Tokyo: McDonald’s Japan has apologized to the public after a lot of people were upset by their limited-edition Pokémon card campaign, which caused long lines, fights amongst customers, and a lot of food waste. The campaign, which included special cards with “Happy Meals” (called “Happy Sets” in Japan), was supposed to last three days, but it ended early at many places since there was so much demand.
The firm said in a statement that the campaign, which started on Friday, rapidly went wrong because “resale-driven mass purchases by customers” caused food to be “thrown away or discarded.” There were a lot of unsubstantiated pictures on social media showing plastic bags full of uneaten burgers and fries. One person on X said, “I couldn’t buy my daughter a Happy Meal because of these people.” Some people even started calling the advertising “Unhappy Meals” because of how bad the criticism was.
Both kids and adults want the Pokémon trading cards very much. Some rare cards can sell for millions of dollars. People wanted the new limited-edition cards so much that there were fights and commotion at McDonald’s stores. Some stores even had to call the police.
In their apologies, McDonald’s Japan said that its plans were “not good enough.” The corporation had first limited each client to five meals and had urged the Japanese online flea market Mercari to help stop resale. But these steps weren’t enough, and the cards rapidly showed up on online stores at high prices.
McDonald’s Japan has promised to put a “stricter cap” on future Happy Meal purchases to stop problems like this from happening again. The company also said that it would refuse service to anyone who tried to buy more than the allowed quantity, kept getting in line, or acted threateningly toward personnel. The fast-food behemoth also said it would ask online stores to do more to stop dishonest reselling.
This isn’t the first time a McDonald’s Japan ad has had problems like this. Scalpers bought a lot of food and threw it away after working with the popular comic series Chiikawa before.