Happy Meals now ILLEGAL in San Francisco.......

[dagnabit]

ALL marketing is predatory.

placing the highest sugar content cereal at childrens eye level in department stores

is vegi tales not predatory marketing directed to lure poor children into a den of pedophiles known as the catholic church?

i dont know about you but id rather see a kid eat a big mac than eat a priests hot dog!!!

Annual Advertising Budget for Products/Brands of Food and Beverages in the US, 2001Product/Brand $$ in Millions
Beverages
Coke, Diet Coke $224.0
Pepsi, Mountain Dew $226.0
Kool-Aid $15.9
Dasani Bottled Water $26.4
Aquafina Bottled Water $13.2
Candy
Nestle candy $65.0
Hershey's candy $55.0
M&M's candy $46.8
Snickers candy bars $46.4
Reese's candy $22.7
Snack Chips
Frito-Lay & Frito's chips/snacks $24.8
Dorito's tortilla chips $20.9
Ruffles potato chips $19.3
Bugles corn snacks $13.4
Fast Food Restaurants
McDonald's $635.0
Burger King $298.0
KFC $206.5
Taco Bell $179.4
Pizza Hut $148.0

NONE OF THOSE ARE GOOD FOR YOU AND ALL OF THEM SPEND LARGE PERCENTAGES OF THAT TARGET MARKETING CHILDREN

this legislation is horseshit dressed up as protect our kiddies...

maybe i want my fucking lord of the rings collectors cup goddamnit!!!!

 

[the_red_bull]

Happy meals are pretty primo dawg, I've always wanted to buy them off gang members.

 

[sparkjumper]

When you get my age with my bowels,a happy meal means anything that doesnt cause the hershey squirts

 

[MoldyFrogToe]

All marketing is predatory and it is taken to an unacceptable level when you have business trying to brainwash your kids with toys & high calorie "Happy Meals." It's a big problem, banning happy meals won't fix it and isn't an end all answer, but it at least gets the ball rolling in the right direction. It's hard to draw a line on all of this stuff but we can't just bend over and let these companies have free reign over the minds of our kids. It's a very tough subject to handle, what a mess.

McD's does nothing significant to offset their predatory brainwashing of young children, fuckem

I guess if McD's was a conglomerate that promoted extreme use of healthy vegetables & raw food it'd be different, but they don't...They clearly try to hook kids on what is needlessly & dangerously high in fat, calories, sodium, and sugar, to the point where it can *easily* be a health risk. You may as well market beer to children, it's really not much different, McD's is a health risk, flat out. It's actually worse than candy bars, at least kids know candy isn't a major source of food. McD's is marketed as being otherwise.

Now they're trying to do like the oil companies with climate change and spend 1% of revenue on something that is made to look like 90% of the business. Oooo, look at all those nice vegetables on McD's screen...it's too bad that's not what you actually find once lured into the store..Fuckem!

 

[Marywanna]

Aren't parents the ones that should be deciding what their children eat?

 

[feral]

think of all the money to made on E-bay with the 'rare' happy meal toys that people will try to hawk and the dumb ass's that will buy them.

 

[SuperSizeMe]

So if "no one thing should influence someone to the point of unhealthyness", then shouldn't a corperation be restrained from marketing addictive carcenogenic crap to kids who don't yet have the fully functional rational thinking of an adult? Unless I read this wrong, no one is saying that McDonalds can't sell a smaller sized meal at a reduced price for children. They are simply no longer allowed to rope them in with some cheap hunk of plastic crap made in china.

I do not feel like we are anywhere close to understanding the role of diet in overall health, including mental health. For an example, some types of autism can be deminished through dietary means. An example is casin, an opiod peptide found in milk, can be problematic for some of these individuals. Another is that certain epileptics can benifet in a diet which produces high levels of ketones (acetone) as a byproduct.

To think that the levels of cancer and heart disease in this country are not at least partially due to the shit which the FDA allows in our food. It seems to cost more to eat real food than processed shit. Also you should see the crap that they have for sale (via the US govt) on Indian reservations. This needs to be addressed. I'm not saying that you shouldn't be allowed to eat hamburgers 3 times a day and fried chicken in between. Just maybe that it should be a real chicken that isn't kept in conditions that would not be shown on tv. Then maybe it should be combined with ingredients that you can pronounce and can readily identify as food items. That's all. I don't think that would be a bad thing.

I don't seem to see Joe Camel or candy ciggarettes so much anymore. Companies should be held responsible for their products and how they market them to people, but not whether or not people misuse them. That is my opinion.

Dude, I get it...they sell slow-acting poison, it even says so on the labeling and on BIG CHARTS right in the stores.

But, if you're being led around by the nose from some 6, 8 or 10 year old, you have bigger problems than what Mickey D's is trying to sell you.

Peace,

SSM

 

[TheBudFather]

I loved McDonalds growing up... Except the gherkin on my burger... The toy is to help keep kids seated and occupied in the restaurant... nobody likes hypo bored kids running around!
I guess the 2 things (Toy & food) have been used in a cpl different ways... and Im glad someone had realised....Kids go McDonalds for the Toy not the grub.

With McDonalds.... If you buy a Burger and Fries for your child, you should get a complimentary piece of fruit.... BUT if you buy the Healthier option for your child..eg salad, You should get the toy! I bet Kids would be all about the Toy and Salad!

 

[medmaker420]

Parents need to take control of their kids and not pass the buck

Here is a thought

lets pretend that crack was legal and could be bought at walmart. Now is it walmarts fault for selling the crack or is it the parents fault for giving their kid the money for the crack or NOT being in their lives to know they are buying crack?

this thought above could be used for damn near any product.

Parents need to stop blaming the video games and type of food and realize it is up to them to set an EXAMPLE and make sure they eat healthy and in the thought of the video games make sure the kids know it is just a video game and if you beat someone up you can go to jail or worse.

Kids are not stupid but there sure are enough stupid ass parents trying to blame others for their mistakes.

All these people bitching about mcdonalds odds are ARE fat themselves and unhealthy. hmmn wonder where the kids learned that,hmm wonder who is paying for the happy meals and DRIVING the kids there as well?

 

[Pythagllio]

The freedom to entice children with toys & brainwashing advertising to lock them, literally with biological weapons of addiction (salt/sugar/cheese)

Yeah I'll pass on that. Same with that cartoon you like on cigs that tries to reel children in who aren't even old enough to smoke.

This isn't about freedom, it's about mass marketing, brainwashing our kids.

What a pile of horse shit.

Everyone does realize that a vegan restaurant would also be forbidden from offering toys with kiddie meals too, right?

 

[Marywanna]

My thoughts exactly. JUST SAY NO.

 

[genkisan]

What a pile of horse shit.

Everyone does realize that a vegan restaurant would also be forbidden from offering toys with kiddie meals too, right?

As a militant vegetarian, I have no problems with that.




ANY predatory marketing tactics aimed at children are evil.......come to think of it....any predatory marketing is evil....as is an economic paradigm based on unchecked profit.

 

[ArcticBlast]

are they going to stop selling lucky charms, too?

ArcticBlast

 

[MoldyFrogToe]

What a pile of horse shit.

Everyone does realize that a vegan restaurant would also be forbidden from offering toys with kiddie meals too, right?

The difference? It wouldn't be high calorie trash like McD's

 

[MoldyFrogToe]

are they going to stop selling lucky charms, too?

ArcticBlast

helzz yeah. slice that rainbow!

 

[treewizard]

What a pile of horse shit.

Everyone does realize that a vegan restaurant would also be forbidden from offering toys with kiddie meals too, right?

Sometimes I get the feeling that people simply scan an article and look at the threads title rather than actually carefully reading it. Maybe all that fast food and advertising has simply fucked everyone's attention span.

9th paragraph down and I quote "It will bar toys from being offered with meals that don't meet a set of basic nutrition standards." In other words because they peddle crap, they can't use a reward (classical conditioning) to program children to eat this stuff. Aww too bad.

This isn't keeping you or your fat assed kids from eating this swill. It is simply limiting marketing. Why shouldn't there be some oversight in this?

For everyone against this, tell me what role you believe that a functioning government should play in general.

 

[genkisan]

I know this post is gonna piss a buncha folks off, but if you wanna talk about predatory marketing, why stop at kids and fast food?

I do not watch ANY broadcast television.....ever.....I have a VCR and a DVD that gets used by my kids once a week for movie night.

That's it, that's all.

As far as I can see, television exists for one reason....to allow the Corpo-Nazis into your home and mind so they can make you into what they need.....a complacent, manipulable employee/consumer/taxpayer.

If you want to read an amazing book on the topic, find " Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1977), by Jerry Mander; ISBN 0-688-08274-2..... he was an ad exec beofre he became an anti-globalization activist.

Heres a small exerpt from a magazine article by him on the topic:
(the bold emphasis' are mine)

Toxic TV

Television is the most important thing in the world that we need to start talking about again. Television is a more efficient medium for cloning global consciousness with a homogenized set of corporate values. I'm going to give you a sense of its scale and impact by repeating some astounding statistics from the United States, but similar patterns can be found all over the world.

In the United States, 99.5% of all homes have television sets. Ninety-five percent of the population watches television every day. The average home has a TV set going more than eight hours per day, even if no one is watching. The average adult viewer watches TV more than four hours a day. The average child age eight to thirteen watches about four hours per day. At age two to four, they watch almost three hours. That's not counting television in school.

These are amazing statistics, when you stop to think about them. Half the population is watching more than four hours per day. How is that even possible? By heavy viewing every night and then all weekend also. People watch more TV in the United States than they do anything else besides sleeping, working or going to school. In the United States, television is the main thing people do. It has replaced community life, family life, culture. It has replaced the environment.It has become the environment that people interact with every day. It has become the culture too, and it's not "popular culture," which sounds somehow democratic. It expresses corporate culture, and that of very few corporations at that. Ours is the first generation to have essentially moved its life inside media, to have largely replaced direct contact with people and nature for simulated, edited, recreated versions. Television is the original virtual reality.

If you were an anthropologist from the Andromeda Galaxy sent to study earth people, and you hovered over the United States chances are you'd report back something like this: They're sitting night after night in dark rooms; they're staring at a light. Their eyes are not moving. They're not thinking. Their brains are in a passive-receptive state -- and nonstop imagery is pouring into their brains from thousands of miles away. These images being sent by a very small number of people are of toothpaste and cars and guns and people running around in bathing suits. The whole thing looks like some weird experiment in mind control. And that is what it is.

I was once in the advertising business, for many years, actually. I quit that some time ago, but I learned that people really doubt the invasive power of television imagery. You are smart. You are educated. You can select from among the images that you see. But let's try again. Let me ask you this. Can you get a picture in your brain of Ronald McDonald? The Energizer bunny? How about the Taco Bell Chihuahua? Or Dave, the owner of Wendy's. Or Jerry Springer. Or David Letterman. Or O.J. Simpson.

These images live in your brain. Can you erase them? I don't think so. They're yours forever. Every advertiser knows that images are unstoppable. Your intellect cannot save you from them.

The average television viewer is seeing about 23,000 television commercials every year. One may say "toothpaste," one may say "car," but the intent of every one of those 23,000 messages is identical: to get people to view life as a nonstop stream of commodity satisfactions. Buy something. Do it now. Commodities are life. This message is the same everywhere on earth.

The last time I checked the numbers, about eighty percent of the global population had access to television. Most industrialized countries report similar viewing habits to our own. In Canada, England, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Greece, Poland, and many countries in Europe and South America, the average person watches three or four hours per day. In Japan and Mexico, they watch more than here. In many parts of the world, the TV they see comes from the United States and other countries in the West, with very few local programs. Even in places on earth where there are no roads--tiny tropical islands, icy tundras of the north, or log cabins--they are sitting night after night watching a bunch of white people in Dallas driving sleek cars, or standing around swimming pools or drinking martinis while plotting ways to do each other in, or Baywatch, the most popular show in the world. Life in Texas, California, and New York is made to seem the ultimate in life's achievements, while local culture, even where it's still extremely vibrant and alive, which is true still for a fair amount of the earth, is made to seem backward and unworthy.

People everywhere are beginning to carry the same images that we do, and are craving the same commodities that we crave, from cars to hair sprays to Barbie dolls to Palm Pilots. TV is turning everyone into everyone else. It's cloning cultures to be like ours. In Brave New World, Huxley envisioned this cloning process via drugs and genetic engineering. We have those too. But TV does nearly as well.

I know this willl start a great big shitstorm, but I stick to my guns...


TV IS EVIL......PERIOD.

 

[treewizard]

People have no idea how much our reality is really abstract. The map is not the territory. The paradigm that you use to relate with the world around you directly defines what you deem is possible and what you are able to percieve. Why would you want to have your reality defined as per the will of some outside institution? This is the point of keeping an open mind. That and some good old fashioned psychedelics are what give you that chance to turn a corner fast enough to see past the box every now and again. I'm also a lot happier since I stopped listening to commercial radio.
After 4 years I can actually listen to Dark Side of the Moon and enjoy it. If they play it and it doesn't suck they burn it down. If you like top 40 shit that's your thing. Its not as though I want my opinions forced on others. I just feel like all of these greedy ass corperations which are so zealously seeking to homogenize the world in their image, should be liable for their actions. I believe that heroin addicts should be able to get up to 3 maintanance doses of pharmie acetyl diamorphine. Studies have shown that this method works better than our current ways and means. It would be a cold day in hell before I would say that it was a good idea for them to pitch their dope in ads though, especially to kids.

 

[dagnabit]

For everyone against this, tell me what role you believe that a functioning government should play in general.

to secure liberties and uphold and defend the constitution.

not to institute negative liberties

 

[dagnabit]

I know this post is gonna piss a buncha folks off, but if you wanna talk about predatory marketing, why stop at kids and fast food?

I do not watch ANY broadcast television.....ever.....I have a VCR and a DVD that gets used by my kids once a week for movie night.

That's it, that's all.

As far as I can see, television exists for one reason....to allow the Corpo-Nazis into your home and mind so they can make you into what they need.....a complacent, manipulable employee/consumer/taxpayer.

If you want to read an amazing book on the topic, find " Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1977), by Jerry Mander; ISBN 0-688-08274-2..... he was an ad exec beofre he became an anti-globalization activist.

Heres a small exerpt from a magazine article by him on the topic:
(the bold emphasis' are mine)



I know this willl start a great big shitstorm, but I stick to my guns...


TV IS EVIL......PERIOD.

yet here you sit on your computer manufactured by "corpo-nazis" on the internet that profits "corpo-nazis" probably own a "corpo-nazi" car.
teaching your children to use the corpo-nazi v.c.r. to tape movies put out by the corpo-nazis in holywood...

your "guns" you stick to are super soakers