The Rise and Fall of Fast Food PlaygroundS

Legend has it that a young boy named

Kevin Archer was celebrating his third

birthday at a McDonald's when he was

pierced by a hypodermic syringe before

his mother had a chance to take him to

the hospital he fell ill and died.

an autopsy declared his cause of death as a

heroin overdose and a police

investigation found knives feces and

other hypodermic syringes Within the

play pit, now Kevin's story was

completely fabricated and many other

stories like it, mainly because of the

public perception of these play areas as

filthy and dangerous.

the sites of colorful tube slides and smells of cheap

plastic is all too familiar.

well hold on to that Nostalgia because

they're slowly disappearing in fact the

number of families who take their

children to these play areas decreased

by 18.6 percent from 2011 to 2016.

It might be, they're riddled with issues

before we dive any further we need to go

back to where it all began back to 1972

in this unassuming city in California

at this McDonald's

like all good stories about McDonald's

our tale begins on a beautiful

spring-like day

this is McDonald's Playland.

the first playland in Chula Vista

brought in a 34 increase in business

before the park was even completed and

others wanted it

first Burger King in 1985 and then other

restaurants like Chick-fil-A and Carl's

Jr would soon follow soon

but it wasn't long before safety issues

began popping up in every direction

remember that creepy Big Mac structure

that kind of looked like a mini

children's jail

well in 1999 the U.S consumer product

safety commission revealed that more

than 400 children were injured after

playing on it from the 1970s to the

1990s and McDonald's failed to report

anything instead the franchise slowly

phased out the climber and other hard

metal play structures and replaced them

with padded equipment

in the end McDonald's paid out four

million dollars to the federal

government the largest penalty the CPSC

had ever received and in the same decade

playgrounds moved indoors but these

didn't last long either why people have

found some of the weirdest and

potentially dangerous objects hidden all

throughout these playgrounds

like cigarettes scissors a dead iguana

and lots and lots of feces

and it's not just safety concerns that

have gotten fast food playgrounds in hot

water either more and more are

also disappearing because of organisms

too small for the naked eye to see okay

so it's not that surprising that Fastway

playgrounds are cesspools for germs

germs and more germs but there are

alarmingly few federal or state

regulations for Playground cleanliness

at least Dr. Aaron Carr Jordan thinks so

mother of four and somewhat of a

playground sanitation vigilante she set

out across the country to take bacterial

swabs at different fast-food chains

Her results, nearly every single one of the 50

playgrounds she surveyed showed several

strains of bacteria that could endanger

children

so what's been done to combat this well

not much playgrounds are technically

considered non-food zones so restaurant

inspectors from the CDC often ignore

them but that hasn't stopped concerned

parents and restaurant goers from

fighting against playground filth

non-profit groups like kids play safe

push restaurants to improve regulations

for proper Sanitation

nevertheless plastic fast food

playgrounds have become more of a relic

of the past

the slides in ball pits once the

Pinnacle of Childhood Carefree Madness

may now even be permanently lost as

they're being replaced by iPads and

iPhones.

for people like my age I think we'd rather

run the risk of coming eye to eye with a

dead iguana then be glued to a screen

all day but maybe that's just me.