He appears to be satirizing a PRACTICE, primarily, rather than any particular restaurant. Although it seems obvious what chain restaurant is the immediate inspiration for the setting. You don’t have to have any real familiarity with either McDonalds or Friendly’s to get the point of the strip. Now, it may be that you don’t find the joke to be terribly amusing (I mean come on, it’s a penis joke), or the point to be that insightful, but those are wholly independent criticisms – and if you mean those, say those.

While I appreciate you granting me that “information is good,” I agree that people should know better when it comes to double cheeseburgers, although I still don’t understand what is so onerous about it being printed on the menus. One of Radley’s objections was cost – would you feel better if the government paid for the testing?

Meanwhile, information isn’t just good, it is the underpinning of a marketplace. The more information made available, the better the marketplace functions. So if a person goes into Friendlys or Fridays or Chilis and makes a decision based upon the calorie information, what is so wrong with that?

Sometimes, it seems like “free” marketers merely want freedom for the sellers, the consumers be damned.

That is perhaps the lamest criticism ever. Additionally, it would seem that given the visual motif and name, Friendly’s is the immediate inspiration for the setting.

I think you do, Sam, but you don’t have to support it in the form of onerous, unhelpful, unfairly applied and actual market affecting government regulations.

I think a free market purist would say that the consumer will determine how much infomration he needs by how he spends his money. Seems to me people are pretty satisfied with the amount of information they get from McDonald’s and Wendy’s as it stands.

For a good critique of this very claim, see the link in the original post titled, “…that Balko guy”.