Also, clowns are kind of creepy.

I know it’s not Wednesday, so this is a little early for Business Time, but I just read the most fascinating stat about McDonald’s and their Happy Meal.

Apparently, the thing accounts for less than 10% of annual sales.  Now, for some reason the article seems to accept “less than” as “9.999%” from the way they’re talking about it and comparing it to sales figures from other companies, but that’s advertising people for you (zing!)

Still, given that most Happy Meal customers don’t come into the store by themselves, the box with the toy and the debatable food is a powerful lure to bring in adult-sized food orders as well, so let’s call it 10%.

This is the part where I get edumacational and point out that decimate doesn’t mean the same thing as obliterate, like many people seem to think, but rather the removal of one in ten, and yes, common usage generally wins out, but my story sounds better if we go with the old school version.

Here, clearly, is how you kill 10% of McDonald’s business (leaving them with only 28 billion in sales, true, but the profits from young children feed vampires more than your money): remove the Happy Meal.  They tried in San Francisco, but maybe it’s enough for some other company to win the kids over.  You know, like how Friendster lost to MySpace which lost to Facebook which lost to Vegan Porn Sexy Book Club?  OK, the last part is merely my dream.

And it might not be too hard for someone to do someday: it’s inexplicable to me, but while 37% of kids surveyed picked McDonald’s as their favourite restaurant, the runner up at (granted, a distant) 10% was Subway.  Maybe the subs can be swung like swords, I don’t know.  I don’t have to understand kids who eat solids yet.  Burger King came in third with 8%, and you’ve got to figure there are a lot of other entries with tiny percentages, since we’ve got 45 percents left to play with.

Or maybe, just maybe, I can be optimistic, and reckon that parents are starting to at least make a “do as I say, not as I do” play and are going to stop taking their kids to McDonald’s, which means it’ll be less of a connection when they get older, and in the end only weird people will go there.  Kinda like cigarettes, yeah?

I can explain! No, I can't. OK, soft lighting might save cabbage, but probably not Steven Seagal

Finally, it turns out there actually is someone out there trying to get you to eat fruits and vegetables, and it’s not some guy in a lab coat (and possibly nothing else, but the camera mercifully never pans…down there) – it’s the grocery stores, who – get this – actually lose money if they have to throw spoiled produce in the garbage.

Huh.

(As an aside, Angela had to explain to me why the leaf lettuce sometimes looked really tiny – grocery stores pull the spoiled leaves off as the week wears on.  Again, huh.)

To “brainwash” you, these grocery stores are resorting to techniques such as soft lighting, and, um, soft lighting.  OK, there’s also the potential for your store to hire a “trained vegetable adviser,” and if I had a nickel for every time he had to say “no, not in your pants, sir,” well, perhaps this blog would be profitable.

I don’t have a whole lot to say about this beyond pants jokes (did you see them? There were two of them!), but what interests me here is the possibility that, in the ridiculously low-margin world of large-scale grocery stores, there might be some untapped gold in the produce department, and since that’s my primary section of the store, any improvements there are going to make me happy.  You know, in my pants (trifecta!)

(Photo stolen from this guy’s post about some kind of Steven Seagal energy drink. I didn’t read it; the picture had me at hello.)

When your ship comes in, you too can be living the dream

This week saw the launch of a new superfund in Australia, which I think is like a mutual fund in North America, but anyway this one has a focus on being cruelty free. The Cruelty Free Super focuses its investments on companies that don’t do animal testing, genetic modification on animals, or animal slaughter, which seems obvious but kudos to them for recognizing that killing is kinda mean.

(Standard disclaimer: while we encourage you to do something with whatever money you have left after feeding your vegan cheese habit, a site called Vegan Porn probably isn’t the best source of investment advice and you should get learned accordingly before investing in anything, or else you too might never hear the end of the reminders of that time you bought a rail car full of pogs, thinking they were going to make a huge comeback.)

I’ll be honest, ethical investing comes up from time to time in my reading, and I think I’ve lost some money in that area in the past, but it always seemed a little dodgy, like how you can drink nothing but Pepsi and probably still call yourself vegan but it’s not the best way to go about it, er, unless you’re a major shareholder in Pepsi, to bring this discussion back to money.

But here’s what I’m wondering: are “non-ethical” investments really that close to the source activities of the respective companies that there’s a true conflict? Does a company actually benefit from the fact that you own shares? In a sense they do, because a strong share price gives them a decent market cap that they can use to fund other activities and acquisitions, and for you there’s the whole issue of profiting from their work, which would include capital gains but also dividends, which are actual profits from animal cruelty.

But what about shorting the stock? Is it ethical to invest in McDonald’s on the bet that they’re going down? I mean, if you profit because they lose money, and especially if you donate some or all of the proceeds to an AR non-profit, how is that a bad thing?

And then there are the derivatives. An option is a contract that gives you the ability to buy or sell a stock at a given price within a certain time frame, but typically you never actually own the underlying security. Is that removed enough from the actual company? And are puts (the option to sell) more ethical than calls (the option to buy)?

These are the things I think of late at night after realizing that I have no money to invest. I also fantasize about booking an appointment with a financial planner to ask about these things (and more, oh, so much more) but I can never guess if I’ll get kicked out for asking seemingly insane questions or if just the whole “no money to invest” thing would disqualify me first.

And so, porn-seeking stockbroker, I turn this over to you in the comments: just how unethical is it to bet on the fact that animal cruelty is going to lose?

Oh, and in case you haven’t guessed, yes, it’s Wednesday, conditions were perfect, and this was Business Time.

You know what we haven’t done lately?  On a Wednesday? When conditions are perfect? And you’re wearing that shirt you got from that work event?

Ohhhhh yeahhhh….

It’s Business Time.

A peculiar battle has broken out between fast food restaurants in the United States.  It seems like there’s some disagreement over who gets the right to kill off their customer base.  No kidding: there are at least two restaurants (and one has two locations) that bill themselves as the unhealthiest restaurants in the world.

In Florida and Arizona, we have the Heart Attack Grill (warning: website has really bad music,) and also in Florida we have the Heart Stoppers Sports Grill, whose website claims to have clogged arteries.  They have a lot of similarities, so many, in fact, that there’s a lawsuit in progress over who’s allowed to offer deals like this:

I’m not 100% sure on this, but I think this is the basis for  bad science fiction slash dark comedy story about the Earth stepping up and employing Dark Agents to get rid of the troublemakers.  We can survive earthquakes, tidal waves, and other natural disasters, but this?  Not so much.  I have no trouble believing that there are people who will model Homer Simpson and gain a few more pounds so they can eat for free.

But let’s twist this around a bit.  What if someone opened a vegan restaurant with the opposite policy?  I don’t know if we want to promote the “vegans are skinny and have eating disorders” myth by doing a free meal for people with a BMI under (some low number,) but it would turn a reward mechanism in the right direction and probably help more than it hurts.  How about some other metric like blood pressure or the easier to measure resting heart rate?

Of course, that’s advanced business stuff there.  For the basics, what if we, oh, I don’t know, just stopped trying to kill the clientele?