More on the board book mystery

  • Scan provided by Joanne's husband, ummm, Mr. Joanne

    The helpful Joanne has sent along scans of The World Famous Snoopy, and yes indeed, the back cover does still carry the old copyright information. The book does, however, have a 2011 copyright date, so it cannot be too old; this isn’t some volume left over from that month last year when they used the Peanuts characters for all of the Kids Meals premiums (premia?). It would have to be either from January or February, and since Joanne got her in the store a “couple weeks back”, I reckon that would be the end of the February run.

  • I found the page where Wendy’s lists all of this month’s kid’s meals toys, and while it lists all the Pac-Man toys for the month, it specifically and solely lists Favorite Things as the kids-under-3 item. So I don’t think this is a matter of a-different-book-each-week.
  • The use of a Peanuts item when all the over-3 items are Pac-Man seems a little odd, certainly not what I’m used to seeing fast food joints do. Not that I’m complaining, mind you – any excuse for a Peanuts book is fine for me. But it leaves me befuddled about whether I should expect a Peanuts book there next month. It seems an odd thing to do two months  in a row unless one is expecting to do it further months. (The thought that the Peanuts book is prepared-in-advance item kept on hand for when there’s some problem with the expected under-3 item late in its production cycle is tempting, but hard to balance with that 2011 date.)
  • On a note unrelated to Peanuts: the visit to Wendy’s brought something interesting to my attention. You can get various items at Wendy’s in different sizes – small, medium, large or “biggie”, but one doesn’t know exactly what size each of these are. It’s natural to assume that the larger you get, the less you’re paying per ounce or fry or whatever. However, Wendy’s in California (and possibly beyond, I haven’t checked) are now putting calorie counts on their menu. This allowed me to observe that a 99 cent Frosty has 310 calories, a $2.19 Frosty has 410 calories, and a $2.69 Frosty has 520 calories. Now, the Frosties all come from the same machine, it’s not some matter where a larger Frosty had a different number of calories per ounce. What this means is that if you want more Frosty, don’t get a bigger Frosty – get more smaller Frosties. Two 99 cent Frosties gives you almost 20% more than the $2.69 size, and costs 71 cents less.
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