McDonald's breakfast sales are dropping, so it has turned to Elaine Benes for help

In the Seinfeld episode appropriately titled The Muffin Tops, Elaine decided to open a store that would just sell the top parts of muffins. When her old boss steals the idea and opens a business called Top Of The Muffin To You!, Elaine explains that it would be more cost-effective to bake full muffins and then just throw away the “stumps,” leaving her with a bunch of stumps that even homeless people won’t take. The lesson is that selling only the muffin tops is actually a bad idea, since life can’t be all about the good things. Sometimes, you have to eat a stump. (The show doesn’t really go that deep, but that’s the subtext.)

Anyway, McDonald’s has now ripped off the muffin top idea, with Bloomberg reporting that the fast food empire has been struggling lately thanks to a dramatic drop in breakfast customers. Apparently, in a twist that we absolutely predicted, the chain’s decision to start offering breakfast all day has resulted in lower sales during the actual breakfast hours, with McDonald’s CFO Kevin Ozan saying in May, “we took our eye off the ball on breakfast.” To try and combat this, McDonald’s has begun trying out new breakfast items in test markets, which is where the muffin tops come in.

Bloomberg says McDonald’s locations in the Baltimore area have been selling coffee cake and blueberry-flavored muffin tops, but the story doesn’t mention if the tops have been successful or what McDonald’s has been doing with the stumps. Based on everything else we’ve ever seen from McDonald’s, we’d guess that they’re being repurposed into McNuggets or they’re being kept in storage somewhere until McDonald’s can try to rebrand them into something new and exciting like the McRib.