McDonald’s let the internet design its own burgers, oops

By Alex McLevy | July 25, 2016 | 5:15pm

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Because corporations will never quite get it, the New Zealand branch of McDonald’s recently had the wonderful idea to launch a promotional tactic seemingly premised on willfully forgetting everything the internet has ever done. On one hand, this isn’t shocking, since most of us need to forget the behavior of people online just to get up in the morning and convince ourselves the world is a worthwhile place. But NZ McDonald’s decided that not only would the company offer a new deal wherein customers could get a free fries and soft drink in exchange for designing their own burger, it also chose to let everyone share their creations online. As in, with a personally selected burger name and everything. So the internet proceeded to do what it does best—namely, make a mockery of anything put in front of it, with a healthy dollop of racism to boot.

As reported by Dorkly—who, happily, captured a bunch of screenshots before the site went down and McDonald’s prudently redirected it to the country’s corporate homepage—the front page of the share-your-personally-designed-burger site was essentially “a non-stop parade of the world’s most racist sandwiches.” But while McDonald’s inexplicable memory loss as to how the internet works led to all manner of lowest-common-denominator offensiveness, it also provided some delightfully ridiculous offerings, by those committed to ensuring “I’m lovin’ it” was more about exposing the stupidity of the burger chain’s campaign. Below are several of the more enjoyable creations, with more up at Dorkly’s original post. Somewhere, Ronald McDonald is sitting, head in his hands, as he fires the entire New Zealand PR team.