McDonald's PlayPlace

McDonald's built its kid empire deliberately. The McDonaldland ad campaign launched in 1971, giving Ronald McDonald a cast of pals and a fantasy world — and the company brought that world to its restaurants with its first playgrounds in the early 1970s: a prototype at the 1972 Illinois State Fair, and an early Playland at a Chula Vista, California location that boosted business there by more than 60 percent. The early equipment was pure McDonaldland, including the Officer Big Mac climb-in jail.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s the play areas moved indoors under a new name, PlayPlace, and the wood and metal gave way to molded plastic and rubber: crawl-tube mazes, slides, ball pits, and a socks-only sign. By 1991 McDonald's had become America's largest playground operator, with 3,000 play areas — and that same year it spun the idea into a standalone family-entertainment chain, Leaps and Bounds, which later merged into Discovery Zone. For a generation of kids, the PlayPlace was the default birthday-party venue and the reason to lobby hard for the McDonald's with the tubes over the one without.

The shine wore off slowly, then quickly. In 1999 McDonald's agreed to pay the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission a $4 million settlement over its failure to report more than 400 injuries on its Big Mac Climber equipment. In 2011 samples swabbed from play areas turned up coliform and staph bacteria — a microbiologist who reviewed the results concluded they were "not cleaned properly or not cleaned at all." And in March 2020 the pandemic closed every US PlayPlace at once; most eventually reopened, but new and remodeled McDonald's increasingly skip the play area in favor of a sleeker, adult look. The tubes are disappearing one remodel at a time — which is exactly why every millennial who spots a surviving PlayPlace points at it like a landmark.