McDonald’s recently ended another installment of their popular Monopoly game. For anyone who has been living under a rock for the last I-don’t-know-how-many years, the concept behind this game is that when you get certain items at McDonald’s (medium or larger fries or drink and certain sandwiches) you get a game piece that corresponds to a spot on a monopoly playing board. If you collect all the spots of a given color you win a prize.

In regards to this game, I would like to question my readers as to whether or not this promotion actually causes you to eat at McDonald’s more often. I know that for me, it does not. One of the reasons it doesn’t is because during this latest running of the promotion I never even received one game piece even though I ate at McDonald’s. The reason for this is that I practice a method of trimming back my fast food budget that results in my not ordering the items that the game piece comes on. Another reason it doesn’t do much to encourage me to eat there is because I generally choose my eating establishment based on what I want to eat rather than how I can benefit from eating at a particular place.

Does it have any effect on you? Do other gimmicks like this influence your decisions? Which ones work and which ones don’t?