hmmm. So given that the odds of winning the five mil is many many times higher than the total number of pieces in the game, what does that mean? The three other railroad pieces are just as common as the rest. I sense some tricky math at work here: they are factoring in the odds of getting the other pieces without factoring in the fact that anyone who gets the one rare railroad will have an easy time of acquring the others as long as they know what they have (which maybe if a decently big “if”: it’s quite possible that someone would get the winning piece and NOT be aware that they could far more easily acquire a winning set than any other person on the planet).
As I keep saying though: even odds of 41 billion to one are better than 0, which is what the odds were for many of the years of the game when the whole thing was being rigged and all the major winning pieces were being stolen and handed off to associates of the riggers.
Yeah, but I think it’s pretty evident that the scandal didn’t implicate McDonald’s directly. I don’t think you’re implying that but it’s important to get out there. “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes”, after all.
It’s fairly clear that you’re not a marketer…or at least not a direct marketer. You would simply be amazed at the greater level of consumer participation (translated as: parting with money) a marketer gets when offering target consumers something to do. Even something as small as ‘place this sticker on the response card’ will bump response up a significant amount.
Plus, what the hell, right? If you’re going to eat there anyway (and with two small children I could end up there every day if I didn’t enforce iron discipline) you might as well play the game. God knows it’s better than the televisions that they have in fast food places now.
And it’s not like you can’t tell people that buying more stamps doesn’t improve their odds. I wouldn’t do it but mathematically their on the right side. It’s just that the odds are so terrible that it’s not a huge help.
The scandal is less about the culpability of McDonalds and more about how it rendered the entire contest even more pointless for years that it already was on its own.
The problem is that the GAME part of it is pointless. There is litterally no more purpose to getting a board and pasting the stickers on it than there is carefully cutting your underware into nice little square pieces and stapling it to your face: both activities are “something to do” and both have about an equal chance of helping you win one of the collection based prizes as carefully saving all your non rare pieces.
Likewise, the idea that you’ll eat there anyways is certainly nice, but plenty of people clearly DO buy more food than they otherwise want as well as different items than they’d otherwise want specifically in the hopes of gaining more pieces to match. This, simply put, is crazy. It’s marginally sensible in the sense of playing a lottery for the super rare piece and hoping lightning will strike. But some people actually do it ALSO to get another common piece of the same color: that’s playing into the “collection” idea that as I’ve alread noted is a goal that has no rational purpose whatsoever. You are not really in any better position for having two common green pieces than you are in having NONE AT ALL. If you get the rare green piece then and only then is there any point to acquiring the common ones, and doing so after the fact is so easy that it renders any prior collection of them completely pointless, even if you don’t count the far far more likely situation in which you will never get a winning rare green piece at all.
“Indiana Borough, Indiana County police busted 2 men they say tried to steal a number of plastic cups from the Wayne Avenue McDonald’s. Apparently the men were not thirsty, rather interested in the “Monopoly Game” pieces attached to the cups.”
I think that pretty much speaks for itself. :rolleyes:
Those men are particularly stupid given that the cups are the LEAST important source for prizes. The instawin pieces are, as far as I’ve heard, all on the fry boxes, and the best buy bucks are all on the chicken sandwhiches. So stealing cups instead of fry boxes or chicken boxes is doubly silly.
Well, to be fair, the pieces are tiny, and sticking them into the booklet insures you against being unable to find one of the common pieces after you’ve acquired a rare piece. Better to have the booklet than go back and try to find another of those common pieces when you really need it.
I’m sure it’s no accident that the pieces are tiny, of course. ISTR that years ago, when McDs first started having games, they gave out cardboard game pieces that you had to open like an advent calendar. You either won a prize with that one piece, or you got “sorry try again” and tossed it away. Now they have to make it nerve-wracking in and of itself, because that’s more something-to-do. That said, I don’t know who these people are who think that six Mediterranean Avenues are worth one Baltic. Are there really that many of them?
The problem is that the rare pieces are worth so much, and the common pieces are so common that the utility of collecting pieces PRIOR to getting a rare piece makes no sense. Even the most common prizes are 50$. If you get a rare piece, it’s child’s play to acquire the other common pieces. You can buy whole sets of the common pieces over the internet for cents on a dime. You can rummage in the trash for em. You can trade with other collecting idiots for free. You can alternatively acquire most any piece you want just by buying 10 meals or so and have all the enjoyment of peeling off pieces to see if you’ve got a winning combo… except that now you know that you are virtually guaranteed to win within a few extra meals! However, far far more likely is that you collect the common pieces, it will all be completely pointless.
They seem to, in my experience. Particularly common and amusing are the offices that pool their efforts: everyone brings in their pieces, hoping that together they’ll have a better chance of getting matches than any one person alone. Again, this behavior makes no sense. All the non-rare pieces are worthless. If you do get a rare piece, you certainly wouldn’t have any reason to come in share the prize with the rest of the office just to get their collection of worthless pieces when you could easily acquire them elsewhere without having to share anything. Unless of course you were a generous person. In which case, why not just hand out 50$ to everyone at the office and not play the game, you generous guy you?
I can only surmise that a HECK of a lot of all this activity comes less from people being too stupid to figure out the implications of how the game works, and more simply too stupid to even think about figuring out how that game really works.
Back in the olden days, when I worked at McDonald’s, the game pieces were not attached to any packaging and we were supposed to hand out the proper number of loose pieces to the customer according to what was ordered. Of course, we gave them out to our friends in handfuls, not to mention the hundreds we opened for ourselves.
When they ran the promotion over here a few months ago, I played. It’s just a bit of fun. And yeah, I put the common pieces on the board too. Why not? Plus at the start I had no idea which ones the common pieces were anyway.
I got some childish enjoyment out of putting stickers on the board.
I do agree however that some people seem to take it too far.
Good lord, it’s rare that I see such a perfect form of party-poopery.
It’s just a dumb game. I’m betting the only people who are really “fooled” into buying more McDonalds products during this promotion are those who are simply making a choice between which fast food vendors should receive their patronage. Those who buy more Big Macs during this game are probably just buying fewer Whoppers.
With the exception of the insider piece dealing episode a few years ago, which certainly wasn’t McDonalds intent, McD’s publishes the damn odds of winning. IIRC, it’s on the Monopoly board game so that anyone can look at it. It isn’t like McDonalds is running an underground lottery here, in which you pay your cash and take your chances. You pay your money, get lunch, and have a teeny-tiny chance of winning.
This contest isn’t an investment strategy, and people aren’t emptying their IRAs to buy more milkshakes. (Blame the lottery or Las Vegas for that form of irresponsibility.) If anyone does that, they are idiots, but somehow I don’t think it is a real problem. What this game is is just a few moments of fantasy during a crappy lunch. I think it takes a real jerk to insult the vast majority of McDonald’s patrons who just want a few moments of escapism with their McNuggets. If you don’t like the game, don’t play.
Apos : You seem to be advancing the case that it’s silly to hang on to the common pieces, because they’re easy to get. Fair enough, but what great cost is incurred to just hang on to them in the first place? Am I going to miss the cubic inch of space that they take up?
Point Two - Each piece can now be used online as well as on the board - it has a code on it, you enter the code online, and there’s a little Flash game where you move around and collect property. You can win there, too (though it’s determined by time of day, not through true randomization.) Each common piece can only be used once.
So, again, there’s a very small value in just keeping the ones you find, and zero detriment.
I don’t think I’ve come out against wasting away the few remaining hours of ones life any way that amuses them… hell, I’m sitting here posting here, aren’t I?
That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the many many people I’ve encountered and who I think you all know exist who act as if its more than just idle fun. The promotion is, from what I understand, incredibly profitable for McDonalds, which is why it keeps returning. That couldn’t happen if the only players were people like who you are insisting you are: just causally being silly with something you know is silly. There are probably plenty of people who even think that, but still have a magical compulsion to supersize their meals for an extra 30 grams of fat they otherwise wouldn’t have gotten, or who buy whichever sandwhich McDonalds is trying to promote that has more game pieces on it.
I think it takes a real moron to not see that this is well and smartly exploited irrational behavior, not just friendly escapism. I don’t begrudge McDonalds at all for figuring out such a great scam. I just feel sort of sad about the people who really and truly believe that by collecting pieces they are getting any closer to winning, when in fact they are just being taken for a ride, ableit a tiny one. Astrology is dumb too. Such is life.
And that’s another thing. Surely they rotate the hard-to-get pieces from year to year. If Illinois Avenue was the holy grail last year, this year it will be Indiana, and like that.
There’s also people who religiously buy lottery tickets, certain that this week everything will change. I don’t particularly condone preying on the mathematically challenged, but it’s definitely not confined just to McDonald’s.
I’m with Anaamika, Monopoly is really the only reason I ever go to McDonald’s. Not because of the game pieces, though the instant-win food prizes are always handy, but because of the guaranteed Best Buy Bucks they’ve been handing out the last couple of years. I can usually accumulate $15-20 and get something fun at Best Buy, just for buying lunch like normal. Win-win.
The Monopoly Game is the best marketing scam going. They’ll only issue a few key pieces for the prizes, and since no one but the game junkies know which ones are key, they get tossed out.
Since they are tossed out, McDonalds doesn’t have to award the prize. (To be specific, once 60 or 90 or whatever number of days listed in the rules have passed since the official end of game date, McD’s gets to keep its un-awarded prizes. They can sell them or give them away to executive employees as bonuses.)
Must be nice to have a contest, advertise expensive prizes, and never have to award the vast majority of them. ( Aren’t you lovin’ it…? )
Heck, if Dopers love the game so much, then ok, let’s play it. You buy McDonalds food and tell me about it I’ll send you some game pieces I have lying around. If I ever send you a winning game piece to complete a combo, you win ten billion dollars!