In Health Care
“The medical community must practice what it’s preaching. It is deplorable for a doctor to ask a patient to avoid harmful foods that cause heart disease while there is McDonald’s in the hospital’s lobby serving a menu that is mostly burgers, fries, and soda.”
-Dr. Lenard I. Lesser, Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar and family physician at University of California, Los Angeles.
While Ronald and his employer have done quite a bit to align themselves with health and wellness, perhaps no other Ronald sighting was as troubling as his appearances in children’s hospitals across the country.
The Washington Post has discovered there are at least 30 McDonald’s restaurants located inside hospitals nationwide, including children’s hospitals in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York City, and Cleveland. In some cases, Ronald hails patients from the lobby.
If it’s not McDonald’s in the lobby or food court, it’s a chain patterned after the market leader. A 2006 study published in the American Academy of Pediatrics estimates that fast food restaurants can be found in nearly 30 percent of U.S. hospitals with pediatric residency programs.
The reason for opening McDonald’s in hospitals may extend well beyond the profit potential, which itself should not be diminished. Outpatient pediatric visitors to a hospital with an on-site McDonald’s are four times more likely than visitors to other hospitals to have purchased fast food the day of their visit. Inserting Ronald in the health care environment is yet another way to build undeserved brand trust among parents and the public. Visitors to hospitals with a McDonald’s more often assume that the chain supports the hospital financially, rating McDonald’s food healthier than visitors to hospitals sans the corporate clown.
Ronald is no newcomer to health care settings. His first foray into the industry was 35 years ago with the founding of his own homes for sick children and their families – the Ronald McDonald House, which now boasts some 300 homes worldwide. The charity’s founding, however, was not entirely as altruistic as the corporation’s historians would today have people believe. Beginning in the late 1950’s McDonald’s decided to visibly support local charities as a means of generating positive publicity. “We got into it for very selfish reasons,” Fred Turner, former CEO and Chairman once told an interviewer. “It was an inexpensive, imaginative way of getting your name before the public and building a reputation to offset the image of selling fifteen cent hamburgers. It was probably ninety-nine percent commercial.” The exposure generated by this community involvement spurred McDonald’s idea for a branded charity of its own.
The expressed marketing intent of McDonald's charity work raises some serious questions. On the one hand, the charities are helping children and families in great need. On the other, the charities are another means of building brand trust, identification, and loyalty to a product and a corporation at the heart of the global epidemic of diet-related disease.
Needless to say, Ronald’s forays in the world of public health have him speaking out of both sides of his mouth.