Wendy’s and McDonald’s have emerged victorious from a lawsuit that accused the fast food chains of false advertising.
A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit brought against the two companies accusing them of selling smaller hamburgers than advertised and alleging the food didn’t look as appetizing in person as pictured on their websites.
Only because ‘everyone does it’
"US District Judge Hector Gonzalez ruled that Wendy’s and McDonald’s food images “are no different than other companies’ use of visually appealing images to foster positive associations with their products.”
Italics mine
Ahh yes the rarely used “jump off a bridge reversal” defense. If everyone jumped off a bridge would you do it too? Of course!
At the very least I’d start checking for a monster chasing them off the bridge.
Everyone does drugs, can we stop punishing people for it?
woah woah woah how would we enslave minorities if we decriminalized drugs
be a little more empathetic to slave owners (prisons and by proxy the politicians) please
“Systemic problems are OK!”
Not really, that’s a minor part of the opinion. The more important part is they tell you how much food you’re going to get of what kind and then they give you that food. I don’t think anyone would be able to win a case on “my burger didn’t look like the burger in the ad” because every burger looks a little different. Lots of things that are the same don’t look the same and let’s not suddenly pretend we get McDonalds for the appearance. They’d win false advertising if, say, a quarter pounder was only 2 oz.
yeah this lawsuit is stupid and anyone who thinks McDonald’s would lose is also stupid
have we forgotten what advertising is? its idealized, its artificial, its eye-catching. thats the point. like the suit says everyone does it, thats just good marketing.
frankly i think it makes commericals a bit more tolerable if theyre at least aesthetically pleasing. but marketers marketing in a system that requires advertising for anyone to be relevant cannot be infringed on for just two companies doing the marketing the exact same. blame capitalism for ads not the companies.
(unless we’re taking excessive ads on websites or whatever then blame the sites they’re just greedy)
If you replace your underscores with asterisks, emphasis/italics should work as intended.
I am posting this from Voyager, does it not look correct? I did not underscore anything and added the italics for his quote.
Here’s what I see:
Interesting, I do not see the underscores in Voyager.
Interesting indeed
let’s test another theory
This comment is in italics on Voyager
people fucking suck
…_at least that’s what I’ve heard _…
Holy shit… That’s me making italics with underscores instead of asterisks…
And it shows up right for me in Sync.,
Shit is weird
Nothing in your comment is italicized in Sync.
Does this line show up in italics for you?
Yes it does
GTK…
Lemmy is weird
😂
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It looks fine on Boost for Lemmy
Imagine seeing a car commercial, wanting the car, then going into a dealership and seeing the exact same car on the floor. You buy it and get some shitty blursed version and they are all “that’s our display only model”. That’s probably different somehow as long as you get the right judge.
Imagine a coffee shop ad with a beautiful example of latte art, but when you get your latte you are horrified to find just plain foam. Unless the ad specifically mentioned latte art, I doubt you’d have grounds for a lawsuit.
As for your example, I’m finding it hard to imagine buying a car before getting inside it. A few dealers offer a pre-order option, but you can always back out of the sale once you see the car.
grounds for a lawsuit
There is a joke in there somewhere. ;)
America proves once again that we will allow just about anything if it makes corpos money.
The advertising angle is likely what sank their case. Proving the food does not meet a technical specification, like not having a quarter pound of beef in a fully cooked patty, is easier to prove. But advertising has always been hyperbole.
A very important aspect that I think people overlook is that they use similar/same marketing photos of the food on their menu. That’s not advertising, maybe that’s what they will argue. If I look at a menu and they have a picture of the food, I’m going to expect I get what I see (within a margin) vs when I see an advertisement I expect it to be a bit hyperbolic.
You could argue that menus are just in-store advertising
A lot of things in stores have to add disclaimers about what is on the cover of the box vs what’s on the inside. I don’t see how fast food gets a pass on that. Or why people are just okay with it too.
Hey I’m not defending them, just trying to imagine what justification they’d use.
Yeah, that might be a good case. Isn’t the weight advertised when it’s frozen/before it’s cooked? How can they call it a quarter pounder if half of it’s weight is reduced before it’s served to you?
Hurray, they can keep showing us inedible objets d’art in food adverts!
The law favors corporate giants rather than real people? How surprising. Fuck McDonalds and Wendys
I feel a little guilty because while I rarely eat fast food anymore Wendy’s is my favorite
Although fast food is irredeemably trash, Wendy’s really hits the spot sometimes. I’d rather starve than eat a McDonald’s though.
I’ll never understand the Wendy’s fandom. I knew a couple other people who were the same. The only fast food they would eat was Wendy’s. I don’t get it. It’s not like they do anything unique or different from any other fast food restaurant. Please explain yourself.
It’s the fries.
…dipped in the frosty.
I like grilled chicken sandwiches and I just think Wendy’s tastes the best. I eat fast food probably less than half a dozen times a year.
Now, just to add more shit to that sandwich, remember what you said when you read that the Supreme Court has ruled several times that police officers ONLY duty is to uphold the law, and they have no duty or obligation to protect the citizens they police.
Did anyone really believe the corporate judge would do any differently?
Absolutely not. I remember when this was filled and I thought, “well this will be dismissed soon”
Poor guy now has to take care of a new yacht
“This is so backwards” one would think and then one realizes that all advertising is deception.
The judge tacitly acknowledges this truth.
I dunno, seems like the judge is explicitly acknowledging it.
Just, uh, stop giving these shitty companies your money and uh, problem solved!
Ah yes, if only we did this one easy thing! It so easy!
If it was that easy/simple they would be out of business already. Unfortunately reality doesn’t always line up with these “simple” solutions, as evidence by… reality.
No. I’m, I’m simply saying that life, uh… finds a way.
The technical term is “puffery”, which the FTC defines as “exaggerations reasonably to be expected of a seller as to the degree of quality of his product, the truth or falsity of which cannot be precisely determined.”
I just recently became aware of that term. Thanks!
I’m honestly confused. Didn’t they show off before that they use the actual ingredients when doing photoshoots? Like no plastic or anything, just making the burger + good lighting, otherwise it’s false advertising?
Of course if you then stick that burger into a tight squished wrapper it won’t look the same, compared to serving it on a plate and setting it up nicely.
I think you’re right I think some of the complaints was the advertisements show more ingredients in the sandwich so they appear larger than they actually are.
Non food items are allowed in commercials but not for the advertised product. The example I heard was Cheerios can use white glue as the milk in a cereal bowl because Cheerios don’t sell milk. I need to look this stuff up more though.
I think one of the things the plaintiff is arguing, which I think is valid, is that the food is not prepared the same way even if the ingredients are the same. The example they use is that the burger patty is browned on the outside but not cooked through, so appears to be a much bigger portion of meat than is actually if the burger. It’s similar to the bait and switch scam of putting all the filling at the top, making it appear the sandwich or burrito is filled with that quantity, but then you open it up and it’s mostly empty.
I think the argument that “we said the exact weight so it’s fine” is BS because few people intuitively understand how much ounces of meat or how many grams a sandwich is, but they can intuitively understand a picture of food.
But then you have to throw the book at literally all of advertising. On TV it shows my chocolate snack bar flying through the air, followed by a trail of shiny milk and a rainbow! And in reality all I get is a boring brown bar lazily sitting in the wrapper. There’s also no penguin holding it for me, darn.
I mean you have all the weights there, you have the calories there and they put the same ingredients into the burgers that they use in the photo shoot. Yes, it might be prepared differently, but who cares? Who seriously expects their food to look exactly like the advertisement, regardless if it’s a burger, a candy bar or whatever?
Sure, they could put photos on the menu that look exactly like what you get. But then you’ll have trouble knowing what’s in the burger (as most ingredients would be hidden) and it would look unappetizing. Nobody wants that.
…and it would look unappetizing. Nobody wants that.
There’s the problem. How about trying to make your food more appetizing. . .
Dude, it’s fast food. It comes delivered in a wrapper or a small box that has been moved around all over the place.
This is not high end eating where they serve you your burger on a proper plate (those ones actually look nice).
Wrong industry.
And if you don’t like it, why the hell would you keep going there?
they won, we all lost
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I doubt there’s any bribery involved just good old fashioned, “c’mon bro everyone does it”
Legally speaking this is called puffery But that is actually where the case was sorta interesting. Lots of places say they have the best coffee in town, but obviously that’s immposible to determine since tastes differ. So the visual appeal of a burger versus a commercial was always a junk claim.
But a product not meeting the specfic dimensions could be false false advertising. This would certainly apply for lots of other products if they were 10% larger or smaller (like basically anything related to construction). However, the judge here ruled that because the burgers start out as the advertised weight and the process of cooking changes it, then no one is lying.
McDonald’s corporate does all sorts of scummy things. But the judge here absolutely came to the correct conclusion.
Okay that sounds reasonable. I’ll have to do some digging around. Thanks
When they’re ALL WRONG they gotta be right right?
