They asked for a side of fries and not a side of knives.
Two Michigan mothers are incensed with the “toys” in their children’s happy meals after box cutters were found inside the iconic cardboard McDonald’s box.
Dawn Paret said her husband brought their two daughters to a McDonald’s location in Warren, north of Detroit, last weekend when her 7-year-old pulled out a bright yellow box cutter from her happy meal.
“You hear of things like this, but never did I think it truly could happen,” Paret wrote in a Facebook post. “The amount of worry and rage that went through me – I have never experienced.”
Paret was not pleased with the Golden Arches and contacted the store’s management who claimed the mishap occurred because they use one of the Happy Meal boxes as a “catch-all” box, where employees would store miscellaneous items.
“McDonald’s I need an answer as to WHY and HOW a box cutter ended up in the bottom of our daughter’s happy meal,” Paret added on Facebook. “Simply saying, a happy meal box is your “catch all” and someone must’ve accidentally grabbed that one is not the answer I want.”
“I understand accidents happen, it’s just I need to know how this happened exactly,” the angered mother told WXYZ.
Along with the box cutter, Paret’s daughter also received an uncapped pen.
Meanwhile, in late May, Kayla Almashy had a similar experience in Brighton, Mich. when her daughter found a similar box cutter in her own meal, and as routine, the little girl asked her mother for help opening her toy, only for it to be the box cutter.
“My baby, she always says Mama will you open my toy and when I went to grab it, it was a box cutter,” Almashy told WXYZ.
“I just want to make other parents aware to check their happy meal boxes because my daughter handed me a box cutter that was in her happy meal box thinking it was a toy,” Almashy wrote on Facebook.
In a follow-up post, Almashy shared her feelings about the incident saying, “I’m very disappointed in my experience with McDonald’s. This was found in my daughter’s happy meal box. Enough said.”
Mcdonald’s management seemingly offered Almashy a free dessert when she reported the incident.
“I just wanted some type of explanation, but there was nothing that he could give me other than he said ‘do you want a free apple pie or cookie,’” Almashy told the station.
“Definitely not the kind of experience we wanted you to have, Kayla. We’d like to look into this for you,” the McDonald’s Brighton location commented under one of Almashy’s posts, sharing a link to the corporate contact site.
McDonald’s said it would investigate the cases and are in communication with both mothers.
“The safety of customers and employees is our top priority, and we take these claims seriously. We have been in touch with the customers involved and are continuing to investigate,” McDonald’s corporate said in statement to WXYZ.
The McDonald’s location in Brighton where Almashy’s daughter was given the box cutter is 45 miles away from the location Paret’s family went to.
Both box cutters came from the same company, CrewSafe, which was designed to have a blade guard that “protects users by automatically closing & locking after each cut,” according to the product’s online description.
