Unnecessary Maths: McDonalds Marketing

So I was in McDonalds today (lets not go into why) and found a piece of marketing that included some numbers. It said

McDonald’s Litter patrols cover over 120,000 miles every year in the UK and Ireland. We are about the environment!

(or something to that effect)

I decided to break this down a bit. After doing a bit of research I found that there were 1,200 restaurants in the UK and Ireland (60% of which are franchisees). So, that makes each store cover 100 miles per year. Divide that by 365 and we get 0.2739 miles per day covered in each day. That’s about 440 meters every day.

Consider also that this is covered by presumably more than one person, and performed more than once a day.  Lets say for arguments sake that on average, there are 2 patrols every day.  So we cut out 440m in half to 220m.

The problem with this is it is a linear distance. This tells us little about how much area is actually covered by the litter patrols.

The actual distance travelled is dependant on the location of the restaurant.  If the restaurant is on a long street, then the distance travelled in each run would be approximately 4x the radius.  If it were located somewhere with more complex roads and alleys, this would be substantially more.  However, we can at least agree on that the distance travelled in one patrol is at least 4 times the furthest away that they get from the store.

So, we divide our 220m by 4.  That means that, roughly, the litter patrols go about 50m either side of the front door, twice a day

Now you break it down, it down I wonder why that sounds impressive.

I suppose if you inflate any number enough, it can seem impressive.  For example, my heart has beaten over 58026240000 times since I was born.  Wow!  And it never stopped once!  (well, not for very long anyway).  You’ve probably farted about 456.25 liters of gas in the last year.  Lets say that’s mostly air… that’s over 500g of farts!  And 16g of CO2.  I wonder how much of the UK’s CO2 emissions due to farts is generated by McDonalds employees going on litter patrols…