I n the last episode of The Saga of the McDonald’s in Hinton, we left off with our intrepid hero — I guess that would be me, I suppose — flummoxed, befuddled and flabbergasted by a sign which was interpreted as that fast food restaurant being open 24 hours per day.
Read the Fine Print — A Lesson Taught By the McDonald’s in Hinton
In response to that episode, Thomas — who is a reader of The Gate — posted this comment as his interpretation of the sign in question, which he described as “definitely misleading”:
[We have a] dining room & drive thru.
[We are] open 24 hours (without specifying which part).
Breakfast starts at 4am.
I took another look at the photograph…
…and at the very top of the blue sign were metal flaps, which could have easily hidden the missing words We have a as inferred by Thomas.
Then I scanned down to the bottom of the sign and noticed some small white print, which — believe it or not — I had not realized was on the sign until today.
The small print comprised of the words “Many restaurants in Canada open 24 hours. See mcdonalds.ca for participating locations. ©2014 McDonald’s”
I suppose what I was supposed to do when I arrived at that McDonald’s restaurant was pull out some portable electronic device and call up the Internet web site. After all, how naïve could I be to simply read a sign and automatically trust what it says?!?
Silly me. I would never have actually believed that a sign proclaiming the hours of operation to be 24 hours would be intentionally installed at a restaurant which is not a participating location.
Perhaps the sign was first installed in 2014 and the McDonald’s in Hinton was originally a participating location but now no longer participates — yet the sign was never updated or replaced?
At the official Internet web site of McDonald’s in Canada, I looked up locations in the province of Alberta.
Sure enough, the McDonald’s location in Hinton is open every day from 4:00 in the morning through 11:00 in the evening — which means that I had just missed being able to use the dining room by less than 30 minutes and was there during the murky dark period of time when the dining room was closed for five hours…
…or perhaps I misinterpreted the hours of operation. Is being open every day from 4:00 in the morning through 11:00 in the evening the metric version of being open 24 hours?
Even odder is that there are two locations of McDonald’s in a town called Edson, which is 91.1 kilometers further east on Trans-Canada Highway 16 towards Edmonton.
I was going to say that the location of a McDonald’s restaurant on Fourth Avenue in Edson is open 24 hours per day seven days per week — but as the hours are from midnight through 11:59 in the evening, does that mean that the restaurant closes for one minute every day?
Summary
I suppose I could have driven almost an hour to the Edson location to have had use of the dining room — how crazy an idea that would have been — but with my luck, I would show up one second after 11:59 in the evening to be told that the dining room was closed.
Anyway, the lesson to be learned from all of this is to read the fine print. I am not sure how that would have resolved anything or resulted in a different outcome; but that is the lesson just the same.
Regardless, I am not lovin’ it…
All photographs ©2017 by Brian Cohen.
