McDonald’s Has Found a Way to Calm Late Night Drunks Looking for Burger-and-Fries Fire
You’ve been out with your friends for a night of music and clubbing and much alcohol has been consumed. What better way to inoculate against the inevitable hangover by pre-greasing up the digestive tract with a burger and fries before heading home to pass out. To McDonald’s!
Obviously, these sorts of customers might be a little, er, difficult, what with their propensity towards rowdiness and vomiting. This is why some McDonald’s outlets in Australia have started playing classical music in their restaurants after midnight. This seems to calm down the drunken Aussie punters to manageable levels.
Meanwhile, a Glasgow Mickey Dee’s which endured 200 police calls over 14 months to deal with drunks is also trying the classical music experiment. So far so good, apparently. And there’s some serious science behind this. From Inverse:
Despite how hammered late-night revelers might feel about classical music, many studies have shown that music like Mozart’s actually soothes the brain. A 2015 study published in PeerJ found that people who listened to a 20-minute-long Mozart violin concert actually felt its effects in their genes. Brain scans revealed that listening to this music not only triggered the secretion of dopamine but also activated the genes connected to synaptic neurotransmission activity, which affects learning and memory. These feel-good results were particularly pronounced among study participants who had previous experience listening to classical music.
