Hello HBR Friends,

Today at Hamburger Business Review we are focused on Zach’s annual great challenge to eat at every McDonald’s on the island of Manhattan in less than 24 hours while traveling only on foot. Also, he has to make a purchase at every store.

This year there was a single overriding focus to the challenge:

By eliminating the four hour break in the middle and doing McTrot without stopping Zach was pushing himself to go as fast as possible. Of course, he also needs a route, and even before the route he needs to get a list of all the stores in Manhattan, which is harder than it seems because you can’t trust services like Yelp, Mapquest, or even Google to have the right data about which are still open and what hours.

After getting all the data Zach then has to decide how to attack the problem. We’ve talked about this before but with some 48 locations this is an almost incomprehensibly difficult problem, that combines all the math of the traveling salesman problem with the added logistics of only some locations being open 24 hours, and not to mention the issues of traffic, weather, and anything else the city of New York might throw at you.

Zach’s solution was to map all the locations on paper and then starting at the northern tip of the island work his way south zig zagging as efficiently as possible. He was joined by his friend Alex for a part of the journey and we can see based on his Strava map a little slice of what this looks like:

We spend the first half of this episode diving into this endeavor including some clips that Zach sent us from the streets of New York as he was taking on this challenge and encountering challenges like foot and leg pain, shakes, cold, and more. Somehow after all this Zach ends his adventure holding on to the motto of McTrot, which is:

“Have fun out there.”

Case Study: Obesity and McLawsuits

After their success in litigation against tobacco companies, trial lawyers sought a new mass tort, and in 2001 obesity was their next campaign with McDonald’s being the target.

John Banzhaf, a professor at the George Washington University Law School, said, “A fast-food company like McDonald’s may not be responsible for the entire obesity epidemic, but let’s say they’re five percent responsible. Five percent of $117 billion is still an enormous amount of money.”

This is a shorter case study at only seven pages, but it generated a lot of discussion! but we also didn’t talk about a number of things!

Super Size Me

We had planned to talk about this case study in light of it being the 20th Anniversary of the Super Size documentary, which famously showed filmmaker Morgan Spurlock gain 25 pounds and suffer liver dysfunction and depression.

Six weeks after the film’s debut McDonald’s discontinued their supersize portions. And later in 2006 a study showed that while this kind of heavy diet does affect liver enzymes, it did not show the same dangerous effects. In 2017 Spurlock admitted to drinking heavily and hiding it not only from the camera but also his doctors.

Obesity Rates

In September of 2024 new CDC data suggested that the obesity rate in US adults is no longer growing. Which seems like good news until reading that while the obesity rate is “holding” at 40%, the severe obesity rate is on the rise in the US. We do mention in the podcast how doctors continue to use BMI to screen for obesity even after admitting it’s a flawed tool.

Policing Fast Food?

* Planning policies to restrict the number of new fast-food outlets leads to fewer overweight and obese children according to research led by Lancaster University (link).

* Levying surcharges on other foods that health policymakers want to curb the public’s consumption of might also work, according to researchers tapping into data from Chicago Booth’s Kilts Center for Marketing. (link)

* Removing fast-food restaurants from bases would cut obesity within the military, said Marine Sergeant Maj. Troy E. Black, Senior Enlisted Advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (link)

* OTOH, it turns out that consumers’ buying habits do not change markedly in response to the higher prices, and that the burden of those taxes falls most heavily on the low-income, who allocate larger shares of their budgets to food than wealthier people do. (link)

Taste Test: Larry’s Chili Dog

It’s hard to really enjoy a burger with all the talk about how unhealthy it is, so this week Hamburger Business Review checks out Larry’s Chili Dog, a southern California restaurant that is not part of a chain, but a classic example of a Los Angeles burger joint..

Next Up: Automation w/ Brian Merchant

Next week we’re talking about a recent attempt by McDonald’s to introduce more automation into a store and the backlash that happened after. To help us dig into the issue we’re being joined by author and reporter Brian Merchant who wrote Blood in the Machine which is about the Luddites rising up to fight the factories coming for their livelihood. Should be fun!

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