I'm loving rule

So, the play here is to get everyone who agreed to the app to file a binding arbitration suit against McDonalds for wedging a binding arbitration clause into the app.

They have to respond to it and it will cost them a lot of lawyer time and money.

Omg I dream for a day of class actions bringing down companies and I'm not in law I promise
- Username does not check out

Ain't no way something like that could actually hold up in court. But I guarantee McDonald's lawyers could fucking use it to delay shit and just hold up people for way longer than people want to invest time into.

“It’s a simple, but powerful, spell”.
Could never hold up in court... If you pay for a decent lawyer
You'd be surprised

Hate to say it but if you go frequently you can save a lot of money with the app deals. Speaking as a former fat ass.
with less phone storage, and no browser extensions

Ain't no way that shit is legal, right?

In the United States, multi-national corporations have try really hard to be on the receiving end of consequences.
Like maybe kill more children than the Joker via contaminated food. And then, still, it'll be a meager fine.
It's legal to put it in the terms, but it doesn't mean anything since it isn't enforceable. It's to scare people away from filling.
I saw a South Park episode about it once. And it told me yes..

If something in a contract is in violation of federal law, then that section of the contract is null and void.

It's a big reason why my boss is free to have me sign a contract saying that he is allowed to execute me if I don't clean the floor well enough to his liking, but if he actually tries it he's not only doing some time, but this contract means that he is absolutely the primary suspect.

Exactly! In-alienable rights

I wanne see them try that in Germany so they get fucked even harder than if they normally had a lawsuit on their ass

surely not even an American judge would uphold that, right? Surely

Brett Kavanaugh: "Hold my beer."
- More like: Hold my McDonald's™️ Coca Cola™️
- I don't think I was more disgusted by Donald trump, then when he apologized to Brett Kavanaugh for the allegations, and stated, falsely, that an investigation was done and his name was cleared. When no such thing happened.
  Again it's amazing, the world would be such a wonderful place if the same standards the poor were required to live up to we're all so the standards that the rich were required to live up to.
  If during a job interview, I cried and started ranting incoherently about how much I love beer, they would likely have me escorted out by security and be left wondering if they should call the cops.
Actually this is one of the instances where America law proves that Justice is at least somewhat of a concept, I mean holy shit we're not Japan. No seriously look at how they do Court over in the Land of the Rising Sun.
Japan has a 99.9% conviction rate, how many of you people knew that the Phoenix Wright series was actually intended as a scathing critique of the legal system of the country it was made in?
If something in a contract is in violation of state or federal law, then that provision of the contract is null and void.
There have been many instances of companies saying that you don't have any rights because you sign them away in the licensing agreement, only for a judge to turn around and call bullshit. The preceddnt is basically cemented in stone at this point.
- Let's recall that the SCOTUS overturned a major precedent not so long ago. Precedent is not rock solid anymore.
- Holy shit America did something right? I can't believe it.
- I agree with everything here, but I wouldn't use conviction rate as a good metric. The US has a fairly disgusting conviction rate itself (especially federally) linked in with that whole "plea guilty to 6-60 months (judge's prerogative) or face 40 years to get a trial, but we don't call that duress".
  I've only once seen a guilty plea where the defendant is asked under oath if they actually agree there's enough evidence to convict them, and that was a high-profile person getting a slap on the wrist for basically treason.
- Why do companies continue to add these clauses then? Just as a deterrent?

This would make they pay more for a lawsuit in a country that takes consumer protection seriously, lol. Samsung had to pay me 5k(35% to the lawyer) because they refused to deliver a fridge on my apartment. They delayed the delivery, had me hours on hold, insult and tried to fright me whenever they talked to me. The fridge was 4,5k and it got done within 10 months. So good luck to Mac Donald's.

Wtf was their problem to begin with?? What was their business plan? Sell an item and keep it?
- Something something they don't go past the 3rd floor, but my address the whole time was 5th floor. The delivery was 2 weeks late and the delivery guy knocked on my door asking if I was going to carry the fridge, even though I had paid them to do that.
To anyone else reading this, avoid Samsung appliances because they are total shite
- Here, the government has a service that you go to and somebody tries to solve the issue for you (like a costumer support). The lady called Samsung, they had her on hold, and then returned basically saying "sue us". She was surprised because the companies tend to reason when the government service calls to solve the issue, because the next step to solving it is a lawsuit. It was a journey with Samsung.
- Why? I'm serious, I have a fridge for 6 years and its good for the money. I'm not defending Samsung and I dont care about brands, so I'm genuinaly asking what is your ground for that affirmation?
Should've been 100k, there were so many times they could've NOT done that, and yet they did, and so many people along the chain failed - they were testing what is possible and what they can get away with.
- Dude, I had just moved, putting everything inside a cooler with ice in the summer. Delaying a fridge for almost a month was terrific. All this information made to the judge. If he thought this was a fair amount, I would mind a little more tho.

How are they even going to prove a specific person agreed to these terms or even used their app?

Using the app forces you to log in (via email or similar). And that can be backtracked to you if you're not careful!
- The last time I checked, they didn't even require clicking any confirmation email. Every time I visit a McDonald's I reinstall their app and just create a new bullshit account with a temporary email which I don't even need to check. For all they know, you might have created an account with my email and agreed to the terms (just an example). It's unenforceable on so many levels I'm dumbfounded.

- Nah. Cook for yourself. Mic drop.

Have you ever been a successful plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit? Those fries are worth more than you would have gotten.

Resident of Illinois here, I got $450 from Facebook, and $100 from Google for Biometric violations.
I got $600
I got several thousand dollars from HSBC in a class action suit.
I got $4 from Target
Yeesh, all the Americans in this subthread getting 3 or 4 figures back from suits. Us canucks get like, $12 per.
- I got $29 from the Intuit class-action suit. Yay. Pretty sure they charged more than that when I submitted my taxes that year. I was dumb.
- I'm an American who once got $6 in a class action suit.
- Most I ever got back from a class action was $70. In a settlement where the defendant was fraudulently overcharging for their product by hundreds of dollars.
  The meagre payout didn't cover the amount I was overcharged by (by then I didn't care anyway) and the class action settlement was little more than a slap on the wrist for the billion dollar corporation because they earned more in the process of defrauding people than they lost in the payments.
Only one I've ever been involved in I got 1000+ £

like how the fine print is that you also have to buy something to get free fries

Legally binding food. Cool and normal.

Imagine anyone unironically swallowing down that pig swill

Actually I used to and can confirm how disgusting and worthless it is. It's not even worth it for the free fries. You barely get any "meat" on the burgers; they're mostly bread and iceberg lettuce which is actually bad for you too.

Even the fucking donuts I eat are better than that disgusting trash. 🤦

Oh, and here's the kicker: the only demographic that eats there consistently is the extreme poor who are unlikely to understand terms of service and contracts, and these deals are designed to exploit them. They, I feel bad for. Anyone who has money and chooses to waste it on that lukewarm basura deserves the suffering they get.

App is shit. Local store made a mistake told me to contact corporate. Corporate told me to talk to local. Eventually was told escalated to tech team. Crickets for two weeks. Had to file dispute with credit card to get my money back.

Uninstalled app and haven't been back to McDonald's since. Fuck em. They have shit support and a shit app.

That should be illegal to add this in the ToS

Nah man.
You can just add "If you agree to this ToS, then you are our slave forever" to get free slaves!
Works every time /s

Is getting people to forego their rights for some free chips bribery?

to certain low-socioeconomic peoples, i would say yes

We live in hell

Tim Hortons did the same thing a few months back in Canada with a donut and coffee. They were caught tracking people 24/7 with their app.

Things like this make me think we need to change contract law to include some kind of requirement that whoever is entering into a contract have actually read and understood the contract in order for their signature on it to be meaningful. I'm not entirely sure how you'd go about setting up a system to prove this, so some compromise to practically might have to be made, but some possibilities I can see might be having the signer initial or check off each point individually, having a physical contract signing be accompanied by video of the person reading through the contract or having it explained to them, or having a neutral third party witness also sign to affirm that they witnessed this being done, or in the case of digital contracts, having each point be ticked off individually with a checkbox for a given section not made available until after a reasonable amount of time to read the section has elapsed since the previous checkbox was checked, and having a requirement that contracts made to be signed by people who are not lawyers must be written so as to be understandable by someone not versed in legal jargon.

It would be a massive headache I realize, since it would make anything where contracts are agreed to take longer and have more paperwork to document things or programming to be done for digital ones, but on the plus side, it would disincentise companies making huge terms of service contracts and end user license agreements that everybody knows virtually nobody actually reads, and make people more aware of what they're actually agreeing to.

Not everything should be a contract. Make the benchmark for contracts to be much higher, such as requiring two notary public or lawyer signatures for it to be binding. Casual contracts in "terms of service" should not only not be binding, but illegal with stiff penalties for trying to sneak in such terms.
So many words to say "shift responsibility to the consumer".
No.
How about instead, we demand companies stop forcing people to sign pages and pages worth of bullshit "contracts" (not even going in to how many are legal or in any way enforceable) for every simple fucking interaction because they're so desperate to cover their own asses and protect every cent they've extracted from their minimum wage employees??
Fuck, I wish people would shift their fucking focus to where it belongs already... 🤦‍♀️
- You misunderstand my intent. Stopping companies from making people sign giant excessive contracts is entirely my point; nobody is going to want to use your app if it takes forever to even install it because of all the legal stuff they'd have to agree to, things they're already agreeing to, but not knowing about. My thinking is that it would force companies to only make contracts where actually necessary and as short as possible. How does this shift responsibility to the consumer? They are, after all, not usually the ones creating the contracts.
I hate to talk like a law student but that's sort of the system we already have. When a person certifies that they have read a contract (such as terms and conditions), it does actually mean something. No one would want to do business if anyone could be released from a contract just because they were lying about whether they agreed to be bound by it.
You might be able to think of it like the safety presentation that happens before takeoff on every commercial flight in the US. If you look around at that time, very few people are ever paying attention to the video or flight attendant. Why is that, if everyone is supposed to be concerned about their own safety? Maybe they think this presentation will be the same as all the others, so they can safely ignore it. Does that make it the airline's fault if a person doesn't know where the emergency exits are when something does happen? No, the typical intuition - and a relatively necessary assumption on the airline's part - is that each person is responsible for knowing the information given to them in that presentation.
Similarly, it does not necessarily change much if a person has to check off multiple boxes instead of just one, or if they have to wait a few minutes before they can sign off, etc. People will tune out whatever they want to tune out, but we can't have a workable system if that's what absolves them of responsibility.
-That being said, US contract law does take this to some extremes that should be carved out as unacceptable exceptions to the rule. The case of Carnival Cruise Lines, Inc. v. Shute comes to mind where passengers were bound by terms printed on the back of a cruise ticket that they only received after they already paid for it.
- The flight thing isn't about the passengers paying attention, it's about the airline being required to make the information available in a clear and concise way. They aren't required to provide interpreters for blind and deaf passengers, the aircraft is structured to make deboarding easy and safe. It's assumed that enough of the passengers will get the gist of it that in the event of an emergency enough people do the right thing that the rest will follow.
They would have to require contracts be dumbed down to a 4th grade reading level as that's all most Americans can handle.
Or accept most Americans are too stupid and uneducated to be able to consent to most contracts and to ban them nationwide.

click wrap isn't binding

Good luck against McDonald's legal team! This is America. The law is written on $100 bills.
- I did employment training for a job with a big company. One of the examples we were given was something like this:
  Tom had to hire someone for a job. He chose to hire someone currently under investigation for some sketchy shit. Our company got investigated for it. After 5 years and $10 million in legal fees, our company was cleared of any wrongdoing. Tom was fired.