Edmundston Burger King Offers High School Students Free Daily Lunch Bus

This one left me nearly speechless.

A local Burger King/St. Hubert franchise in Edmundston, New Brunswick, has started sending high school seniors from Cité des Jeunes A.M. Sormany (CDJ) a free lunchtime school bus to bring them to their restaurants.

The restaurants, located roughly 1km away and across a highway, clearly expect sufficient high-schooler traffic so as to make their bus and driver outlay worthwhile.

Though I regularly write about different food industry sponsored predatory advertising, this feels different. This isn't a large, nameless, multi-national corporation with a deceptive advertisement. This is a local franchisee who who has chosen to explicitly exploit their own local community's children to make a buck.

While it may be unrealistic to expect more from multi-nationals, here's hoping that this local franchisee reflects on the ethics of what strikes me to be an especially predatory practice.

[Thanks to the frustrated parent who sent this my way]

UPDATE: One week after this blog's posting (and subsequently a great deal of local media attention) the Burger King bus was cancelled.