A few good friends of mine travel most of the year for work, and while the lifestyle appears glamorous to untraveled pedestrians like myself, they generally despise it for the longs hours logged away from home. Unless they’re going to Japan, because Japan is f*cking amazing. Everything is shiny, the food is weird, and nobody ever seems to sleep.
However, Japan’s good times may soon be coming to an end, because the country’s massive stores of frozen french fries is running dangerously low. According to Reuters:
The fast-food chain said it was importing more than 1,000 tonnes of frozen fries by air, which began arriving last Monday and had begun routing another 1,600 tonnes through ports on the U.S. East Coast which should begin arriving in late January.
Those steps alone, however, are not sufficient to prevent a shortage.
“Unfortunately without this sales restriction step, we would run the danger of running out of fries at some of our stores around the end of the year or beginning of the new year,” said McDonald’s Japan spokeswoman Kokoro Toyama.
So what gives? Turns out an ongoing labor dispute on the U.S. West Coast is to blame. Since October, talks between dockworkers from 29 different ports and the Pacific Maritime Association have dragged on without any discernible end in sight. Meanwhile Japan, which is the “biggest Asian market for U.S.-made frozen potato products,” just wants its goddamn french fries.
Then again, both the Japanese consumers and the McDonald’s franchises could afford to better ration their consumption and production of potato-based products. Seriously, these people eat a literal sh*t-ton of fries. At least, that’s how I’d describe the serving size if I ever actually ate one of these without exploding:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PcSgmLMUEQ