‘If their target audience was a landfill, congrats!’: McDonald’s unveils its 2024 Halloween Boo Buckets and people want to throw them right in the trash

Halloween is just around the corner, and that can only mean one thing for one of the most decidedly American holidays in the entire history of forever; another mashup of rustic nostalgia and holiday-specific merchandizing.

Indeed, per Today, McDonald’s has unveiled this year’s designs of the Happy Meal Boo Buckets, which are Happy Meal containers designed like trick-or-treat buckets. These spooky satchels first house the contents of a Happy Meal, after which customers can use the bucket to go trick-or-treating on Halloween, because McDonald’s still foolishly assumes that only children of trick-or-treating age are privy to Happy Meal indulgence.

But here’s the twist: despite the decorative stickers that come with this year’s monster-themed Boo Buckets, no one seems to like them very much at all. Indeed, especially without the lids that defined the Boo Buckets of yore, the internet is booing the modern Boo Bucket pretty severely.

Now, this is the part where I ruin the illusion of being an objective observer in this particular instance, and plead a bit of cultural ignorance. Is this an American thing? Is it normal to harbor a strong enough opinion on a promotional fast food novelty item that it makes its way onto your socials?

Social media, of course, plays a huge role in communicating to the world who you are (or, more accurately, who you want to be) as a person, and so I’m led to believe that lots of people want to be partly defined by their feelings on the shape and functionality of the Boo Bucket container that’s meant to hold a child’s fast food order and Halloween candy.

An OSHA violation I would understand (and I would, in fact, be morbidly impressed if the corporation could squeeze such a thing into such a simple item), but the mere fact of an unsealed bucket sporting an ugly graphic that’s nevertheless as functionally Halloween-coded as it is inconsequential? That’s where the attention is going?

Look, I’m Canadian; my home country is basically America if it was shorter and wore less foundation. I’m not here to point any fingers at how strange American culture is for seemingly hyper-fixating on the McDonald’s Halloween Boo Buckets, because in all likelihood, we Canadians probably have an equally ridiculous equivalent. All I’m saying is, we have the benefit of that non-committal “probably,” whereas we know for a fact that a sizeable amount of Americans have strong feelings about McDonald’s Halloween Boo Buckets, in all their lidless shame.

Anyway, you’d best believe that if I stumble upon a more Canadian pivot-point of nonsense, I am not going to bring it to light. America has always been the spotlight favorite between our two countries, and we are more than happy to keep it that way in this context.

The McDonalds’ Happy Meal Boo Buckets will launch on Oct. 15 and will be available while supplies last.