Back in the mid-70’s McDonald’s re-designed their coffee stirrer from a little spoon into a little paddle. Among us high schoolers at the time, the rumor was that McD’s made the change because they didn’t want people sniffing cocaine from something bearing their corporate logo.
I couldn’t find anything about this on Google or Snopes, and I wondered if any Dopers remember this too.
It was more recent than the 70s that these were phased out (at least it was here in the UK) - I remember seeing them into the nineties.
I remember that reliable source, Saturday Night Live, doing a Weekend Update story on this very subject. They showed the old coffee stirrer, which supposedly could be used as a coke spoon, and the redesigned stirrer, which supposedly looked like a little bong.
This Usenet thread has an extract from a Lexis-Nexis search pointing to a NY Times article that says it’s true. If you want to do more research (I’m too lazy), here are the results of a search I did for Mcdonalds spoon in the groups alt.folklore*.
Yep, it’s true–I was there, I lived through it as a working adult who bought coffee at McDs.
Mucho embarrassment on the part of McDonalds as the word spread as to what their cute little coffee stirrers were also good for. As I recall, they withdrew every coffee stirrer within something like the space of a single weekend, or something like that. It was like, wham! and suddenly all they gave you to stir your coffee with was a sucky little plastic twig, which to this day
STILL.
DOES.
NOT.
WORK.
The sugar STAYS at the bottom. The teeny coke spoons worked MUCH better, I don’t CARE if McDs was thereby catering to the hopheads and contributing to America’s 50 kajillion dollar a year drug problem, I wish they would bring back the teeny coke spoons.
Plus you could snap off the stem and it made an admirable Barbie spoon, for those of us who knew little girls who needed Barbie spoons…
I was in Jr. High when it happened which would have been late '70’s. The coke spoon thing was what I was told at the time so if it’s a rumor, it dates back to when the event happened.
Haj
Duck Duck Goose, turn your little stir thingie over so that the McD arches are in the coffee… now stir.
There. Isn’t that better?
In Canada , or at least in Ontario , the coke sppons were not phased out , till the mid eighties. We were still giving them out , when I worked there.
Declan