The $1 Meal: Marketing or Lifeline?

$1 meals, smart marketing and a snap lifeline. Carl's Jr. The hamburger chain is turning a government failure into a $1 solution. Southern California franchises are offering kids hamburger, small fries and a drink for $1 to anyone showing an EBT card, federal employee ID or a military ID at participating locations while supplies last. This comes as the shutdown stalls food aid for millions using snap. That's the supplemental nutritional aid program, what people think of as food stamps. A court move to keep November benefits flowing was contested by the Trump administration, prolonging uncertainty for families. Critics call this politics of cruelty, where the pain itself comes. The point. Carl's Jr. Leans into a different mess. Community. As franchise owner Amir Sadiqi put it, when the neighborhood is under stress, a warm, cheap meal matters. It's genuine relief and undeniably savvy brand positioning. That's reporting courtesy of the New York Times. What's the real Message here? Carl's Jr. A fast food hamburger joint, a junk food fast food organization now is taking the moral high ground when it comes to taking care of kids versus Washington D.C. when that happens, you know the whole world has gone topsy turvy. Let's dig a little deeper here. I give credit to the people at Carl's saying, okay, let's step in. A lot of our customers, a lot of people in our community are hurting. We want to help them. And so they're taking a little bit of a hit, presumably. I understand fast food, they buy in bulk. It's not that costly. But with employment charges, rent, overhead, marketing, advertising, they're not making money selling a meal for a dollar. Now, the Make America Healthy Again program, and a lot of nutritionists and a lot of doctors would say, oh my God, the last thing we need are our kids, especially poor kids, eating more French fries, drinking more sugary drinks and eating junk food. But everything's relative compared to no food. Yeah, a dollar Carl's hamburger, drink and fries has got to be pretty terrible tantalizing. Now, I give credit. This is bizarre because normally Carl's is in the receiving end of a lot of negative publicity. They have famously run really sleazy commercials with hot, sexy women dripping with what looks like butter and sort of classical sexist imagery. Here they are coming out looking like the good guys, the good folks, the kind hearted people in the community. I do want to stress the. This is not nationwide. This is not a solution to the fact that there are 40 some million Americans now who have no food stamps and none of their SNAP benefits, who are trying to figure and Most of these are kids. It's all well and good to think of the middle aged lady driving around in the Cadillac, swilling malt liquor, being lazy, but the reality is most hungry people in America are kids. They are the ones who benefit from these SNAP programs. And, and right now a lot of people in America are going hungry because of this government shutdown and because the administration has decided even though they could pay the benefits, they're not going to until the government's back open. We'll leave that debate for another time. What I am focused on is frankly how Carl's was smart here. They saw a big, big story. They also saw a huge problem facing not only society, but people in their own community, their own customers. And they found a solution. Because of that, they've gotten millions and millions of dollars of positive publicity. This is the new world of marketing and media and branding. Something like this goes a long way to really making people feel warm and cuddly about your brand. There are going to be people who are perhaps going to get their first and maybe only meal this week from Carl who are down and out on their luck right now. And through no fault of their own, their kids, their parents didn't have the money for them, the food stamps ran out. Some of these kids are going to grow up to be the next generation. It's in Los Angeles, it's Southern California. So some of these people are going to grow up to become famous movie stars, movie directors, perhaps Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs. Some of them are going to be very successful. And I'm willing to bet they're going to take their kids to Carl's. They may have their own private fancy chefs at some point when they're really successful, but they're going to have a warm spot in their own heart for Carl's because of something like this. So this is a huge branding opportunity for Carl. They took the advantage of it. And I think there are opportunities for other companies to do this as well, especially if it involves food. Now some of you may be saying, well, T.J. it's easy for you to be generous with other people's money. I get that. Grocery stores already work on extremely small margins. Most restaurants have extremely small margins. They can't all simply say, here's free food, we or here's food at 10% of what our costs are without going bankrupt. I understand. But if you are a company or any organization and can somehow help people during this extremely troubling time, it's going to go a long way to build your brand and to build positive goodwill and to frankly, get a lot of positive publicity for your organization. So I do think that for savvy media operators these days, we're past the age of going to cigar and martini lunches with John Dr. And coming up with that brilliant idea of sitting around singing Kumbaya to Coca Cola. We're at the point, and we are going to be talking about Coke in a later story today. We are at the point where you've got to look around at what's going on in the world. How can you actually be a heart of conversation? And Carl junior's this is one time when they're on the positive side of the conversation. They're not dominating the conversation about sexist ads. They're not a part of the conversation about the problems with junk food or childhood obesity. They're actually part of a solution, which is how do you deal with the fact that the United States, one of the richest countries in the entire world, if not the richest, depending on your metric, now has tens of millions of people, citizens, most of them kids, who are hungry. And while a hamburger and fries and a Coke are not my first choice, if I were hungry, it would be my number one, number two, and number three choice. So hats off to Carl for two things, one, PR move of the day and number two, for doing something that's helping in a current political environment where no one seems to really care at all about these poor people. Carl's maybe they're not doing it for purely altruistic reasons, but bottom line is they are helping people eat who need food. So kudos to.