JAPAN TODAY



 

McDonald’s Japan runs a lot of cool Happy Meal promotions, but none of them stick around for all that long. For example, the Pokémon Happy Meals that went on sale August 8 are only going to be around for a few more days.

However, one Happy Meal bowing out means that another should be on the way, right?

Indeed that was the plan, as McDonald’s had another massively popular anime franchise partnership lined up, one that it had managed to keep an impressively tight lid on.

However, barely a week before the new Happy Meals were supposed to debut, McDonald’s has said that they’re being postponed indefinitely, even though they still hadn’t been officially announced.

In a press release issued on Wednesday, McDonald’s Japan says:
"A notice regarding the Happy Meal campaign which was scheduled to start on August 29

As part of a company reassessment of Happy Meal-related operations, we are postponing the Happy Meal campaign that was scheduled to begin on Friday, August 29.

During the period in which the campaign was scheduled to take place, we will instead be distributing toys from previous campaigns to Happy Meal customers."

It’s not until the very last line of the press release that McDonald’s unceremoniously mentions what the intended promotion was: One Piece Card Game Happy Meals.

Though it may not have as massive a player base as the Pokémon Trading Card Game, the collectible card game branch of the "One Piece" franchise is a very big deal too.

Not only does it feature the characters of one of the most popular and long-running anime/manga series of all time, the One Piece Card Game is published by Bandai, a company with a wealth of promotional event planning expertise.

▼ A display of "One Piece" cards

 

With "One Piece" being hugely popular with kids and young adults alike, there’s no doubt the Happy Meals would have had fans lining up to get one. Unfortunately, it’s also a certainty that scalpers would have been equally eager to snatch up as many as they could.
 
Sandwiched in the middle of McDonald’s Japan’s Pokémon toy giveaway this month was a period of three days when the Happy Meals also included exclusive Pokémon cards.

The resulting rush of resellers led to litter and food waste from people picking out the card from their order and then abandoning or dumping the food and packaging, as well as uncomfortably tense atmospheres as regular customers were forced into competition with for-profit card hoarders.
 
This led to McDonald’s Japan issuing an official apology and adopting new countermeasures to make it more difficult for scalpers to bulk-buy Happy Meals, but apparently the chain feels these are still insufficient for items with as high a projected demand as "One Piece" cards.

In the above tweet, the official One Piece Card Game account also let fans know about the postponement of the Happy Meals, which, to repeat, had not even been publicly announced yet. 

As an indefinite postponement, it’s unclear how confident McDonald’s is that the promotion can be salvaged, and there’s a possibility that this will turn out to be a de-facto cancellation of the One Piece card Happy Meals entirely, proving that, no matter what the real treasure turns out to be, it was most definitely not the resellers who ruined things along the way.