A row between the fast food giant Burger King and one of its major franchise owners has erupted over roadside signs proclaiming “global warming is baloney“.
The franchisee, a Memphis-based company called the Mirabile Investment Corporation (MIC) that owns more than 40 Burger Kings across Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi, has described Burger King as acting “kinda like cockroaches” over the controversy. MIC says it does not believe Burger King has the authority to make it take the signs down.
The dispute began to sizzle last week, when a local newspaper reporter in Memphis, Tennessee, noticed the signs outside two restaurants in the city and contacted the corporation to establish if the message represented its official viewpoint. Burger King’s headquarters in Miami said it did not, adding that it had ordered MIC to take the signs down.
But a few days later readers of the Memphis paper said they had seen about a dozen Burger King restaurants across the state displaying the signs and that some had yet to be taken down. Media attempts to contact MIC to establish why it was taking an apparently defiant stance were rebuffed, but the Guardian managed to grill MIC’s marketing president, John McNelis.
“I would think [Burger King] would run from any form of controversy kinda like cockroaches when the lights get turned on,” said Mr McNelis. “I’m not aware of any direction that they gave the franchisee and I don’t think they have the authority to do it.”
McNelis added: “The [restaurant] management team can put the message up there if they want to. It is private property and here in the US we do have some rights. Notwithstanding a franchise agreement, I could load a Brinks vehicle with [rights] I’ve got so many of them. By the time the Burger King lawyers work out how to make that stick we’d be in the year 2020.”
#28, Hmeyers: I’m going to knock religion as long as religious types come into my child’s school and into my government and into my life and try to tell me what’s right and what’s wrong and how I should live my life, all based on an ancient book of superstition and an imaginary friend.
As soon as they stop doing that, I’ll stop knocking them.
Am I the only one relishing in how these bitter Joe-The-Plumbers of the world are lashing out? Look at the funny monkey! Ooh, he’s an angry monkey!
@ fpip
“As soon as they stop doing that, I’ll stop knocking them.”
I’ve learned over time my differences with religious people probably amount to about 1%-3%.
Don’t kill, don’t steal, half the stories of any religion are at least as good tales of morality as any other collection of fiction.
At the end of the day, my disagreements really amount to the age of Earth, evolution and dinosaurs — not really enough at least for me to get riled up about.
Skippy, if the guy had just said he doesn’t believe in global warming you’d have a point. The link was to a specific argument.
#1 I don’t know about where you live, but the Burger Kings where I live(southern california) the a automated machine, raw patties in the top, serpentine stainless belt,under gas flames, cooked patties out the bottom.
MikeN, thanks for the laugh! (your chart) 🙂
MikeN, you are awesome! (teh chart)
# 25 Jägermeister said
#23 – BubbaRay
LOL – Oops… a typo. 😀
Yes, but the finest typo I’ve seen in many years. I’ve got to remember “the indivisible being” as the “Jägermeister indivisible being.” This is award class material, all we need now is the picture to go with it.
HAR I love all the “morans” who have the ignorance or the temerity to believe that scientific debate can be OVER on any issue. Those who declare the global warming debate are Marxists disguised as well-meaning do-gooders who only care about saving us from ourselves.
Hey Goreski, read about real climate change and realize that we’ve been in a warming period since the mini ice age. All anthropogenic? I don’t think so. Get educated and get wise or be a useful idiot to making Al Gore wealthy.
Burger King’s new Baloney Burger will donate 20% of our profits to the Help Increase Global Warming fund through August, 2012.
It’s the least we can do.
Oops
http://worldclimatereport.com/wp-images/loehle_fig2.JPG
#20 Patrick, hard to tell but looking at the graph CO2 appears to be correlated just as well.
#43 Actually, CO2 follows temp increases, not the other way around…
The 2007 IPCC report said at the current rate of global warming as was believed in 2007 (a colder 2008 and 2009 may have changed some minds) …
… said …
The sea levels would likely rise by 9 inches by 2100 due to global warming.
Yet I see commercials telling the kids during cartoon commercial breaks that the world’s future is in dire jeopardy due to global warming.
Where the fudge is the intellectual honesty in this world especially from the global warming worshipers?
#44, it happens in both directions.
>(a colder 2008 and 2009 may have changed some minds)
No it sure doesn’t. Now they are producing even more alarming forecasts.
Part of the alarm is justified, since their own assessments for some reason show the US and Europe reducing their carbon emissions after 2050, with no explanation given.
The IPCC….hmmmmm….. Find a reputable source.
# 15 Great American said:
“mmmm baloney!”
“So the company is OK with advertising the creepy “new” version of the burger King but not this.”
I know what you mean — that insane-looking cartoon is so ultra creepy it gives me the heebie-jeebies and the willies and the creeps all at once.
Laugh of the year/decade:
Global Warming Believers are slowing changing the name of their movement. You’ll notice that ‘the cause’ of global warming isn’t just causing warming anymore, it’s causing Climate Change.
….cause, ya know….it’s gotten colder:)
Kind of remindes me of a conversation between cavemen as they ponder the rising sun and how much longer they had to live before the world burned up.
Not to get all Matrix-religious and all, but didn’t this country live through something very similar 30-40 years ago?
A democratic president, poor economy, global warming, and threats from the middle east.
And 30-40 years before that?
….does this constitute a trend?
It’s a free country (supposedly)…
Post your own “Global Warming is REAL” counter-sign, who stop you? 😉