Social media posts have been claiming that the fast food restaurant shuttered its branches in Iceland due to a public boycott linked to the Israel-Hamas war.
Posts have been going around on social media alleging that McDonald’s exodus has just left Iceland as a result of a concerted public campaign — but this isn’t true.
The posts include an AI-generated image showing a run-down McDonald’s building and a caption asking whether boycotts work.
Other posts link the supposed boycott to pages in support of Palestine, echoing recent calls to boycott McDonald’s around the world due to its perceived support of Israel.
However, the closure of McDonald’s in Iceland has nothing to do with any public boycott.
The fast-food chain left the country on 30 October 2009 following the Icelandic financial crisis in 2008, which caused Iceland’s currency, the króna, to plummet in value.
This meant that the imports needed for McDonald’s products became too expensive for the restaurants to keep making money. McDonald’s Iceland was particularly reliant on importing meat from Germany.
The BBC reported at the time that McDonald’s also blamed the “unique operational complexity” of doing business in an isolated nation with a population of just 300,000. Iceland’s first McDonald’s restaurant opened in 1993.
McDonald’s Icelandic franchisee Jon Gardar Ogmundsson said back then that the restaurants had “never been this busy before … but at the same time profits have never been lower”.
McDonald’s was eventually replaced by the local fast food chain Metro, which sells similar items and uses cheaper, locally supplied ingredients.
As of the time of this fact check, there are no longer any McDonald’s restaurants in Iceland, but you can still see the last cheeseburger and fries sold in the country on display at Snotra House — a hostel in the south.
It reportedly runs a live stream of the meal on its website, regularly reaching 400,000 views.
Reports from earlier this year say that even now, it still doesn’t have any mould.
McDonald’s has been a key target for boycotts since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October of last year.
It was criticised for giving away thousands of free meals to Israeli soldiers, prompting protests against the chain that have particularly affected sales in the Middle East, Indonesia and France.
As a result, it bought back its Israeli restaurants after sales suffered from the boycott: the company uses a franchise system that allows separate operators to receive licences to run the fast food giant’s outlets.
ADVERTISEMENTMcDonald’s previously said that the conflict in the Middle East had “meaningfully impacted” some of its financial results in the final quarter of 2023. It described the boycott as “disheartening and ill-founded”.
CEO Chris Kempczinski said that McDonald’s sales in the Middle East, as well as some outside the region, had been significantly impacted by “misinformation” about the company’s position on the Israel-Hamas war.
