The Handong Times: McDonald's fails to stop vouchers handed to kids

LONDON - McDonald's has once again been caught distributing cut-price Big Mac vouchers to schoolchildren, one month after vowing to crack down on the practice.

Summary
Last month, McDonald’s announced that they would launch an investigation. This is because Richard Watts, the campaign coordinator of Sustain’s Children’s Food Campaign spotted McDonald’s vouchers being handed out to children in school uniforms in North London.
The investigation has been able to found out that an East London branch has also been handing out vouchers to children. However, they claim that the vouchers do not carry a disclaimer prohibiting under-16s from using them (I think this refers to the vouchers that were made before the Children’s Food Campaign placed a restriction on the distribution of vouchers to minors).
The argument was slightly different on both sides, (it seems that both sides did not want to admit they had done wrong). The franchisee (of the coupon selling branches) claimed that there had been no advice from the McDonald’s head office with regard to the new vouchers with the prohibiting order, but a spokeswoman said that McDonald’s no longer condones vouchers being handed out to minors. She also claimed that this had been informed to all franchisees and business managers last month. However, she later states that the branches (North/East London) had been giving out old versions of the vouchers which did not clearly show that the offer is for over-16s.

Opinion
It has not been described specifically in the article, but it seems that there has been a restricting order on distributing McDonald’s coupons to minors (under 16s) in the UK. At first, I thought that “oh, this must be a new demographic (age) segmentation strategy that McDonald’s is using to raise profits/sales.” However, deeper thought led on to the realization that the main marketing strategy for McDonald’s is to target the younger age (school children age). Stepping into the shoes of McDonald’s, it will certainly lead to be a decrease in sales to the younger age, taking away a large proportion of sales. Therefore I understand why franchisees may want to (illegally) distribute vouchers to minors. However looking at this problem from the Campaign’s (health motivated) point of view, it is wrong to use promotional methods that may suggest that eating McDonald’s makes you ‘happy’, or your family ‘happy’ and other methods similar to this, which disguise that fact that over consumption of the oily products may damage your health. After this incident, McDonald’s may have to change their image a little bit to improve sales.