There is no shortage of attractive surprises at McDonald's children's meals, but this "surprise" was not expected by two mothers of children from the state of Michigan, USA, they certainly did not expect: a Japanese knife instead of a gift. In two separate incidents that took place within weeks of each other in the same U.S. state, a large yellow knife was found inside the children's meal package of the leading fast-food chain. Is this a coincidence?
Dawn Parrett, a mother of two girls from Warren, north of Detroit, said her husband took the girls to a local McDonald's last weekend. To her horror, after receiving the invitation, the seven-year-old suddenly pulled a Japanese knife out of her children's lunch box. "Sometimes you hear about things like this, but I never thought they really happened," Parrett wrote in a Facebook post, where she also shared photos of the knife (incidentally, a pen also snuggled into the box). "I've never experienced this amount of anger and worry," the mother clarified.
A horrified Parrett quickly contacted the branch management to express her displeasure. There she was told that it was a malfunction and explained that the children's dinner box served to the family was actually a storage box in which the employees keep various objects. "McDonald's, I demand an answer: why and how a Japanese knife finds its way to the bottom of my daughter's children's lunch box," Parrett added on Facebook. "To say that it was a mistake and that it was a storage box that someone probably took by mistake is not the answer I want," the mother fumed.
Mistakes can happen, but what makes Parrett's case unusual is another incident that occurred online just weeks earlier. In late May, Kayla Almashi, a mother from nearby Brighton, experienced a similar incident with an identical yellow knife.
"My daughter asked me to open the toy for her — and it was actually a Japanese knife," the mother told local television station WXYZ. "I just want to ask other parents to check the children's lunch boxes, because my daughter thought the knife was the surprise," Almashi added, claiming that the branch staff initially offered to compensate her with a complimentary dessert.
However, after learning of Parrett's incident, the network decided to take things a little more seriously and promised to investigate the dangerous phenomenon in depth. "The safety of customers and employees is always our top priority, and we take these allegations seriously," McDonald's told WXYZ. "We are in contact with the customers involved and continue to investigate."
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