This seems to have been the biggest news out of Iceland yesterday thanks to a Bloomberg story which reported:

Iceland’s McDonald’s Corp. restaurants will be closed at the end of the month after the collapse of the krona eroded profits at the fast-food chain, McDonald’s franchise holder Lyst ehf said.

McDonald’s in Iceland, which imports most of the ingredients it uses in its meals, will shut after costs doubled over the past year, Lyst said in an e-mailed statement today. The franchise holder said it doesn’t expect the situation to change in the short term.

“We would have to raise our prices by 20 percent to get the margin needed on our products,” Magnus Ogmundsson, Lyst chief executive officer, said in a phone interview. “That would have sent a Big Mac to 780 kronur” ($6.36), compared with the 650 kronur it costs today, he said.

The story also got over 700 upvotes on Reddit, taking it to the front page with 600 plus comments.

As one commentator pointed out:

If I wanted to put this bluntly, I would say: Who gives a frag? There is no news value to this really.

The BBC’s World Service, however, would beg to differ. Iceland’s top bloggers received a call from them and had this to say on Twitter after:

“Just interviewed by BBC World Service. They wanted to know if we were terribly distraught about McDonald’s leaving… I said we were weeping uncontrollably into our McShakes, choking on our McFries… we thought we’d at last held civilization in our hands, and to have it so cruelly snatched away **SOB**

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