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  • 2016-02-09 (xsd:date)
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  • McDonald’s 'New Policy' Bans Customers from Buying Food for the Homeless? (en)
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  • On 21 May 2015, the True Activist web site published an article misleadingly headlined McDonald's 'New Policy' Bans Customers from Buying Food for Homeless, which opened with an equally misleading paragraph asserting that the McDonald's hamburger chain had implemented a new policy barring customers from purchasing food for homeless people: As suggested by the second sentence of that paragraph, the headline and claim about McDonald's having put in place a new policy prohibiting the purchase of food for the homeless at that chain's restaurants were based on a mere two incidents that took place within a week or so of each other at the same UK McDonald's restaurant (out of more than 36,000 McDonald's outlets worldwide). Both accounts drew only local media coverage, not international headlines, and only one of the two incidents involved a customer's attempt to purchase food for a homeless person (the other was about a paying customer's ordering a meal for himself). Finally, McDonald's corporate quickly clarified that both cases comprised errors committed by the local management of a single McDonald's and were not reflective of any chain-wide policy (new or otherwise) regarding the homeless. The first incident, reported by the Manchester Evening News on 8 May 2015, concerned a gardener in work clothes who was initially denied service at a McDonald's restaurant in Oxford Road because workers there mistakenly assumed from his scruffy appearance that he was homeless: Eleven days later, the same newspaper published an account of a similar incident that also involved the Manchester McDonald's restaurant in Oxford Road, one in which a teenager asserted that she had been prevented from purchasing food for an elderly homeless man: However, in both cases the customers in question were in fact served after initial confusion was sorted out, and in both cases McDonald's corporate confirmed that the company had no policy in place barring purchased of food by or for the homeless at their restaurants: Given that there has been no rash of complaints in the news media (either before or since these two same-source incidents) about McDonald's outlets spurning homeless customers, it's safe to say the evidence backs McDonald's assertion they have no such policy in place. In fact, McDonald's outlets in East Asia have not only been welcoming the homeless, but also offering them places of refuge (although that benificence is also not an expression of official company policy) In January 2016 the UK news media humorously reported on a reverse case — a customer avowed she successfully purchased food at a Halifax (West Yorkshire) McDonald's restaurant for man she assumed was homeless, only to discover he was another McDonald's customer who was simply waiting for his order: (en)
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