain fish eat certain other fish. Is the mounted fish complaining that his fish sandwich was taken from him, and that he's not in a position to do anything about it, stuck as he is on a wall? But this would render indefinite the last bit about "if it were you in that sandwich," as it would seem hypocritical to fault a human for eating a fish sandwich, while at the same time complaining that you had been deprived of the same opportunity.

I'm coming to believe that the sense of the commercial depends upon an obscure, complicated and necessarily speculative back story that we know nothing about. It's not clear to me whether we're better or worse off not knowing it, but we're surely worse off after having seen this commercial than we might be if we'd have been able to proceed in our lives unmolested by this godawful nonsense.

And finally, I'd like to note that the fish charges his listeners with laughing, apparently at his expense. I think that's pretty presumptuous. The two human characters in the ad are not laughing. Their faces toggle subtly between expressions of bemusement and concern. This leaves only the television audience — the rest of us in T.V. Land who have been subjected to this inanity — and I'm not laughing. I am, in fact, far from laughing. I don't buy that a singing fish translates of necessity into laughter, and I don't like that I've been made the presumptive target of this fish's indignation.

But again: none of this matters. There's a singing fish, right? Boom! Done. There's your commercial. Building a compelling, comprehensible character-based narrative around that singing fish would only be gravy.

And nobody eats a Filet o' Fish with gravy.