Earlier this month, McDonald’s released a new promotional product that it alluringly referred to as an “adult Happy Meal” in collaboration with the trippy-dippy, celeb-fave streetwear brand Cactus Plant Flea Market. Each meal comes with your choice of a Big Mac or 10-piece McNuggets, medium fries, a medium drink, and one of four hallucinatory figurines, in the likeness of classic McD’s characters Grimace, the Hamburglar, and Birdie, or Cactus Plant’s own smiley-faced Cactus Buddy avatar, wrapped in an opaque bag.
Priced in most markets at $10.79 (and in other places, including New York City, $12.95), the whole deal costs about $2.40 more than the same meal would without the toy.
Though the promotion was originally slated to run through October 30, the Cactus Plant Flea Market Box sold out at most McDonald’s locations across the country in a matter of weeks, the company confirmed in an email to GQ,. The dearth led scarcity-motivated streetwear heads to seek out the collectible figurines online, where—naturally—resellers are now listing them for many, many times retail price. One eBay seller asking $25,000 for a single unopened Happy Meal toy has also requested, as CNBC pointed out, that the winning bidder pay an additional $6.10 in shipping fees.
The company did not confirm if there are any current plans to release more CPFM toys.
McDonald’s is no rookie to hype-laden launches, from the chaos around the chain’s 2017 Szechuan sauce revival fanned by fans of the TV series Rick and Morty, to the predictably clamorous releases of its collaborations with rapper Travis Scott and megaband BTS. The label Cactus Plant Flea Market, founded a few years back by the elusive designer Cynthia Lu with a boost from her former boss, Pharrell, is a bit more insider-y, relatively speaking. (You may recognize its four-eyed smiley logo from the popular merch the brand created to accompany Kid Cudi’s 2018 album Kids See Ghosts.) But CPFM also has precisely the kind of fans who would covet, and potentially shell out big bucks for, a piece of memorabilia.
Lu still styles Pharrell, who wore a CPFM x McDonald’s hoodie to an event in Miami on Thursday evening. “When I wear Cactus Plant, I feel like I have on antigravity,” the musician told GQ in 2020. “I don’t feel like I am living within the matrix of the social norm.” Seeing a McDonald’s Happy Meal toy listed on eBay for $300,000 may have a similar effect.