Maybe rewarding scalpers just for ordering a Happy Meal is part of the problem.

Earlier this month, McDonald’s Japan doubled up the items included in its Pokémon Happy Meals, giving away not just toys but also exclusive Pokémon Trading Card Game cards over a three-day period. This drew not only Pokémon fans young and old, but also scalpers to the fast food chain’s locations, with speculative resellers buying Happy Meals in bulk, picking out the cards, and leaving behind litter and wasted food not only inside McDonald’s restaurants but on nearby streets as well.

In response, McDonald’s put additional purchase restrictions in place and has also indefinitely postponed a planned One Piece Happy Meal that was supposed to go on sale next week. This still isn’t enough in some people’s eyes, though, and even the Japanese government has now said it’s displeased with how McDonald’s handled the promotion. During her regularly scheduled press conference on Thursday, Natsuko Horii, commissioner of the Consumer Affairs Agency, part of the Cabinet Office of Japan, said that she has contacted McDonald’s and instructed them to revise its sales methods in order to reduce food waste.

It’s not clear, though, whether the Consumer Affairs Agency offered any framework by which to achieve this goal, and in a free economy, preventing your customers from wasting food is something that’s easier said than done. So today, let’s take a look at some of the ways this problem could be addressed.

First, though, we should keep in mind that there’s no perfect solution, and improving one aspect of the situation might make others worse. Still, with no end to the scalping problem in sight, it’s worthwhile to think about how to get to the root causes of the waste, litter, and inconvenience to regular customers and genuine fans that are caused by Happy Meal item scalpers.

● Plan A: Unlimited supply

Getting to the fundamentals, scalpers turn higher profits by reselling items that are rare. Given equal levels of demand, the rarer item commands the higher per-unit price, and so McDonald’s could, theoretically, erode resellers’ profit margins by flooding the market with supply. Ordinarily, each Happy Meal promotion runs for about two or three weeks, but extending that to two or three months, or even more, would eliminate a lot of their scarcity. With enough supply from McDonald’s, there should even be a point where scalpers would have to resell their items for less than they originally paid for them, since no one is going to pay extra for a second-hand item when new ones are easily available.

There are a number of problems here, though. McDonald’s and its promotional partners have to pay costs associated with producing, warehousing, and shipping their Happy Meal items, so an endless supply would also mean limitless costs. We also have to remember why McDonald’s and its partners are producing Happy Meal toys to begin with: to make sales profits, bring customers into McDonald’s restaurants, and promote the partner franchise. Limited-time offers are an effective way to drum up interest, so stretching out a Happy Meal promotion so long that there’s a sense of “Eh, you can get these whenever you fee like it, no rush,” can dampen fan excitement, which could then mean lower customer demand. That’s before getting into the potential problems for specifically seasonal items too, like the summer festival-themed Pokémon Happy Meal toys or the beach-themed Hello Kitty ones, for which the interest window is inherently narrow.

● Plan B: Stricter sales limits

OK, then how about putting a tighter cap on how many Happy Meal items a scalper can amass? McDonald’s sort of did this during the back half of this month’s Pokémon promotion, when for a three-day period, when the chain put in a limit of three Happy Meal purchases per customer group.

The loophole here, though, is that there was nothing stopping a scalper from going into a McDonald’s, ordering three Happy Meals, walking a few blocks to another branch to buy three more, and then continuing to repeat that process all across town. Granted, this does slow things down, but with scalpers having a profit incentive, they’re not going to mind spending an afternoon lining up in one McDonald’s after another as long as they can get the items they want to flip later.

So for this countermeasure to really be effective, McDonald’s would need some way to track individual customers’ order histories in order to judge if they’re bulk-buying for resale purposes. That’d be pretty easy to do for mobile orders through the McDonald’s app, but for in-person orders, they’d need customers to show an ID or otherwise register who they are and what they’re buying. That’d be a time-consuming inconvenience, and also would mean that kids without any form of ID would be unable to purchase Happy Meals on their own. Strict limits could also leave families with many children (plus families where the parents are fans of the Happy Meal partner series too), or parents who are dining not just with their own kids but also their kids’ friends, unable to buy everyone their own Happy Meal. Then there’s the question of how often a customer’s limit resets. If it resets too quickly, then it’s not much of a deterrent to scalpers, but if resets too slowly, it freezes out genuine fans who simply wanted a second toy for their own collection, which runs opposite to the core idea of Happy Meal toys being randomly awarded from a set of possibilities.

● Plan C: Sell just the toy

This would be the most direct way to eliminate food waste. If scalpers are throwing away/abandoning the food that comes in their Happy Meals because they want just the toy, then sell them just the toy, right? However, while purchasing the Happy Meal toy without the Happy Meal itself can be done at McDonald’s restaurants in the U.S., it can’t currently be done at McDonald’s Japan.

It’s not clear why McDonald’s Japan doesn’t offer this option to customers. Maybe directly selling toys is more blatant an admission of the profit motive than its marketing team is comfortable with, and they prefer to able to position the toys as a little extra to make meals with friends and families more fun. It could also be that McDonald’s feels that selling just the toy lessons the ability of Happy Meals to promote the chain as a restaurant, particularly to parents or others who’re there with someone who wants the Happy Meal but are getting something else for themselves. And while selling the toy on its own would largely eliminate food waste, it wouldn’t do anything to discourage resellers, unless, again, it’s coupled with some sort of registration system with cutoffs to prevent bulk-buying.

● Plan D: Give the toy for something other than just ordering a Happy Meal

With all this in mind, let’s stop for a second and remember exactly why scalpers are more likely to waste/litter: they’re not interested in the meal, just the toy. Unfortunately, appealing to scalpers to eat their meal, or at the very least properly dispose of it at their own home or in an appropriate wastebasket, are things McDonald’s is asking scalpers to do after the scalpers have already gotten what they want.

So if that’s the case, maybe McDonald’s needs to stop giving customers their Happy Meal toys at the same time they give them their Happy Meal food.

Ideally, McDonald’s wants to funnel Happy Meals away from wasteful scalpers, but still make them readily available to genuine, well-mannered fans who aren’t going to litter or waste the included food. In other words, a customer who eats their meal and isn’t trying to amass a 20 toys that same day isn’t a problem. So rather than, in essence, rewarding customers with a toy just for ordering a Happy Meal, maybe the solution is to reward them for eating it instead.

The challenge here is how to determine whether a customer actually ate their meal or not. As a fast food chain, McDonald’s doesn’t have table service, so there’s no server coming by the table to check if someone polished off their burger. The restaurant could, though, establish some sort of estimated minimum eating time, say 15 minutes from when the customer receives their order, and have them come back up to the counter after at least that much time has passed to receive their toy. For customers actually eating their food, the total time for them to eat their meal and receive their toy wouldn’t change much, but forcing scalpers spend more time waiting before they can obtain the toy would limit their ability to bulk-buy.

Another problem would be how to handle to-go orders, since they would require customers to make a second trip back to restaurant to pick up their toy, so again, this isn’t a perfect solution, and in truth, adequately addressing the scalping problem is probably going to require multiple policy changes on McDonald’s part, as well as greater discipline from deep-pocketed shoppers in not purchasing Happy Meal toys from resellers. Still, it’s pretty clear that the current system isn’t working too well.

Reference: McDonald’s, McDonald’s Japan, Nihon Keizai Shimbun via Hachima Kiko
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