Bad news for Californians with small children: You’ll have to do your own parenting for a while longer.
McDonald’s Corp.can keep including toys in Happy Meals in most parts of California after a San Francisco judge threw out a proposed class-action lawsuit seeking to ban the practice in the state.
Superior Court Judge Richard Kramer did not give a reason in his decision for dismissing the suit, initially filed in 2010 by the consumer advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest and Monet Parham, listed in the suit as a California mother.
Michael F. Jacobson, the group’s executive director, said in a strongly worded statement Thursday that using toys to lure kids to unhealthy fast food was “a predatory practice” that involves “unscrupulous marketing techniques.”
“McDonald’s must stop exploiting children at some point,” Jacobson said, adding that eventually, the tactic “will seem as inappropriate and anachronistic as lead paint, child labor and asbestos.”
And yet some say these people lack perspective.
I don’t like McDonald’s either. Just the thought of eating that stuff makes me shudder. So you know what I do?
I DON’T EAT THERE.
If you don’t want your kids eating fast food, don’t feed them fast food. If they scream about it and drive you up a wall, you should’ve thought about that before you had kids. You are responsible for them. Not a corporation. Not a state. You.