McDonalds Turn Young pettioners away.

hollydays

p00hsticks wrote: »

According to the link I posted, it formed part of a BBC program about the 'war on plastics'.


Perhaps when the OP has ceased being shocked they can come back and provide a bit more info on what actually happened, what the BBC did and where the girls parents were.

I was fairly happy with the ops account of what happened, and clearly it was correct.
This is the " Vent board".
This is exactly what this board is for.

spadoosh

POPPYOSCAR wrote: »

Why they were there is irrelevant to me.

The way they were treated was disgraceful.

Staff could be seen looking through windows and laughing.

I was so annoyed I emailed Mcdonalds and got an almost immeidiate reply and this was last night.




"Thank you for contacting McDonald's Customer Services.

We would like to apologise unreservedly to Ella and Caitlin. When they wrote to us expressing their concerns about our Happy Meal plastic toys our normal process was not followed - we endeavour to respond to every contact individually and personally. They absolutely should have received a proper response to their letter and petition.

The way they were treated when they came to our offices was absolutely unacceptable. It was never our intention to turn them away or cause any upset and we are immediately reviewing why this situation was handled in this way.

We are committed to listening to our customers, but we failed Ella and Caitlin at every point, and for that we would like to say sorry.

We absolutely agree with Ella and Caitlin in recognising that the reduction and use of plastics is an important issue, and we are committed to reducing plastic across our business, including Happy Meal toys. The joy that many families get from our Happy Meal toys isn’t something that we can ignore and any changes to that have to be planned through carefully.

However, we are evolving what we offer. In the UK over the next six months our Happy Meal promotions will include a mixture of board games, books and soft toys – which will see an almost 60% reduction in the number of hard plastic toys given away in comparison to the first half of the year.

Thank you for taking the time to get in touch."

So basically... "we employ all sorts of eejits, unfortunately youve come across a few of them today. As a business our stakeholders are essential to us as such we will try and please them. If they want cheap food we will offer that, if they want higher quality food, we will move to that, if they want carrot sticks, we'll sell that option, if they want no plastic toys and send us a petition we'll take it on board and due to the dramatic rise in social issues surrounding plastic waste weve already been looking at various options of reducing our impact as its a crowd pleaser and happy customers make you more money which means you can do more to make people happier and thus make even more money. Its a model weve been practising for about 80 years now. Thank you come again."

POPPYOSCAR

hollydays wrote: »

I was fairly happy with the ops account of what happened, and clearly it was correct.
This is the " Vent board".
This is exactly what this board is for.

Thank you hollydays.

Yes it was a vent, hence my choosing this forum and not a discussion one.

Never heard girls age 7 and 9 being described as "busybodies" before but nothing surprises me on here.

spadoosh

Id just prefer if you targeted the actual people that did this.

Mconalds is a corporate entity. Having not ever looked at any of their policy documents im going to go out on a limb and say it says absolutely no where that staff should ask two young girls to leave the restaurant/office should they be coming to hand in a petition about the use of plastics in happy meal toys.

The staff where douche bags, highlight there bad behaviour and the fantastic response you got from mcdonalds. Dont blame mcdonalds for idiots being idiots. You protect the guilty and make them faceless and you put guilt on the faceless and the innocent.

hollydays

spadoosh wrote: »

So basically... "we employ all sorts of eejits, unfortunately youve come across a few of them today. As a business our stakeholders are essential to us as such we will try and please them. If they want cheap food we will offer that, if they want higher quality food, we will move to that, if they want carrot sticks, we'll sell that option, if they want no plastic toys and send us a petition we'll take it on board and due to the dramatic rise in social issues surrounding plastic waste weve already been looking at various options of reducing our impact as its a crowd pleaser and happy customers make you more money which means you can do more to make people happier and thus make even more money. Its a model weve been practising for about 80 years now. Thank you come again."

Or " we thought as they were kids we could ignore them as they aren't important"

" We reinforced this belief by , instead of getting a Manager to deal with them, we got a security guard,( who wasn't trained to deal with this sort of thing) as the Manager was also untrained , a bit dim, and didn't want to appear on camera. unfortunately this has backfired and we now realise we are just !!!!!!"

spadoosh

hollydays wrote: »

Or " we thought as they were kids we could ignore them as they aren't important"

" We reinforced this belief by , instead of getting a Manager to deal with them, we got a security guard,( who wasn't trained to deal with this sort of thing) as the Manager was also untrained , a bit dim, and didn't want to appear on camera. unfortunately this has backfired and we now realise we are just !!!!!!"

Because McDonalds ignores kids because they arent important? Whilst not being the people who pay i suspect McDonalds view children as particularly important in driving their business.

So who are you blaming here? Mr Ronald McDonald? Im sure the Hamburglar has a bunch of stocks we can put him in. Managers? Which ones? The specific manage invovled in this instance or the night shift manager at my local McDonalds?

Call out the actions by all means, call out the people by all means. Calling out a faceless entity just gets an email sent out that a load of !!!!!! arent going to read.

hollydays

spadoosh wrote: »

Because McDonalds ignores kids because they arent important? Whilst not being the people who pay i suspect McDonalds view children as particularly important in driving their business.

So who are you blaming here? Mr Ronald McDonald? Im sure the Hamburglar has a bunch of stocks we can put him in. Managers? Which ones? The specific manage invovled in this instance or the night shift manager at my local McDonalds?

Call out the actions by all means, call out the people by all means. Calling out a faceless entity just gets an email sent out that a load of !!!!!! arent going to read.

They thought the views of a couple of kids weren't important.
Every company I've ever worked for would have contacted their head office for advice on how to deal with press related incidents.
It's paramount as any PR expert knows.
Major fail.
Who are you blaming?

POPPYOSCAR

hollydays wrote: »

They thought the views of a couple of kids weren't important.
Every company I've ever worked for would have contacted their head office for advice on how to deal with press related incidents.
It's paramount as any PR expert knows.
Major fail.
Who are you blaming?

This was their HO is East Finchley I believe.

He did not look like a security guard, he was not in a uniform.

When asked who he was he said 'security' however he was dressed like an office worker.

His manner was very offhand to say the least.

Ectophile

I am really not shocked or surprised that the staff didn't go along with the BBC's media stunt.


The staff there would not have been expecting a camera crew to turn up. They would have not been given any information with which to respond to any claims put to them, but anything they said could be filmed and put on national television.


Realistically, the only option they had was to ask the BBC to leave, while they had time to think about what to do next. I would expect the staff at any large company to have done much the same in that situation.


The television companies should have stopped that sort of doorstepping years ago. It's just bad journalism, designed to make whoever they are filming look bad. If you say something you didn't intend to, you look bad. If you don't know the answers to their questions, you look bad, and if you chuck the TV crew out, you look bad.

onwards&upwards

It’s the head office of a massive business that sells to families primarily and has had lots of controversies in its history (mclibel, supersize me, recent strikes over Union bans).

I would definitely expect the staff working there to have a better idea of how to handle camera crews, petitions, protesters etc.

I saw a bit of the programme, it looked like Burger King responded a lot better, so it wasn’t impossible!