Hasta La Creative!

If you were traveling or doing some last-minute shopping in the days before Christmas, you may have missed the news that “Posts on McDonald’s employee site bash fast food,” as CNBC, which broke the story, gently put it. This amounted to an unexpected Christmas gift to the rest of the media, which quickly re-reported the CNBC scoop, but typically had a little more fun in the headline department. For instance: “McDonald’s Tells Workers To Avoid Fast Food” (The Huffington Post), “McWhoops: McDonald’s tells workers to avoid fast food” (CBS News) and “McDonald’s to workers: Don’t eat our food!” (New York Post).

Well, sadly, the party’s over. McDonald’s has taken down the web presence of the McResource Line. The site, which apparently included outsourced, boilerplate employee-resource advice, had been the gift that kept on giving; earlier in the year it also made headlines — for dispensing inappropriate and entirely tone-deaf financial advice. See, for example “McDonald’s to Employees: Low on Cash? Sell Your Stuff and Eat Less,” from November, and “McDonald’s to Employees: Get a Second Job or Drop Dead,” from July (both of those saucy headlines are from Gawker).

Why pull the site now? A McDonald’s spokeswoman has been supplying this slightly testy statement to the media this morning:

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