Drabble by Kevin Fagan for March 16, 2016

Just eat yer fries.

The worst part is learning that particular restaurant doesn’t serve seasoned curly fries!

Shouldn’t he still be outside eating the lawn?

I’ve been reading “Drabble” ever since the Rocky Mountain News first carried it in 1979 and it seems that Norman has indeed morphed into a millennial these days, complete with eating “Happy Meals”.By the way, the reason why there is a “Happy Meal” in the first place was because onetime rival to McDonald’s, Burger Chef, offered a kid’s meal at their outlets and that more families with small children were going over to Burger Chef than McDonald’s in markets that had both.So McDonald’s looked for an alternative to the Kid’s Meal that Burger Chef was offering and found it in a McDonald’s Franchisee in Guatemala City, Guatemala, who was packaging the prototype for a “Happy Meal” in their “restaurants” to make it easier for families to order meals at their venues.And once McDonald’s started offering “Happy Meals” at both their corporate-owned venues and their franchise-owned outlets in 1977, their market share against Burger Chef increased and eventually, Burger Chef found that it could no longer compete.Eventually, Burger King, then owned by Pillsbury, also got on the kid’s meal bandwagon to stay competitive against McDonald’s and introduced their own kid’s meal and eventually the Burger King Kid’s Club in the 1990s to further promote the brand and the product.So that’s why there are “Happy Meals” these days at fast-food joints and what may have started out as a way to simplify the menu at one fast-food chain turned into a marketing gimmick for most fast-food chains these days.As for Norman, I think he might wind up in a Liberty Mutual commercial for auto insurance, like that millennial girl that names her car “Brad” and totals it, complete with that whiney voice and that those commercials are back, again.

Isn’t “Happy Meal” a trademarked term?