Ukraine war: Burger King still open in Russia despite pledge to exit

Are you also telling us how much they own of those Burger King franchises in Russia they are supposed to shut down?
- They are getting paid 100% of the franchise fees of their Russian businesses.
- You don’t own franchise partners by definition. They are individually owned restaurants that pay you a fee to use your brand (name, menu, marketing, etc.).
  „Shutting down“ here means: Don’t renew these franchise contracts. The restaurants will continue to exist, but they will have to rebrand and be less lucrative.
War profiteer is an interesting way to look at it. If a company doesn't cut ties with warmonger countries, they are war profiteers ?
They should also get away from US, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and most of the "developed" countries that are historically exploiting poor countries ?
They sell fucking burguers, if they manage to not put too much garbage in the food to save money, they are doing enough.
Especially with firehouse subs having such a purpose washed image/mission, you think they'd be smarter.

I thought burger king staying was the punishment

Capital Scum doing capitalist scum shit.

There has been a lot of debate on this. Is it cruel and unusaul punishments. Have the russiand done things so bad to deserve burger king. only time will tell.

Every hexbear comment reads like AI trained only on the Tumblr accounts of 14 year old boys with Stalin body pillows.

Absolutely brilliant description.
Say anything remotely negative about Dictatorship 1 and Dictatorship 2, and they come scrambling out of the woodwork with a long rant full of lies, stupidity, and revisionism and a couple of those cringe ass, unnecessarily large emojis to go with it. Honestly sick of them. Individual instance filtering can’t come fast enough.
- Yuuuuup.
Have some lemme.ee gold friend
- Fucking savage 😂
I just clicked the rainbow pentagram to see that version of this comment thread. Wow. So glad we defederated from those assholes.
- What's the deal with the rainbow pentagram next to the username?
  Clicking it seemed to just take me to another lemmy instance?

Don't like it, don't go there. Tell them why.

Personally I'm boycotting them. Not because of any moral justification, but because they sell overpriced disappointing mulch.

Literally worst fast food joint and the only people I've met who claim otherwise have objectively bad taste.
Like no joke, objectively, "I love a butter and cheese sandwich on wonderbread", British, wouldn't know flavor if it ripped their tongue out.
- I have to make my own burgers now. Most places serve fast food swill, and the only nice place has switched to brioche buns.
  Brioche buns are not load bearing buns! They fall apart at the slightest contact with moisture. I will die on this hill forever.
- You rank BK as worse than McDonald's? I only ask cause I've worked at both, and I would put McDonald's just the tiniest bit lower than BK. Wendy's is barely better than both BK and McDonald's.
- I sent my sister a bottle of fry sauce that she's been trying to find for years (she never thought to check Amazon lol), this is what she sends me back. Told her she was supposed to use it to enhance good food, not make terrible food tolerable.
- And yet they invented the sticky toffee pudding. Two extremes

I simply don't get this mentality. I'm sure you do realize, that companies such as Microsoft still operate in Russia. You think all people over there are running Linux? Aside from how unbelievably stupid your take is, guess they are traitors too. But you'll still keep using their OS and Office suite for millenia to come.
- MS stopped selling licenses last year and blocked the ones operating this year (non renewal). But I get your point, only not all the big companies stayed
Extend that to all companies and capitalism is over party.
- Good.

Slow news day I assume?

No news means good news. Maybe that's just me being pessimistic tho.

That's one way to defeat Russia. Have them eat garbage food.

Can Burger King pull out of the US first? Absolutely the worst fast food chain ever. The only reason anybody goes to BK is if McDonald's is on fire.

Personally I prefer Burger King over McDonald's. Haven't been since the first BK opened in my city.
- Why is that vs McDonald's?
At least for vegetarian options they are way ahead of McDonalds
Can't speak for the rest of the menu though
- McD has zero vegetarian options, besides some very sad salad.
- Yeah, in Finland at least the vegan Whopper is waaaaaaaay better than what McD or other similar franchises offer.

AFAIK, the situation with Burger King, is that unlike McDonalds, BK doesn't have much leverage over Russian franchisee's. They can try and say "close the stores, we're leaving", but the actual store owners would just say "no" and re-brand them back to "Rostik's". They don't really have any assets in Russia so there's nothing really to sell either, but they do still receive the franchise fees. So pulling out would only benefit Russia

Rostik's is actually what KFC was, and the funny thing about it is KFC has the similar franchise structure in Russia, they officially left, told all franchisees to change names back to Rostik's, but the biggest one just said "no" even to that, as KFC's contract that includes the rights to use the name expires only in 2035.

So you say I should ignore all the injustice in the world just because I cannot care about all of them?
That's just stupid
You know you can care about multiple things at once, right?
Ah, classic case of whataboutism. Go troll somewhere else.
Classic Russian whataboutism

They're making too much money. Corporations are not beholden to nations, silly Americans.

They're very mediocre in Canada. But that said, they're cheap as hell compared to their counterparts. And I'd argue, in many urban centers they definitely are feeding the homeless, just charging for it lol.
You can get two cheeseburgers, fries and a drink for $6. You can get a pack of nuggies for $3. You aren't getting that sort of bang for buck at any other commercial fast food place around here. Something like that would easily cost close to $10 if not more at mcdonalds.
I always tell my wife if I was homeless, she'd find me begging for change at the intersection closest to a burger king.
How does this make sense? They lose money from giving away free burgers and lose money from leavig Russia. Why would they do this? This is like when George Michael throws a banana away for every dollar he steals from the cash register

My condolences to the Russians.

Спасибо за поддержку. Мы стараемся держаться и попытаемся пережить это неописуемое горе.

BK in Russia? Smh I thought biological warfare was illegal.

Was going to say that.

If BK food in the US is any indication of the quality in Russia, let them stay open. Worst of the worst as far as fast food goes. It's economic warfare with none of the war crimes! /s

On all the shorts etc showing sanction life in Russia, not one has mentioned burger King is still there.

Every time someone complains about hexbear they make their emojis 1 pixel bigger

Their burgers are trash compared to what they used to be - so fine - feed the Russians trash. About not keeping their word to leave Russia... does anyone here believe anything corporate has to say?

This is the best summary I could come up with:

David Shear, RBI's president, said in March 2022 that Burger King's main operator in Russia had "refused" to shut the outlets following the first attacks on Ukraine.

Steven Tian, part of a team of researchers at Yale University who track what companies have done in response to the Ukraine war, argued using franchise agreements as an "excuse" was a "convenient smokescreen".

Mark Dixon, founder of the Moral Rating Agency, which campaigns against firms doing business in Russia, called for RBI to disclose what specific actions it had taken in its attempts to leave.

David Bond, partner at law firm Fieldfisher, said RBI's 15% stake meant it could not simply "dictate terms" to its fellow shareholders to require them to close Burger King branches.

He also suggested companies that franchise out their brands would be reluctant to simply walk away from deals as it could lead to "dire consequences", including being sued for breach of contract, as well as reputational damage.

But he said consequences aside, there was nothing stopping RBI from terminating the franchise arrangement if it was adamant it wanted to do so, though added it might not result in the Burger King brand ceasing to exist in Russia.

The original article contains 671 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 70%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

I know the answer to my question, don't bother. But let's all try to come back to the really basic common sense. Burger king topic in a war news channel? For real?

Yo those chips look fresh

let them eat that poison idgaf

Ukraine: Have it Russia's way.

Burger King ad, remove. Fast food are a health hazard stop promoting this shit

and even the taste remained the same - shit with sauce

borgin queen is ruzzian orc cpc shill putler bot