The NFL season began on September 7th, when the McDonald’s Buffalo Bills Meal—now known as the CollectiBILLS Meal—arrived. Within days, fans were searching the Capital Region for bobbleheads like it was a fast-food Easter egg hunt. Word quickly spread. Some stores quickly ran out of inventory.
The setup is fairly simple: a collectible Buffalo Bills bobblehead is included with each of the four meal configurations. Alongside the figure, you can see a hash brown, a drink, and a sausage egg McMuffin for breakfast. Lunch and dinner take it a step further: a Big Mac, a 10-piece Chicken McNuggets, or a 10-piece Spicy Chicken McNuggets, each of which comes with a drink, fries, and a bobblehead.
The heavyweight of the group is the Bills Mafia Box, which costs between $15 and $17 and includes two cheeseburgers, a 20-piece Chicken McNuggets, and two medium fries. To be honest, there was enough food to feed a small tailgate.
The geography of this is what sets it apart from a typical fast-food promotion. This is not a national issue. It’s not even statewide in the traditional sense; New York City is completely left out, which makes some sort of sense. No Bills bobbleheads are given to Giants or Jets territory.
Because the meals are limited to upstate and western New York, they have a local, almost tribal energy that larger campaigns seldom manage. Albany residents are traveling by car to three separate locations. Some are using the McDonald’s app to place their orders just to make sure the store closest to them is taking part.
A minor detail that suggests someone in the marketing chain genuinely cared about the product is the return of the Buffalo Chill drink, a frozen layered mix of Fanta Blue Raspberry and Fanta Wild Cherry that matches the team’s blue and red. It’s the kind of thing that fans pick up on. It’s the type of thing that is captured on camera and shared online.
The bobbleheads aren’t being sold separately, as was to be expected. That scarcity is working hard. On eBay and other resale sites, figures are already showing up; some are listed for $35, while others are rising to $40. Within hours of the promotion’s launch, someone had the bobblehead in their possession and had it listed for sale online before the majority of people were even aware of it. That’s not surprising because every limited collectible goes through the same cycle, but it does imply that the demand is genuine rather than manufactured.
It’s difficult to ignore McDonald’s recent increased emphasis on team-specific promotions. The Bills collaboration in September, followed by the FIFA World Cup 26 meals in June. It’s really unclear if this will eventually spread to other NFL teams, like a Steelers box in Pittsburgh or a Chiefs meal in Kansas City.
However, the Bills Mafia has always had a particularly fervent fan base, and McDonald’s appears to recognize that a limited-edition collectible and an intense fandom work well together. For now, before the shelves close, it might be worthwhile to check out the app if you live in upstate New York.
