McDonald's McResource Problem: Even Good Advice Can't Make Up For Low Wages

Yesterday McDonald’s (MCD) closed its McResource website, a well-meaning effort that had become a font of bad press for the fast food chain. The site suffered for two opposite but equally embarrassing problems. Some of its advice—how to tip an au pair or a pool cleaner, for example—clearly did not apply to McDonald’s workers. But some addressed the potential desperation of low-wage employees. It also suggested that workers considering returning unopened Christmas gifts to get out of debt. A worker group publicized the fact that a McDonald’s worker who called the McResource help line was told to look into food stamps. And in what was perhaps the final straw, the site was discovered to be cautioning employees about the health effects of fast food, calling a cheeseburger and French fries an “unhealthy choice.”

But while the McResource site offered the lowest of hanging fruit for mockery and derision, it raises a broader question about the place of such advice for low-wage workers who are struggling to make ends meet. The site’s recommendations certainly could have been less comically tin-eared; even if so, would they have been useful?

The tradition of seeking to improve the lives of the poor by teaching them virtuous habits—thrift, sobriety, piety, self-control—extends back to Victorian social reformers. Today, the question of whether poverty is caused primarily by bad decision-making or societal conditions is one of the main points of contention between American conservatives and liberals. But if interesting new research is correct, the conditions and the decisions are indistinguishable. In other words, poor people really do tend to make worse financial decisions than rich people, but it’s not for lack of good McAdvice. It’s because they’re poor.