I saw an advert for McDonald's recently that made some comparisons between their prices and some other things you could spend the same amount of money on. Unfortunately, I think someone in their marketing department needs a calculator.
The advert stated that their saver menu, where an item costs £2.49, is equivalent to:
- 0.000001% of a football match
- 24 seconds of a hotel night's sleep
- Two spokes of a bike
- Two snips of a haircut
- 1/4 of a backswing on a golfing holiday
- One word of a movie in the cinema
- Four pebbles in a country house driveway
- Half a foot on a rollercoaster
Presumably McDonald's are trying to persuade customers that spending money on their food is better value for money than spending it on these other things. Let's look at those claims individually.
0.000001% of a football match
The maths here is relatively straightforward. If 0.000001% of a football match costs £2.49, we take that value and multiply it by 100,000,000 to get 100%. £2.49 multiplied by 100,000,000 is £249,000,000.
£249 million is unquestioningly a ridiculous amount to pay for a ticket to a football match. It's more than it would cost to put on a football match. It's probably enough to build a small stadium and hire a premier league footballer to come and have a kickaround with you and your friends.
For context, 0.000001% of 90 minutes (the normal length of a football match in the UK, not including half time or extra time) is 54 microseconds. The cost of a ticket to see a football match can vary from less than £50 to more than £100, so a more reasonable claim might have been 0.01% of a football match, but even then you'd be paying £249 for a ticket, which is still quite a lot.
24 seconds of a hotel night's sleep
If 24 seconds costs £2.49 then a minute costs (2.49 / 24) * 60 = £6.225.
If a minute costs £6.225 then an hour costs £6.225 * 60 = £373.50 (which is already expensive).
Hotel stays for one night vary in length depending on check in/out times but let's say you only spend seven hours of that time actually asleep. That means our total night's sleep costs £373.50 * 7 = £2,614.50.
This claim is not quite as ridiculous as the football match but it's still a very large amount of money to be spending on a single night in a hotel. A quick search online shows that the most expensive hotel room in London for tomorrow night (at time of writing) is £1,260. I don't know which hotel chain the McDonald's marketing people are using but they seem to be paying over the odds.
Two spokes of a bike
Bike costs vary considerably depending on the type of bike (adult, child, road, mountain, folding, electric) and brand, so this one might be a little harder to quantify, but let's give it a go.
I checked my bike and it has 20 spokes on each wheel. If two spokes cost £2.49 one spoke would cost half of that so one wheel worth of spokes would cost (£2.49 / 2) * 20 = £24.90.
You can buy a front wheel for a bike at a popular retailer for £29.99 but that means the rest of the wheel (hub and rim) would come in at a mere £5.09, which seems disproportionate. A bit of digging online produced prices for spokes around £10.99 for 60 spokes. That's (£10.99 / 60) * 2 = £0.36 for two spokes.
Again, I don't know where the McDonald's marketing people are buying bikes but I'd suggest they shop around a bit more.
Two snips of a haircut
This one is also hard to quantify - when was the last time you counted the number of snips in your haircut? But let's try some simple calculations. If two snips costs £2.49 then one snip costs half of that, £1.245. That means:
- 10 snips would cost £12.45
- 20 snips would cost £24.90
- 50 snips would cost £62.25
- 100 snips would cost £124.50
The cost of a haircut varies, but £15 would not be an outrageous price for a man, whereas a woman's haircut can run to considerably more.
Since we don't know the actual number of snips in a haircut I can't dispute this one exactly, but I'm pretty sure even a quick trim would run to more than 10 snips. I'll happily update this article if anyone is prepared to keep count next time they go.
1/4 of a backswing on a golfing holiday
We're continuing the theme of vague and difficult to determine, but let's give it a go.
If a quarter of a backswing costs £2.49 then a full backswing costs £2.49 * 4 = £9.96. Normal golf courses have 18 holes, and let's assume you're really good at golf and only need 3 shots per hole, which gives us:
(£9.96 * 3) * 18 = £537.84
That's an expensive round of golf (and it gets more expensive the more shots you take - four shots per hole would cost £717.12). For comparison, a golf course in Cambridgeshire that I found online offers a single weekend round for £77, approximately a tenth of the McDonald's number.
But the advert doesn't say a round of golf, it says a golfing holiday, which presumably includes travel, accommodation and food. Let's be generous to McDonald's and say we'll go for a golfing holiday from the UK to Spain.
A bit of online searching produces some approximate numbers for a trip to Quinta do Lago, a Spanish golf resort. A return flight can cost around £200, plus a night in a hotel at £137 (164 euros), plus the cost of the round itself at £164 (197 euros), giving a grand total of £501 for our golfing holiday (for one person, not including food or other transport).
McDonald's might not be too far off with this one, except you could certainly manage a round of golf and a night in a hotel for a lot less than that if you decided to do it closer to home.
One word of a movie in the cinema
We're getting into really nebulous territory now (how many words are in a movie?), although it's pretty easy to see how flawed the logic is here. If one word in a movie costs £2.49, simple multiplication shows:
- 2 words costs £4.98
- 3 words costs £7.47
- 4 words costs £9.96
- 5 words costs £12.45
- 10 words costs £24.90
We're already well past the amount I think most people would be prepared to pay for a cinema ticket in the UK, and ten words is obviously well below what you'd expect.
But how many words are there in a movie? Obviously it will vary depending on the movie - action movies will tend to have fewer words than a Shakespeare adaptation, for example. Arnold Schwarzenegger famously had only 17 lines in The Terminator, a total of 58 words. If you edited the film to cut out the lines spoken by all the other characters the cost of the ticket would be £144.42, which even outstrips the cost of popcorn these days.
Four pebbles in a country house driveway
Obvious questions abound from the outset with this one - what sized pebbles? How deep are the pebbles? What are the dimensions of the drive? These will all vary depending on the house, so let's start with a simple drive with enough space for one car to park, plus some other assumptions.
A reasonable size of drive for one car would be 6 metres by 3 metres. Let's assume the drive is covered in a single layer of pebbles, and each pebble is 20mm in diameter. We can roughly calculate the following.
- Pebbles in 1 metre square is (1000mm / 20mm) * (1000mm / 20mm) = 50 * 50 = 2500 pebbles
- Area of drive is 6 metres * 3 metres = 18 square metres
- Pebbles in 18 square metres is 2500 * 18 = 45,000
- Cost of one pebble is £2.49 / 4 = £0.6225
- Cost of driveway is 45,000 * £0.6225 = £28,012.50
That's a lot of money for a drive. It gets even more expensive if you have more than one layer of pebbles - depths of drives like this are usually at least 30mm deep if not deeper, and our layer doesn't account for pebbles being round and therefore the space between them (this is apparently a classic sphere packing problem - the natural arrangement of spherical pebbles in a single layer would not be as described - they would effectively arrange themselves using hexagons as the structure - but that's too complicated to include here).
For comparison, there are websites that let you calculate how much gravel you would need for your drive. A 6x3 metre drive at a depth of 2cm would apparently require 0.65 tonnes of gravel, which can be bought for a relatively cheap £160.49.
But the advert doesn't say a small drive, it says a country house driveway. There's no standard I'm aware of for the length of a driveway but let's say our driveway is still 3 metres wide but 30 metres long. Covering it with our single layer of pebbles gives us the following numbers.
- Area of drive is 30 metres * 3 metres = 90 square metres
- Pebbles in 90 square metres is 2500 * 90 = 225,000
- Cost of driveway is 225,000 * £0.6225 = £140,062.50
Let's not forget that you'd probably need at least three times that number of pebbles for a proper driveway (especially if you're out to impress your rich friends with your expensive gravel) so the final number would be nearer £420,000. We've also lowballed the length of the drive, so you could probably double that number again for a proper country house, which means our driveway is almost costing us a cool £1 million.
This is all obviously inaccurate but can be summed up far more simply. If someone offered you four pebbles for £2.49, would you think that was a good deal?
Half a foot on a rollercoaster
One metre is 3.28084 feet, so we can calculate the following.
- One foot would cost £2.49 * 2 = £4.98
- One metre would cost £4.98 * 3.28084 = £16.3385832
Riding a roller coaster at a cost of £16.34 per metre would mean it would cost you the entry price to Alton Towers before you'd got out of the station (a walk up ticket costs £68, divided by £16.34 gives just over 4 metres of ride). So that's clearly wrong. Maybe they mean the cost of building a roller coaster?
Ignoring that most people buying the saver menu at McDonald's aren't likely to be financing the construction of roller coasters, let's check some real world examples. The Nemesis roller coaster at Alton Towers is 716 metres long, which based on the price we calculated above would mean it would cost £11,698 to build, which is well short of the actual cost of around £10 million. The Big One in Blackpool is 1,675 metres long, which would cost £27,367 to build, again massively short of the actual cost of around £12 million.
Summing up
I think it's fair to say that all of the claims made in this McDonald's advert are either false or difficult to justify. Some of them are frankly bonkers.
There are so many adverts in this world and so many vague or misleading claims that it's refreshing to be able to prove one of them wrong for once.
(thanks to my friend Matt for checking my calculations and for explaining the sphere packing problem)
Large version of the advert for reference.
