That wasn’t the case, at least in my memory – the instant-win food items said so right on the ticket.
Ah OK, I must have misunderstood.
I don’t know why it’s fizzled in the US then.
There were both instant win tickets and puzzle piece tickets. Winners of $20 to $100 weren’t that uncommon we got them at our store
My suspicion is some combination of:
- Wearout: they ran that promotion, fundamentally unchanged in its execution, for close to 30 years in the U.S., and maybe, as noted by others, it wasn’t generating enough incremental sales/visits anymore
- Changes in corporate strategy in the U.S. (including focusing on driving usage of their mobile app)
- Possibly, some consumers believing that the game was “fixed,” and that they had no chance to win a big prize, due to the scandal
In the 1990s Watt Pottery was extremely collectible to the point of being a frenzy at the national conventions. I founded the Watt Pottery Collectors USA and ran the convention. There was another even larger collectors club as well. When I was attending the other convention, which took over most of a large motel, the word got out that the local McDonald’s had just released the latest Beanie Baby figure in their ongoing promotion… The motel practically cleared out as so many people rushed to McDonald’s to grab one. Soon there were Beanie Babys for display and sale in many of the rooms.
My wife had a similar story for back in the day when they had some promtion where you peel the piece off of cups; as shift supervisor she caught a bunch of kids going through the old stock, set aside after they switched back to regular cups. It was mainly for prizes like “free fries” and she gave them the “don’t let me catch you doing that again” speech.
Monopoly was just run again here in Canada ending a few months ago. The only thing I won was a 50% off at some picture-framing (web site?). Needless to say, never used it. The previous time, I think I had a free muffin or something I never collected.
I see ads for some gambling site(?) on US TV channels featuring the little mustachio’d millionaire in his top hat, so I wonder if it’s due to licensing conflicts with the character. Either (a) they lost the right to use him in the USA or (b) they don’t want McD to be confused or associated with a gambling site.
I recall a news item about some company in Canada, back in the 70’s I think, that cleverly had a similar “collect a match” contest. Apparently they thought they were being clever by sending half the pieces to one area of Canada and the matching halves to another.
Back in those days, when transport and communications were more expensive, markets were actually considered isolated. The article mentioned that Winnipeg, for example, stuck in the middle of nowhere a long way from other decent sized metropolises, used to be an ideal test market because test products rarely leaked to the rest of the country.
Anyway, apparently someone figured out “Hey, the other piece is common as borscht in X!” and vice versa. People began trading them through the mail and the company lost hundreds of thousands on the promotion.
You can watch the documentary on McD Monopoly, but IIRC the short version, he had his friends collecting the prizes in various locations they happened to be at. Some enterprising statistician realized “the odds of so many of these prizes being collected in less populated states is statistically impossible.” which triggered the investigation.
As has been answered multiple times, McDonald’s used the “limited numbers of one piece in the set” method, and it is not the first by any wild stretch of the imagination to do this. Back in the late 1960s, Shell ran a couple of games - one with Presidents of the USA, then one with states - where you collected coins, and getting particular sets of coins won prizes; quite a few people got all but one coin for each of the large prizes.
I remember a Monopoly contest run in California from I think the 1970s where the object was to collect stamps representing the four NFL teams there at the time (49ers, Raiders, Rams, Chargers), and the Personals section of the Want Ads in the San Francisco Chronicle had quite a few “Will pay (some amount up to half of the prize) for (the rare stamp for the grand prize)” ads; columnist Herb Caen even mentioned it when, reportedly, the person who actually got that stamp didn’t realize its rarity and threw it in the trash.
The Albertsons chain (Albertsons, Vons, Safeway, et al.) had its own Monopoly contest, but instead of using the game’s properties, the stamps were just numbers. This one added a twist; for most of the larger prizes, in addition to one of the pieces being rare, there was a second “semi-rare” piece.
What most people don’t remember is, McDonald’s started doing it in 1972. The 1972 version had a different rule; if USA won more than one medal in event, you won each prize available for those medals - and only stamps where USA was entered were printed. That was one of the problems with 1984; as the hosts, USA was automatically entered in every event. I think it was tried again in 1988, but in 1992, when NBA players were allowed in the Olympics, McDonald’s switch to giving away “Dream Team” cups for their drinks.
A lot of them were from the Jacksonville area with some faking their real addresses with PO boxes, but no one realized that until after the investigation started. What sparked the investigation was an informant calling the FBI and telling them that three of the million dollar winners were related.
In the documentary, we never learn exactly who all three were, but Jerry Colombo won a Dodge Viper, his wife Robin’s father was a million dollar prize winner and Robin’s friend Gloria Brown was a million dollar prize winner.
edit to add for shits and giggles:
if you search Google for “mcdonald’s monopoly million dollar winners,” Google’s generative AI summary lists all of the McMillions documentary executive producers, including Mark Wahlberg, as being “involved in the scheme.”