It happened in Japan
Come them all, except for chips. Pokémon fans are eating waste in Japan’s McDonald’s
by Kathleen Magramo e Junko OguraCNN
Mentes of untouched Menus Happy Meal are spreading through the tours in front of the McDonald’s restaurants in Japan during the weekend. Frentectic customers run unbridled to stores to get the Pokémon cards that are part of a limited edition of the fast food chain.
This promotional partnership between McDonald’s and Pokémon ended a few hours after being launched on Saturday. This is because customers have bought large amounts of food to have access to unique card sets to resell them. The food is that it was was wasted in its entirety.
In Japan, a Happy Meal menu costs 510 yen (about three euros) and includes food, a drink and a toy. However, there are now advertisements for Pokémon letters for sale on Ebay for about 24 euros.
Photographs released on social networks showed dozens of boxes of Happy Meal menus thrown abroad from a restaurant. Other records made it clear how there was food left to abandon the tables. The result? Public protests against food waste.
“We regret that the distribution of Pokémon letters to customers who buy the Happy Meal Pokémon menu, scheduled for just three days, August 9-11, ended in many stores due to above -expected sales,” McDonald’s Japan published on its official website.
Japan is a country known as a cleaning model, with tourists frequently compliments the organization of the streets and the high standards of public hygiene. Therefore, when the images of the garbage piles arrived on social networks, there were those who would leave the leadership of McDonald’s to clean everything.
In a statement, released on Monday, the fast food chain said that “it does not tolerate the purchase of Menus Happy Meal for resale, nor the abandonment or waste of food.”
McDonald’s Japan also said it will work with other sites to prevent the price of collectible letters from increasing.
“The recent situation clearly contradicts our longtime philosophy, which is to provide pleasant gastronomic experiences to children and families.”
“We took this matter seriously and recognized that our answer was insufficient,” adds the company.
Japan is the cradle of Pokémon, a brand recognized worldwide and focuses on animated figures that appear in collectible letters, video games, movies and television series since 1996.
Limited edition Pokémon letters that are in perfect condition can yield hundreds of dollars in the resale market. Therefore, there are many people to buy them as a speculative alternative investment.
