Hoax Alert: McDonald's WON'T Close 17,000 Restaurants Due To $15 Wage Increase

Fact Check

  • by: Maarten Schenk

Fake news website Now8News claims the fast food giant will close 17,000 restaurants in the U.S. because the minimum wage increase from $8.75 per hour to $15 an hour is costing them too much and they can't make a profit anymore.

Obviously this is a totally false story: in order to close 17,000 restaurants in the U.S. they would first need to open over 2,000 new ones: according to the financial information on McDonald's website there were only 14,350 McDonald's restaurants in the U.S. in 2014. Even if they opened up a few hundred more this year that would still leave them well short of the 17,000 the article claims they will shut down starting November 1st 2015.

It also seems unlikely that a $15 minimum wage would cause the chain to close restaurants in 2015, especially since this rate will only apply in 2018 and then only in San Francisco, with Seattle and Los Angeles to follow years later (source: Wikipedia).

If you ask us, the 'journalists' at Now8News would be better off flipping burgers. And yes, we would like fries with that.

Lead Stories' Trendolizerâ„¢ constantly scours social networks worldwide for trending fast food news. Scroll down to see the latest.


  Maarten Schenk

Lead Stories co-founder Maarten Schenk is our resident expert on fake news and hoax websites. He likes to go beyond just debunking trending fake news stories and is endlessly fascinated by the dazzling variety of psychological and technical tricks used by the people and networks who intentionally spread made-up things on the internet.  He can often be found at conferences and events about fake news, disinformation and fact checking when he is not in his office in Belgium monitoring and tracking the latest fake article to go viral.

Read more about or contact Maarten Schenk

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