Probably a large proportion of the top prizes are never claimed and everyone involved shrugs.
This is not just a McDonald’s thing. When I was a kid various products had instant win promotions where it just told you what you had won. Almost all now have a qr code that you must scan, or a code to enter on a webpage…I’d be surprised if even half of the prizes get redeemed.
I remember an old Mad Magazine cartoon about a free car promotion where they described it as…
TWO MILLION F’s will get sent to dealers!
THREE MILLION O’s…!
FOUR MILLION R’s…!
3 D’s to be sent to Communist China, a year after the contest ends.
To the point re: Wendy’s above, I worked there in the summer of 1987 when they had a promotion where we gave game tickets to people ordering food. The game tickets themselves were not attached to anything and they sent us boxes of these things.
As you can expect, we stole the fuck out of these things. If 40% went to customers, I would be surprised. I had so many free singles, frosties, drinks, and fries that I was able to sell $2 combos when I got back to school that fall. I also used them to woo the young lady that would become my first wife, lol.
Are there any stats on the percentage of major prizes that never get claimed?
Oh yeah but McDonalds. When a friend would come in they would get a giant handful. One promotion when I was there was some kind of scratch off with trivia questions. There were only like twelve possible questions so even if we didn’t know the answer at first, we would know the next time.
The other one was like the monopoly one but it was some kind of diamond or jewel matching. The rarity one for the big prize was kind of similary to a regular one so a lot of people were briefly suckered. That one was a pain in the ass because you ripped off two little perforated edges to reveal the game piece and those things were a bitch to sweep up.
From some quick googling, in 2018 only 8 million out of 25 million food prizes were claimed. This surpises me actually; here in the UK the food prizes are directly printed on the sticker. But I guess in addition to those thrown away there are stickers that people will have kept and not got around to redeeming (and note that you only have about a month after the promotion ends before the tickets become invalid).
In another year, 2023, only 2 of the 5 £100,000 prizes were claimed. This is pretty much as I’d expect; you need to actually be playing the monopoly game to realize the significance of the Mayfair sticker.
If I were to play and win a shake or a filet of fish, I’m just going to throw it away because I don’t like those which is another way they aren’t redeemed.
I just remembered a short-lived promotion that McDonald’s ran in my college town, almost 50 years ago.
They were leaning into school spirit and support for the college football time……if our team won, the next day you could get a discount on a Big Mac, the discount being equal to the number of points the team won by.
Our team had a VERY good year that year. They win the first game by 85 points. This was in the 70’s, so they ended up selling LOTS of Big Macs for, IIRC, 14 cents. And when you are giving away Big Macs for 14 cents in a college town, you’ll give away LOTS of burgers.
The next week they kept the offer but changed the food item to French fries. Our team won again and the spread was equally large, so free fries for everyone.
That was the last time they ran the promotion, but the team kept winning.
I’m sure whoever designed this promotion envisioned discounts of 5 or 10 cents, but the promotion got totally screwed up by the banner season.
This could easily be remedied by grouping points into percentage cohorts.
Eg 0 - 5 point win = 5% discounts
More than 50 point win = 20% discount.
The one I remember from back then was the one corresponding with the 1976 Olympics. You would get a card with the name of an event on it and get a small drink if the US took bronze, fries for a silver, and a Big Mac for the gold.
For whatever reason, a clerk gave me a stack of about 15 of these with my $2 meal and half were for the 100M Butterfly which the US swept that year. I was thoroughly sick of Big Macs by the end of the year.
The game returned in 1984 and from what I understand, McDonald’s took a bath since the Soviet bloc pulled out.
I used to fill out the customer satisfaction polls on the Wendy’s receipt, to get the code for a BOGO on a large sandwich. Then they changed the incentive to getting a percentage off of a value meal. Forget it: I don’t want frozen fries and fountain soda. I just want the burger/s, then to get my fries at a non-franchise place, and have a healthy drink at home. Which means I get the sandwiches less often, of course.
Other countries still get the Monopoly game but we (the U.S.) don’t. Probably because of that big scandal.
if so, it was only indirectly the cause. The scandal came to light in 2001; McDonald’s continued to run Monopoly games in the U.S. until around 2016.
Yeah, but the big docu-series on HBO where most of us learned about it didn’t air until 2020.
…so, four years after they stopped running the game in the U.S. Again, probably not the main cause.
But maybe the reason it will never come back. As I remember, there were long hiatuses between games.
It was pretty much an annual event, at least up until 2013, according to this wiki page:
Sounds like Corporate finally figured out the effort didn’t result in measurably better sales net of its cost.
Or perhaps Hasbro, or whoever owns the Monopoly IP, charges different licence fees for different markets, and it’s just more expensive to get the rights for the US than for other countries.
Or it was a big winner at first but then changing demographics and the way people buy the product changed things. I guarantee that when I worked at McDonalds decades ago people loved those promotions. Now it’s been replaced by reward points on the app.
It’s still very popular here in the UK. Perhaps a difference is the instant win tickets; someone upthread said that in the US you don’t know if you’ve won a burger or whatever until you checked the code somewhere? I can see that making a big difference.