20 February 2006

McDonald's lawsuits start

It didn't take long for the first lawsuits to be filed against McDonald's for failure to disclose their fries contain dairy and wheat products that can cause adverse physical impacts on people with sensitivity to those foods.

We've already posted about this story and the implications for people with celiac disease, among other things.

One of the factors in McDonald's corporate decisionmaking is likely the relative cost of changing their product or disclosing its contents accurate versus doing what they did.

If they changed their fries - as they have repeatedly claimed to do but failed to do repeatedly - there are billions of dollars of sales involved. failure to change produce lawsuits that in the past 15 years totals less than US$20 million. That's a pittance.

Ditto in this case. Even if the estimated 2.0 million American celiacs and their 300,000 Canadian counterparts all jumped into court on the same day, the total cost of any settlement would still not come close to one day's global sales of fries.

But gee, it's not like the notion of companies weighing the relative costs has ever been discussed publicly before either in fiction, or in real life.