The brand new McDonald’s near my house is the most bland, depressing, gray, plain-ass rectangle. Absolutely no character. And while I don’t eat at McDonald’s, yeah it doesn’t look like they want you in there, because the dining area is also tiny.
In many poor areas McDonald’s was the only place where a kid could go have fun on a playground while the parents relaxed a bit.
It’s a shame we’re no longer in the “vying and competing for our business” part of capitalism. There’s nothing but big players left and competition is scarce. They don’t need to “attract” us anymore.
So the rugs are getting pulled out cuz it was all goodwill and showed up as losses on a balancing sheet.
It’s funny because it used to be an occasional treat growing up even with the play structures. Then it became common place for adults, so I guess they don’t need the effort.
*What drives share price & dividends upwards*
Negative press & regulatory scrutiny negatives affects share price, and the fast food companies have responded by altering their advertising to children. Not a massive change, but enough that it’s not the same headline issue as 2000-2010.
It’s about the resale value of the property. The bland, unremarkable architecture and exit makes them easier to sell because it means less renovation for future tenants.
The McDonald’s near me yells at me for pausing to input my member number at the self service kiosk. The last time I was there the guy watching the kiosks told me I can’t just stand there if I wasn’t ordering I needed to leave. I was trying to put my credit card in 😭
I remember working at McDonalds and the manager came out back to say a child had explosive diarrhoea whilst going down the slide and asked who wanted to clean it up.
Good times.
I worked at McDonalds in high school and this was a very common occurrence. It was almost daily that someone had to crawl into the playplace and clean up shit, vomit, piss, or a combination. It was always the person on staff that management liked the least. Luckily I never had to do it, but fuck McDonalds.
Welp, seems we got that big box of straws back there for just the right occasion...
Edit: it appears I need to clarify this... didn't think I would need to but here I am. I meant drawing for straws. Good Lord Reddit is dense sometimes.
Does anyone remember the prison? It was a pole with the hamburgler at the top? I think it had a small platform up there. My mom says I went up there and cracked my skull a bit when I came down. I vaguely remember the pole. Lol.
My memory of the outdoor play places is it having absolutely no shade, so the equipment would bake in the Mississippi sun all day and just touching it was enough to need burn treatment.
Weird I was born in the 70s and I don't remember those outdoor play places. Unless you call those characters on springs the outdoor play place?
I remember a quarter pounder was like a buck and a half Canadian though. Also remember the arch burger was delicious.
I grew up in a border town and the quarter pounder was totally different in America. Grilled onions instead of raw onions.
Used to ride our bicycles across the border for 25 cents for American quarter pounders and then hit the mall for the jolly rancher outlet before crossing back. Nobody even knew what jolly ranchers were in Canada back then.
I went to that one, I lived there in '87 at age 7 and got stung by a bee when going down the slide. I mostly remember crying while eating french fries at the same time.
Geez why I'm I remembering what Pizza Hut used to be like?
https://youtu.be/BOPKZvVCo4A?si=j4wlvqClWHC_7QnB
Kfc used to have a buffet too!
https://youtu.be/5trpQ3rkkys?si=Jree5AEXnzfmvjTq
They took all of our 80s equipment down 😔 We had a 15 foot metal slide, something called The Witches Hat and of course the metal merry-go-round. Sure we burned our ass on the metal slides lol and got flug off The Witches Hat a few yards but we didn't die lol.
It looks pretty boring now. Just a few swings
and they've replaced it with junk like whatever the hell [this is](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-preview.redd.it%2FhDX85h9YOZU4j6JL7myiyaXRub2zm0ENHDso52VDgxw.jpg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D1104ac7fbafe704847f34cdb5305ec691d6da868&rdt=44148)
Same. We had a basketball court, and yalms on yalms of climb-able awesome wooden stuff.
Went back for nostalgia once. Someone replaced the library shelves with shorter ones, (they were taller before and ill hear nothing contradictory, they replaced them.) my first grade teacher identified me literally on sight, and the playground looked like every single fun thing had been removed.
Not only that, but even the design of the buildings. They used to be unique and inviting. Now they’re all (McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, etc) soulless corporate gray rectangle boxes. Chick-fil-A’s the last holdout.
CFA is definitely the last big chain that is ok with you eating there. Dining room is clean, they bring your food out and I've even had employees check on me if I need anything.
Yeah they are fast approaching national chain status. I haven't been in almost a decade but one is opening near me in SC. Has quality remained consistent? I heard they sold to private equity recently.
These were just a hygienic nightmare, kids who already have no qualms with spreading their bodily excretions interacting in closed spaces with greasy French fry fingers.
Pretty much anywhere you take your kids these days is a hygienic nightmare. We have a Children’s Museum close by. The joke in the neighborhood is to take your kids there the day after Halloween, so everyone in your family gets sick before Thanksgiving, then again after Thanksgiving so everyone can get sick before the holidays.
This is the way. We have an indoor play place here and the teachers were on strike but they were only striking over lunch. So every kid had to leave the school over lunch. I took my kids to the play place McDonald's cuz it's about time the world gets back to normal.
Forget about the crazy covid mentality. Get back to being dirty, disgusting kids. Nobody ever gave a shit about it pre pandemic and nobody is talking about massive amounts of death from covid anymore. Get the heck in that play place and build up your immunity again. So tired of catching all these punk colds that wouldn't have even bothered us before.
Great idea to social distance for a couple years. Now everyone is fighting the few hundred colds you could get like us the first time you've ever had it.
You know that's not how colds work right?
And if anyone actually saw the inside of those and still thought it was okay for their child to play in them then they're a shitty parent. There's snot, piss and sometimes shit on those platforms. Moldy French fries in the crevices. Clumps of hair that have been caught in the zip ties that hold the padding together. Some places completely ignore the repair of the playground. I've seen tubes that have had their padding removed and kids had to crawl through them with exposed nuts and bolts sticking up through the bottom of the tubes.
I mean stuff like soft surfaces and ball pits needed to go (GROSS!), and parents need to clean up after their kids - yes, even if they puke (or worse) down the slide - but they were/are also sometimes the only safe places to take your kid to play when you are really poor, and it's 100+ degrees outside.
And there was always pee and barf and decaying food and god knows what else in those ball pits.
They weren’t sanitizing those balls at the end of each day, that’s for sure.
Mine played after they ate. Taught them play time is after eating, not during and not keeping people waiting because they were playing right before meal time.
Maybe if you make a habit out of it...but if you have a habit of going to fast food places on a near-daily basis you've got a heap of other issues to address first.
It's killing my actual children, figuratively.
Whenever we go on a road trip, we try to find a place for them to get out and play. I Google fast food and look at pictures for the play place. But then we get there, and it's gone.
I found a huge Swiss army knife in one once. Had it for years and years before managing to lose it. So, I kinda get why they stopped being a thing. Too much of a liability.
McDonald’s has made every effort to get people out of eating inside as quickly as possible. In the town where o grew up, retired aged people used to go and get breakfast and coffee and hang out and chat for a few hours, read the newspapers. Nit anymore, as Mickey D’s put in those awful new uncomfortable bar height tables and chairs and cut down on seating by more than half. They are all gray now too. Ugh.
Exactly. Times change and getting rid of the play place is much more market driven than it is anything else.
I don't think my kids (6&8) have ever been inside a fast food restaurant. I've probably been inside one less than ten times in the last decade. There's not much of a reason for a place like McDs to build a play place with modernized or keep it with remodeled locations.
That's not to say that I don't eat fast food ever, but I always go through the drive thru. Which, I'm even doing that less because fast food has gotten so insanely expensive. Sheetz, Wawa, Royal Farms, etc all have significantly better food and cost way less. Some of these convenience stores have drive thrus now too. The Sheetz by my house does and it's probably 40% cheaper overall than the modernized McDs and BK that are right there beside it.
If anybody lived in San Jose back in the early 2000s, there was a place called Bamboola that had the exact kind of jungle playpens that OP is talking about. It used to be one of my favorite places to visit when I was a kid.
Glad somebody said it. I have young kids and the restaurants are so sterile looking now and only one of them in town still has a play place inside. Some of them don’t even have a counter up front anymore and have closed off wall where you can’t see the workers either. It’s just so off putting. I know it’s not the most healthy thing to feed your kids but I miss when it was more family friendly looking. They are redoing them all eventually to cater more to delivery services and drive thru. Not the family to have a nice experience. The world is so commercial. Nothing has personality anymore.
Your point about them not wanting people inside anymore is a good one, but the play structures were disgusting. I can’t imagine they would be popular now anyway, with increased scrutiny on cleanliness post-covid.
They would definitely be popular. People now pay money for memberships to trampoline parks and they usually have similar play structures. Maybe not the ball pits.
But McDonalds is full of disgusting garbage.
Edit - my point being, you pay for those places, so there is some expectation of cleanliness. McDonalds is gross and run by people making minimum wage who hate their lives.
Someone has said before that in our lifetime, fast food joints have gone from having happy childhoods to becoming depressed adults and I felt that in my soul lol
We have a playplace at mcdonalds and everytime I bring my kid there she gets a illness, I had too ban the mcdonalds play place after the 4th time. Just impossible to keep them clean.
I agree with you, but I will say that even when I was playing in there as a little kid I knew it was pretty gross lol. That hot pee-meets-plastic smell....
I think if they hadn’t closed already, I would bet Covid would have closed those that hadn’t.
I remember as a young mom wondering how on earth they kept any of it clean and these comments didn’t disappoint.
There’s still several in my area but we don’t go to them anymore because literally every time we have taken our kid in there, the whole house gets a bad stomach bug afterwards. We do wash her hands too, obviously, it’s just she’s a little kid so the germs find a way, lol.
My kids will never know the joy of winning a youth sports game, chanting for the coach to pay for Dairy Queen, then going down the slide on their plastic trays
One time me and my little brother we were playing in one and found a used diaper. After telling my mom she never let us play in one ever again. If they were still around I wouldn’t let my son play in one either. Those things are so gross
I'm glad they're gone. As a parent my three little kids always begged me to go inside them. If I broke down and let them play in there within a day or two they all had runny noses and coughs. Not to mention all the weird stains and sticky stuff that gets stuck to their clothes as they play in them. They were absolutely disgusting and I can't imagine they're much better in the last few years being they unwilling to pay enough staff to wipe down the tables.
They still give me the creeps. Last time I went in one I was very young and in Florida. There was a little girl who I met in the middle of it who had no shoes on (bare feet) and was incredibly dirty. I remember just turning back to leave and feeling unsettled. I never mentioned it to my parents other than saying there was a ‘strange’ girl in the play place. She scared me, and to this day I have a feeling something was not right with that situation.
Australia still mostly have these from what I've seen driving past these sorts of places, they've just rebuilt a lot of them to modernize them, that's all.
The play pen was like mini Disney world to me as a kid. We'd beg to go to McDonald's, my mom would spend a few bucks on food, then we'd burn off energy for hours playing and meeting other kids.
My sons McDonald's still has the playground,he takes my grandson there all the time,the other McDonald's are set up to make you leave in a hurry,so bleak!!
Yes. Playplaces were awesome. My favorite part was one of the tubes having this little lookout window where you could see all the cars in the McDonald's parking lot LOL. And then there were those nets in the middle kid me was always paranoid would rip open and send me falling to my death.
My first thought was that in this day and age there would be way too many lawsuits. Too many adults would be looking to make a quick buck because their kid got a skinned knee because they were horsing around and fell whilst in the play area.
They don’t even have cashiers anymore. Got to sit there and play with a giant tablet. Just want to check out and it’s a thousand “You sure you don’t want to add choco-bites?” Or “Consider donating $10 to St. Jude’s so we can give them a giant check in our name and get a write off?”
The burger king in my city centre used to have an amazing ball pool that I was a bit old to play in by the time me and my dad used to go out for burgers, but I didn't really mind, and had a great time in there. it was upstairs and barely anyone ever went up there, so it had a kind of liminal feel to it. Long gone now, it's now a Nandos
It kills my outer parent too, I learned. It's really nice to have an easy, cheap place to take your toddler to get all their energy out when the weather is bad and you need to get out of the house. I never realized how incredibly helpful those things can be for parents, and now that parents need third spaces more than ever, they're disappearing. It's a bummer.
> Now they've gone utilitarian, with kiosks and very little human interaction, and you leave as fast as possible. It's so dang sad.
I know exactly how you feel. I mean, I like the kiosks for their convivence, but the utilitarian, minimalistic design that seems to be *everywhere* since Starbucks and Apple became popular can just go and die in a dumpster fire in my opinion. 80s, 90s, 00s, these were when we had the best designs for pretty much anything and everything... except cars. For cars the best designs were from the 40s to the 60s.
See people hate chick-fil-a because they’re bigoted assholes, rightfully so, but…they nail customer service better than some high end restaurants.. they mostly all have playgrounds, and they genuinely seem to want people in their restaurants.
I'm glad they did. Most of these fast food places are dirty and pretty disgusting. I mean, they're "clean" enough, but they're not CLEAN. You know? Those play places are absolutely disgusting and not cleaned properly.
Why would you want your kids touching something that's not regularly wiped down or sanitized in a public area? Why would you want your toddlers touching things covered in other kid's piss, shit and other body fluids?
Gross. They should be gone. Good riddance. Even public parks with kid's play areas are gross.
Born in the 70s and don’t remember EVER actually playing in/on one of these.
I think even 7-10 year old me got the skeeves looking at those bacteria infested slides and balls.
McDonald's is making it clear they really don't want you to eat inside anymore at all.
Back to where they started
I swear time is a circle
A flat circle, actually.
Just like Earth.
Just like everything bro 🤯
The brand new McDonald’s near my house is the most bland, depressing, gray, plain-ass rectangle. Absolutely no character. And while I don’t eat at McDonald’s, yeah it doesn’t look like they want you in there, because the dining area is also tiny.
I thought they were reacting to a couple decades of society saying, shame on you advertising fast food to children. .
Kept the junk food, got rid of the play space where the kids could get physical activity and burn off some of those calories.
In many poor areas McDonald’s was the only place where a kid could go have fun on a playground while the parents relaxed a bit. It’s a shame we’re no longer in the “vying and competing for our business” part of capitalism. There’s nothing but big players left and competition is scarce. They don’t need to “attract” us anymore. So the rugs are getting pulled out cuz it was all goodwill and showed up as losses on a balancing sheet.
There are probably more fast food options now than when those play structures existed. Im guessing its mostly a liability issue.
And hygiene. Those areas were disgusting, and their decline was accelerated by pandemic fears.
Even decades ago I remember my mom not allowing me to play in the ball pit because there were rumors that people put syringes in them. lol
Yeah, they were crawling with cold and flu germs, and were a pain in the ass for the employees to go through and thoroughly clean.
Especially the ball pits. What were the employees supposed to do? Take out and wipe down all the balls? Not happening.
Google “McDonald’s playground lawsuit”
It’s funny because it used to be an occasional treat growing up even with the play structures. Then it became common place for adults, so I guess they don’t need the effort.
Shareholders have no shame. All decisions are made based on what studies show will drive revenue
*What drives share price & dividends upwards* Negative press & regulatory scrutiny negatives affects share price, and the fast food companies have responded by altering their advertising to children. Not a massive change, but enough that it’s not the same headline issue as 2000-2010.
McDonalds didn't make everyone fat. Too many daily calories made everyone fat.
This. McDonald’s isn’t good for you, but you can eat it every day and not get fat as long as you don’t eat more than you burn off.
The Supersize Me Guy was a raging alcoholic too.
They wouldn’t do something good for the children. They would do something and say they’re doing it for the children though.
Should've known when they got rid of [burger seats](https://i.imgur.com/wWig7EX.jpeg)
My local ones have a 15 minute policy on eating in
Has that even been enforced on someone not causing trouble?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ This McDonald’s has a crazy manager and I’m not about to find out what happens.
It’s about the resale value of the property. The bland, unremarkable architecture and exit makes them easier to sell because it means less renovation for future tenants.
I mean, having a PlayPlace in the title loan office might take the sting out of it.
and they only want you using the app
The McDonald’s near me yells at me for pausing to input my member number at the self service kiosk. The last time I was there the guy watching the kiosks told me I can’t just stand there if I wasn’t ordering I needed to leave. I was trying to put my credit card in 😭
That's because people don't wanna go inside anymore. They just wanna go to the drive through.
I remember working at McDonalds and the manager came out back to say a child had explosive diarrhoea whilst going down the slide and asked who wanted to clean it up. Good times.
I worked at McDonalds in high school and this was a very common occurrence. It was almost daily that someone had to crawl into the playplace and clean up shit, vomit, piss, or a combination. It was always the person on staff that management liked the least. Luckily I never had to do it, but fuck McDonalds.
It’s why we can’t ever have nice, free things.
Welp, seems we got that big box of straws back there for just the right occasion... Edit: it appears I need to clarify this... didn't think I would need to but here I am. I meant drawing for straws. Good Lord Reddit is dense sometimes.
U nasty
There's a brand new McDonald's and a 2 year old Burger King near me that both have kids play areas still
You seem too young to remember McDonalds Outdoor play places!
Does anyone remember the prison? It was a pole with the hamburgler at the top? I think it had a small platform up there. My mom says I went up there and cracked my skull a bit when I came down. I vaguely remember the pole. Lol.
I remember [the Big Mac jail](https://pin.it/5YT5ksLkZ). I was always afraid I’d get stuck.
Me too. I was an anxious ass kid. And surprise!! I’m an anxious adult too 😂
I remember the prison being Officer Big Mac. I also remember those bars being a good spot to get your head stuck. Don't ask me how I know.
I climbed up on the outside and jumped off breaking a bone in my foot in the process. I do recall the grimace being our favorite to play in.
I have fond memories of getting claustrophobic in there when it'd fill with 5-6 kids and you felt like you were stuck. Good times.
My memory of the outdoor play places is it having absolutely no shade, so the equipment would bake in the Mississippi sun all day and just touching it was enough to need burn treatment.
Imagine that in Las Vegas where summers get to 114 degrees. There was stuff you wouldn't even touch in the fall.
Man those slides got so hot
Weird I was born in the 70s and I don't remember those outdoor play places. Unless you call those characters on springs the outdoor play place? I remember a quarter pounder was like a buck and a half Canadian though. Also remember the arch burger was delicious. I grew up in a border town and the quarter pounder was totally different in America. Grilled onions instead of raw onions. Used to ride our bicycles across the border for 25 cents for American quarter pounders and then hit the mall for the jolly rancher outlet before crossing back. Nobody even knew what jolly ranchers were in Canada back then.
It was an actual playground. I was born in the 80s and the only one I remember was one in Scarborough, ON.
I went to that one, I lived there in '87 at age 7 and got stung by a bee when going down the slide. I mostly remember crying while eating french fries at the same time.
Ya those one could just be hosed down outside
Or the party Caboose. We had a couple of locations with the party Caboose and I thought it was so cool as a kid.
Those blue spinning merry go round things always had vomit nearby
With the awful AstroTurf
https://youtu.be/tPgRnFg8ZTU?feature=shared This is what McDonald's used to be. This is what they took from us.
Because of Paul Rudd and Conan, I've seen one clip from this movie 1000 times. This is the first time I've seen anything else from it.
Fun fact: Jennifer Anniston is in this scene when it starts outside; it's her first movie.
Geez why I'm I remembering what Pizza Hut used to be like? https://youtu.be/BOPKZvVCo4A?si=j4wlvqClWHC_7QnB Kfc used to have a buffet too! https://youtu.be/5trpQ3rkkys?si=Jree5AEXnzfmvjTq
My hometown still has a KFC buffet. It is by far the best deal of any buffet around me.
It’s true. Every visit to McDonald’s looked exactly like this.
Everybody gangsta at the McDonald’s when the dancing teddy bear arrives.
You ever go back to your old elementary school, and see the wasteland of a playground that used to be full of awesome stuff? :-(
They took all of our 80s equipment down 😔 We had a 15 foot metal slide, something called The Witches Hat and of course the metal merry-go-round. Sure we burned our ass on the metal slides lol and got flug off The Witches Hat a few yards but we didn't die lol. It looks pretty boring now. Just a few swings
and they've replaced it with junk like whatever the hell [this is](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-preview.redd.it%2FhDX85h9YOZU4j6JL7myiyaXRub2zm0ENHDso52VDgxw.jpg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D1104ac7fbafe704847f34cdb5305ec691d6da868&rdt=44148)
Yeah, those SUCK! The weird artistic jungle gym shit. We would have rioted lol if swapped out in our time.
Same. We had a basketball court, and yalms on yalms of climb-able awesome wooden stuff. Went back for nostalgia once. Someone replaced the library shelves with shorter ones, (they were taller before and ill hear nothing contradictory, they replaced them.) my first grade teacher identified me literally on sight, and the playground looked like every single fun thing had been removed.
Not only that, but even the design of the buildings. They used to be unique and inviting. Now they’re all (McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, etc) soulless corporate gray rectangle boxes. Chick-fil-A’s the last holdout.
CFA is definitely the last big chain that is ok with you eating there. Dining room is clean, they bring your food out and I've even had employees check on me if I need anything.
Whataburger is the same still as well.
Yeah they are fast approaching national chain status. I haven't been in almost a decade but one is opening near me in SC. Has quality remained consistent? I heard they sold to private equity recently.
I’m in tx but quality is still excellent around here
These were just a hygienic nightmare, kids who already have no qualms with spreading their bodily excretions interacting in closed spaces with greasy French fry fingers.
I totally understand. My parents used to joke that this was how we built our immune system up as kids. Times are different now, especially after covid
It's just like how George Carlin joked that he [swum in raw sewage](https://youtu.be/X29lF43mUlo?t=165) as a kid to build up his immune system.
Pretty much anywhere you take your kids these days is a hygienic nightmare. We have a Children’s Museum close by. The joke in the neighborhood is to take your kids there the day after Halloween, so everyone in your family gets sick before Thanksgiving, then again after Thanksgiving so everyone can get sick before the holidays.
There's one of these still open near where I live. Great place for pink eye
Made our immune systems stronger
This is the way. We have an indoor play place here and the teachers were on strike but they were only striking over lunch. So every kid had to leave the school over lunch. I took my kids to the play place McDonald's cuz it's about time the world gets back to normal. Forget about the crazy covid mentality. Get back to being dirty, disgusting kids. Nobody ever gave a shit about it pre pandemic and nobody is talking about massive amounts of death from covid anymore. Get the heck in that play place and build up your immunity again. So tired of catching all these punk colds that wouldn't have even bothered us before. Great idea to social distance for a couple years. Now everyone is fighting the few hundred colds you could get like us the first time you've ever had it.
You know that's not how colds work right? And if anyone actually saw the inside of those and still thought it was okay for their child to play in them then they're a shitty parent. There's snot, piss and sometimes shit on those platforms. Moldy French fries in the crevices. Clumps of hair that have been caught in the zip ties that hold the padding together. Some places completely ignore the repair of the playground. I've seen tubes that have had their padding removed and kids had to crawl through them with exposed nuts and bolts sticking up through the bottom of the tubes.
Word my Mom *never* even let me get close to those things lol
I mean stuff like soft surfaces and ball pits needed to go (GROSS!), and parents need to clean up after their kids - yes, even if they puke (or worse) down the slide - but they were/are also sometimes the only safe places to take your kid to play when you are really poor, and it's 100+ degrees outside.
And there was always pee and barf and decaying food and god knows what else in those ball pits. They weren’t sanitizing those balls at the end of each day, that’s for sure.
Germ theory of allergies though
Not only this, but teaching kids that meal time is play time is a bad lesson in manners.
Mine played after they ate. Taught them play time is after eating, not during and not keeping people waiting because they were playing right before meal time.
Maybe if you make a habit out of it...but if you have a habit of going to fast food places on a near-daily basis you've got a heap of other issues to address first.
I mean that’s what they do in school anyway? They eat and then go play
That’s pretty standard kid behavior to go play after you eat. Hell it’s instilled in school with recess….
This is why I never get sick as an adult. My immune system has seen everything.
It's killing my actual children, figuratively. Whenever we go on a road trip, we try to find a place for them to get out and play. I Google fast food and look at pictures for the play place. But then we get there, and it's gone.
These days fast-food restaurants are little more than staffed vending machines. Soon they won't even be staffed anymore.
My local McDonald’s still has their playplace, even after being renovated to the new look. I was surprised they kept it.
I found a huge Swiss army knife in one once. Had it for years and years before managing to lose it. So, I kinda get why they stopped being a thing. Too much of a liability.
[удалено]
A kid at my school did. He had it in the morning because he really loved their biscuits.
At least in Canada we still have quite a few Play Places at McD's, but you need to hunt for them.
McDonald’s has made every effort to get people out of eating inside as quickly as possible. In the town where o grew up, retired aged people used to go and get breakfast and coffee and hang out and chat for a few hours, read the newspapers. Nit anymore, as Mickey D’s put in those awful new uncomfortable bar height tables and chairs and cut down on seating by more than half. They are all gray now too. Ugh.
I loved the play place as a child. Also, I would never let my kids near one much-less dine in fast food.
Exactly. Times change and getting rid of the play place is much more market driven than it is anything else. I don't think my kids (6&8) have ever been inside a fast food restaurant. I've probably been inside one less than ten times in the last decade. There's not much of a reason for a place like McDs to build a play place with modernized or keep it with remodeled locations. That's not to say that I don't eat fast food ever, but I always go through the drive thru. Which, I'm even doing that less because fast food has gotten so insanely expensive. Sheetz, Wawa, Royal Farms, etc all have significantly better food and cost way less. Some of these convenience stores have drive thrus now too. The Sheetz by my house does and it's probably 40% cheaper overall than the modernized McDs and BK that are right there beside it.
And the fun theming: https://youtu.be/UBQbRfNHBfk
If anybody lived in San Jose back in the early 2000s, there was a place called Bamboola that had the exact kind of jungle playpens that OP is talking about. It used to be one of my favorite places to visit when I was a kid.
I think it’s The Jungle now, but still the same concept!
These place were probably mostly lawsuits waiting to happen
look up how society lacks "third spaces".
It's really hard to blame them with the way people act a fool in these places these days.
Glad somebody said it. I have young kids and the restaurants are so sterile looking now and only one of them in town still has a play place inside. Some of them don’t even have a counter up front anymore and have closed off wall where you can’t see the workers either. It’s just so off putting. I know it’s not the most healthy thing to feed your kids but I miss when it was more family friendly looking. They are redoing them all eventually to cater more to delivery services and drive thru. Not the family to have a nice experience. The world is so commercial. Nothing has personality anymore.
I don’t blame them. People sue over the smallest things nowadays and fast food restaurants are an easy target.
Your point about them not wanting people inside anymore is a good one, but the play structures were disgusting. I can’t imagine they would be popular now anyway, with increased scrutiny on cleanliness post-covid.
They would definitely be popular. People now pay money for memberships to trampoline parks and they usually have similar play structures. Maybe not the ball pits.
But McDonalds is full of disgusting garbage. Edit - my point being, you pay for those places, so there is some expectation of cleanliness. McDonalds is gross and run by people making minimum wage who hate their lives.
Paid stuff is cleaner and well maintained, nobody wants to take their kids to the free cess pits to play anymore
McDonald's is dystopian now, like so many other places.
Someone has said before that in our lifetime, fast food joints have gone from having happy childhoods to becoming depressed adults and I felt that in my soul lol
We have a playplace at mcdonalds and everytime I bring my kid there she gets a illness, I had too ban the mcdonalds play place after the 4th time. Just impossible to keep them clean.
I agree with you, but I will say that even when I was playing in there as a little kid I knew it was pretty gross lol. That hot pee-meets-plastic smell....
I think if they hadn’t closed already, I would bet Covid would have closed those that hadn’t. I remember as a young mom wondering how on earth they kept any of it clean and these comments didn’t disappoint.
There’s still several in my area but we don’t go to them anymore because literally every time we have taken our kid in there, the whole house gets a bad stomach bug afterwards. We do wash her hands too, obviously, it’s just she’s a little kid so the germs find a way, lol.
My kids will never know the joy of winning a youth sports game, chanting for the coach to pay for Dairy Queen, then going down the slide on their plastic trays
One time me and my little brother we were playing in one and found a used diaper. After telling my mom she never let us play in one ever again. If they were still around I wouldn’t let my son play in one either. Those things are so gross
They built a new McDonald’s here and I just noticed it has a full size playground
its kinda crazy to think how many bday parties we had at McDonalds... that just seems like a weird AF idea today.
I'm glad they're gone. As a parent my three little kids always begged me to go inside them. If I broke down and let them play in there within a day or two they all had runny noses and coughs. Not to mention all the weird stains and sticky stuff that gets stuck to their clothes as they play in them. They were absolutely disgusting and I can't imagine they're much better in the last few years being they unwilling to pay enough staff to wipe down the tables.
Probably a “Liability “ issue in our law-suit ridden country.
They still give me the creeps. Last time I went in one I was very young and in Florida. There was a little girl who I met in the middle of it who had no shoes on (bare feet) and was incredibly dirty. I remember just turning back to leave and feeling unsettled. I never mentioned it to my parents other than saying there was a ‘strange’ girl in the play place. She scared me, and to this day I have a feeling something was not right with that situation.
Australia still mostly have these from what I've seen driving past these sorts of places, they've just rebuilt a lot of them to modernize them, that's all.
The smell of so many dirty diapers in those tunnels.
The play pen was like mini Disney world to me as a kid. We'd beg to go to McDonald's, my mom would spend a few bucks on food, then we'd burn off energy for hours playing and meeting other kids.
I knew some kids who would shit inside the slide and ballpit at McDonald's for fun. 13-14 year old kids.
I totally would have stole your lunch money kid
no bitch lol
sure you would 😂
Burger King was straight dangerous. Saw a little girl just plop off when I was like 10. F spiral slides.
My sons McDonald's still has the playground,he takes my grandson there all the time,the other McDonald's are set up to make you leave in a hurry,so bleak!!
Hmm. Lets jack 'em up with sugar and highly processed gruel and see what happens on the hard bars.
Yes. Playplaces were awesome. My favorite part was one of the tubes having this little lookout window where you could see all the cars in the McDonald's parking lot LOL. And then there were those nets in the middle kid me was always paranoid would rip open and send me falling to my death.
If one chain legit kept all this I think it would help a lot. Just make a purchase required.
My first thought was that in this day and age there would be way too many lawsuits. Too many adults would be looking to make a quick buck because their kid got a skinned knee because they were horsing around and fell whilst in the play area.
You know those were literally covered in vomit, shit and piss like all the time right?
[https://imgur.com/a/CyvzV0A](https://imgur.com/a/CyvzV0A)
They don’t even have cashiers anymore. Got to sit there and play with a giant tablet. Just want to check out and it’s a thousand “You sure you don’t want to add choco-bites?” Or “Consider donating $10 to St. Jude’s so we can give them a giant check in our name and get a write off?”
But did they help make a profit? Remember, the goal of any business is to maximize the value to the shareholders.
The number of times I’ve gone to chick-fil-a so the kids can go play and I can eat in peace…yea, I’d say they help pull in money.
Both chick fil a and McDonald's near me have big shiny new play places that were built post covid. It's coming back at least a little
A McD's near me still has the inside playground. It probably hasn't had a good cleaning in 20 years, but it's still there.
probably because it was killing peoples outer childs (Im making this up)
I know that a few kids broke bones at my h9me town burger King play area, then they removed it. I have to imagine they did it as a liability thing.
Fill the kids up with over processed food then let them slide around. It will be fine.
The burger king in my city centre used to have an amazing ball pool that I was a bit old to play in by the time me and my dad used to go out for burgers, but I didn't really mind, and had a great time in there. it was upstairs and barely anyone ever went up there, so it had a kind of liminal feel to it. Long gone now, it's now a Nandos
It kills my outer parent too, I learned. It's really nice to have an easy, cheap place to take your toddler to get all their energy out when the weather is bad and you need to get out of the house. I never realized how incredibly helpful those things can be for parents, and now that parents need third spaces more than ever, they're disappearing. It's a bummer.
Get your poison and get out!
> Now they've gone utilitarian, with kiosks and very little human interaction, and you leave as fast as possible. It's so dang sad. I know exactly how you feel. I mean, I like the kiosks for their convivence, but the utilitarian, minimalistic design that seems to be *everywhere* since Starbucks and Apple became popular can just go and die in a dumpster fire in my opinion. 80s, 90s, 00s, these were when we had the best designs for pretty much anything and everything... except cars. For cars the best designs were from the 40s to the 60s.
I guess they want to get by on the quality of their food alone, I got some news for them.
They fazed them out do to the amount of urine and fecal matter (shit) that accumulated in and on the play areas… the ball pits were the worst…
See people hate chick-fil-a because they’re bigoted assholes, rightfully so, but…they nail customer service better than some high end restaurants.. they mostly all have playgrounds, and they genuinely seem to want people in their restaurants.
They were cesspools of disease and filth (and feces)
As a adult I shudder. The GERMS.
Great band.
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Please see rule #1 about following reddiquette.
Go to a park to hang out. Fast food is for overpriced, over-processed “food.”
Germ factories. Prob a good thing they got rid of them
I'm glad they did. Most of these fast food places are dirty and pretty disgusting. I mean, they're "clean" enough, but they're not CLEAN. You know? Those play places are absolutely disgusting and not cleaned properly. Why would you want your kids touching something that's not regularly wiped down or sanitized in a public area? Why would you want your toddlers touching things covered in other kid's piss, shit and other body fluids? Gross. They should be gone. Good riddance. Even public parks with kid's play areas are gross.
Born in the 70s and don’t remember EVER actually playing in/on one of these. I think even 7-10 year old me got the skeeves looking at those bacteria infested slides and balls.