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Why Can't You Get A Hot Dog At McDonald's?
If you were opening a restaurant that mostly sold burgers and you needed other edible objects to complement them, wouldn't hot dogs be the first thing that came to mind? I mean, the question "Hot dogs or hamburgers?" has historically done a better job of explaining someone's personality than any horoscope ever could. Hot dogs are an institution, and yet they're nowhere to be found at McDonald's, or most places like it. Hot dogs came and went at Burger King not long ago, and have popped up at foreign McDonald's locations here and there, but the chain hasn't sold them throughout the U.S. since the '90s -- which was coincidentally when they first attempted to do so.
If you were to have asked McDonald's former owner Ray Kroc about it, he'd have told you there was a "damned good reason" for their absence: "There's no telling what's inside a hot dog's skin, and our standard of quality just wouldn't permit that kind of menu item." But even outside of burger places, there's a strange lack of hot dogs in the fast food world. Nathan's has fewer than 300 stores in the U.S., compared to upwards of 14,000 McDonald's locations. Surely some wiener experts have an explanation for this. One suggestion is that since hot dogs are a huge choking hazard for young children, the big chains are worried that they will kill their customer base much faster than their products are normally intended to.