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As long as we’re thinking about overeating this week…

By Ed Goldman

With Thanksgiving scheduled for tomorrow—yes, it comes out on Thursday again this year, can you believe it?—I’m strangely reminded of a headline I read a few months back: “McDonald’s Sales Cool as Diners Pull Back.” I thought it could mean two things: 

(a) That the company was chill even though its profits in previous quarters were “sputtering” (one business paper’s term); and

(b) That the company was finally admitting its food’s usually cold by the time we pick up our orders and drive home.

But no. McD’s CEO Chris Kemperczinski said it’s all the fault of lower-income people who can no longer afford Big Macs, much less fries and a small McCafé® Coffee. (As an aside, I thought I was really onto a good gag when I postulated that  Kemperczinski got his job when the company said to its executive recruitment firm, “Czech, please!” But it’s a Polish name. My career does not lack for disappointment. I hope yours is going better.)

Reasons given for the McSlump include the eatery’s rising meal prices, which are in direct response to rising minimum-wage requirements, which themselves are in direct response to people earning so little at the restaurants that even their employees can’t afford the food.

With the exception of its fries, which have always had a mystical, (dare we say, orgasmic?) quality, I’ve always found food at McDonald’s to be—wait, let me rephrase. I’ve never found food at McDonald’s. Oh, it may look like food, you can actually consume it and it will even provide enough calories to sustain you—but then, so would a daily diet of Scotch, at least until your liver dialed 911. 

If you doubt that, just remember Robert Altman’s movie “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” in which Warren Beatty’s character (McCabe) seems to exist principally on cigars and tumblers of whiskey with raw eggs dropped in. But let’s face it, Warren looked pretty damned good back then. In fact, now 87 years old, he still looks better than most the guys I know in my own chronological cohort. Must be the raw eggs.

“McDonald’s is putting emphasis on its new meal bundle and the opportunity to capture customers seeking deals,” reads an article in the Wall Street Journal. The cited “bundle” features four items: “a McDouble or McChicken sandwich, small fries, small soft drink and a four-piece Chicken McNuggets—for $5.”

Let’s examine some of this verbiage. First of all, customers “seeking deals” usually talk to their brokers or do their own E-trading, but rarely at McDonald’s. And getting a half-buck or more off a meal of junk food is hardly what we think of when we watch films about deal-making dynamos like “Wall Street” or “The Wolf of Wall Street.” I’m sure if we’re foolish enough to read Trump’s “The Art of the Deal” we can pair him up with Happy Meals but don’t forget his book was completely ghost-written by a journalist named Tiny Schwartz who looks too trim to be scarfing down Big Macs.