Icelanders Make Run on McDonald's as Firm Leaves

Panic set in in Iceland this weekend. It was a run, but not a run on a bank. It was a run on McDonald's.

McDonald's is leaving Iceland, as they announced earlier. It's simply too expensive for the company to keep restaurants open in Iceland, where McDonald's has to import everything for its Icelandic restaurants. That includes packaging, meat, vegetables, cheese.

The island's economic collapse has made such imports prohibitively expensive, and as such, all three of the island's restaurant were set to close. Given that, Icelanders flooded the three branches of the fast-food restaurant in Reykjavik several hours before the outlets shut for the last time.

One can only hope the Icelanders weren't stocking up and saving the food to be eaten later.

The firm Lyst operates the Icelandic branches. At one point, there was even a shortage of the company's trademark Big Mac. The closure of the McDonald's restaurants in Iceland will make it one of the few Western nations without a the ubiquitous fast-food restaurant.

Lyst plans to remake the three outlets into restaurants with local food. They don't expect McDonald's to ever enter the nation again, however.