McDonald’s USA will be giving away the limited edition, and probably-more-revolutionary-than-actually-needed Suction Tube for Reverse Axial Withdrawal (the STRAW) at participating restaurants nationwide.*Customers who purchase a Chocolate Shamrock Shake at participating restaurants will receive one of these exclusive straws on a first come, first served basis, while supplies last. Only a few straws will be available at each participating restaurant. Those who aren’t near a restaurant where the straws are being given away should follow McDonald’s Facebook page , as well as their local McDonald’s Twitter handle for a possibility to win one of these coveted straws.*Participating restaurants: 
 
 February 24, 2017 
 
 
 
 1208 6th Avenue, SE, Decatur, AL at 10:45 a.m.8660 Sierra College Boulevard, Roseville, CA at 6:00 p.m.410 Grand Ave, Arroyo Grande, CA at 12:00 p.m.101 South Westover, Albany, GA at 11:00 a.m.1105 Northside Drive, Atlanta, GA at 3:00 p.m.1375 Broadway Ave. Boise, ID at 11:00 a.m.2322 7th Street West, St. Paul, MN at 11:30 a.m.326 S. Washington Ave. Bergenfield, NJ at 12:00 p.m.160 Broadway (Wall Street) New York, NY at 12:00 p.m.1510 Deer Park Ave. North Babylon, NY at 12:00 p.m.1533 Johnnie Dodds Blvd., Mount Pleasant, SC at 11:00 a.m.4608 Hwy. 58, Chattanooga, TN at 9:05 a.m.1302 Westheimer, Houston, TX at 11:00 a.m.4717 US Highway 83, Laredo, TX at 4:00p.m.1610 South Padre Island Drive, Corpus Christi, TX at 4:00p.m.4590 Southmost Road, Brownsville, TX at 4:00p.m.3550 N. Digital Drive, Lehi, UT at 10:45 a.m. 
 
 March 1, 2017 
 
 
 
 80 Old Valley School Rd, Danville, PA at 5:00 a.m. ||||| For decades, customers have complained that McDonald’s straws were pretty much useless when used to drink milkshakes. The flimsy, thin straw would buckle under the power of your own suction. With most milkshakes, the problem solves itself as the shake melted and became thinner. But McDonald’s gum-based processed shakes didn’t really melt. They just sort of...got warmer. 
 
 But now, with the announcement of several new Shamrock Shakes, the fast food giant has swung the pendulum far in the other direction, with a straw that’s overengineered – seriously, two engineering firms worked on it – to look more like mountain climbing equipment than it does any straw we’ve ever seen. Here’s the result of design, a determined product development team, and a 3D printer: 
 
 A ridiculous item like this requires an equally bombastic name, which McDonald’s has, of course, bestowed upon the item. It’s the STRAW. Naturally, it’s got an acronym as contrived as the device itself: Suction Tube for Reverse Axial Withdrawal. 
 
 The straw was designed so that the new shakes which consist of two tiers of flavors, can be enjoyed near-simultaneously. Note the holes in the upturned end: 
 
 See how those two holes would (ostensibly) allow for the inflow of not one but two flavors in shakes such as these: 
 
 Of course, the problem with an upturned straw is that you can only drink the beverage until it falls lower than the straw’s lowest opening. However, this device addresses that issue with a THIRD hole at the bottom of the U-shaped bend. That’s the attention to detail you get when you engage two engineering firms to design this thing. 
 
 A scant 2,000 of these straws will be available during Shamrock season (ie, “March”) so if this device should appear on your wishlist, you can visit one of the participating stores and score one with the purchase of a Chocolate Shamrock Shake. 
 
 Or you could hang tight and buy someone’s used straw on eBay. 
 
 Gross. ||||| It arrives in a glossy black box, its sensual shape traced in shadow. My fingers grasp at the perfectly positioned pull-tab and slide the box open. There it sits, the product of the creative minds that helped birth Google’s Project Ara modular smartphone and projects for NASA and DARPA. 
 
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 It is a straw. Apologies–it is the STRAW, or Suction Tube for Reverse Axial Withdrawal, designed to mix the black-and-tan-esque strata of McDonald’s new dual-layer Chocolate Shamrock Shake in perfect proportion. [Photo: courtesy the author] “My first reaction was, that doesn’t seem too hard. We could have a double straw–one longer, one shorter. No problem,” says Seth Newburg, principal engineer and managing partner at NK Labs, which teamed up with JACE Design on the STRAW (the two companies also worked on Project Ara together). “Then we immediately thought, once you get halfway down, one straw is going to start sucking air . . . It’s one of those things that seems so simple, but as we got into it there were a lot more issues exposed. It turned out to present quite a few engineering and scientific challenges.” The STRAW looks something like a saxophone, or a fish hook, with fluted holes. It’s the product of comedic over-engineering, involving white boards, physical prototypes, CAD models, and even fluid dynamics simulations. “A lot of designs we came up with would work well when the shake was full, or might work when the shake was empty, but in a lot of situations, we found if we didn’t get the diameters just right, we’d end up drawing in air, or the first few sips would be good, but you had to wait a minute for the straw to be recharged,” Newburg says. Video: 74 Years Of McDonald’s Marketing In Two Minutes The breakthrough happened in a white boarding session. “One of our team members said, ‘How about we change this? Instead of drinking the bottom up, we drink from the top down.’ They drew a J-shaped straw.” The end of the J would suck in shake, as would two large holes on its tip, allowing you to get the mix you want. But as the shake dipped below the J holes, those openings wouldn’t start sucking in air as a straight straw with holes would. Instead, you could continue sucking because of a vital third hole, on the bottom of the straw. As long as there’s shake coming through the bottom, you close off the pressure system to the tip of the J. 
 
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 Over the course of 100 or so shakes bought from McDonald’s, they worked out the finer details. During the prototyping phase the team built many frankenstraws, cutting together their ideas like craft projects and sucking in cups of layered oil and water to test their flow and mixture levels. By spitting out each sip into a side container, they could actually measure how close they were to a 50/50 ratio–a surprisingly low-tech way to check their theories. Meanwhile, they modeled the actual milkshake flow in software, fine-tuning designs with the help of 3D printing. Then, over the course of 100 or so shakes, bought in bulk from McDonald’s and stored in the lab fridge, the team worked out the finer details of the straw–like how large the holes should be, and what straw diameter worked best as the shake went from thick to more melty. //The team from NK Labs and JACE, with backgrounds in electrical and aerospace engineering, test axial flow of the STRAW, which stands for Suction Tube for Reverse Axial Withdrawal. But did they actually succeed? “At some points when you’re drinking it, you can get an exact 50-50 mix of the flavors. But with the different conditions: Full cup, nearly empty cup, depending how much it melted, you could get some slight variations. But we made sure that you’re still getting both flavors all the way through.”’ It’s a very self-aware Christopher Guest documentary in product form. On a particularly warm winter day, McDonald’s PR dropped off a trio of Chocolate Shamrock Shakes for me to test–complete with the final working STRAW. The STRAW itself is rigid plastic, almost like a metal straw, and it has less girth than your average milkshake tube. But it works. My first sip was something like a frango mint coated in ash from a menthol cigarette (I’m not a mint guy). As I dropped below the radioactive sprinkles, the flavor mellowed out and I quickly found the shake half gone. However, as I reached the bottom inch or so of shake, I found the sips intermittent, the blasts of air breaking into the stream of dairy fat. I found myself wondering why I couldn’t get that last sip, why the bottom hole that was in place for just this scenario wasn’t coming through for the milkshake portal that is my mouth. Was the STRAW flawed? Was there an error in the physics? Or was there just too much whipped cream in the bottom of the cup for even the most advanced straw on the planet to manage . . . 
 
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 The chain’s new STRAW, which stands for Suction Tube for Reversal Axial Withdrawal, was created by JACE and NK Labs and is meant to suck the ideal flavor ratio of 50 percent chocolate and 50 percent mint in each sip of the seasonal milkshake. Regular dumb straws are only capable of sipping from the very bottom, and the Chocolate Shamrock shake is inconveniently layered, with the chocolate flavor on the bottom and the mint on the top. 
 
 “It was a puzzling assignment but one with an ambitious goal,” Seth Newburg, principal engineer and managing partner at NK labs, said in a press release. 
 
 The project is definitely puzzling and very complex for it being pretty much just a gimmick. McDonald’s description of the product is actually very accurate: The straw is “probably more revolutionary than actually needed.” 
 
 To show off its work with the STRAW, McDonald’s presented it in a parody commercial that seems to mimic Apple’s 2012 Jony Ive commercial. The original ad features the English designer against a white backdrop passionately talking about the iPhone’s characteristics in great detail. 
 
 McDonald’s commercial does just the same. It even pokes fun at the British accent by hiring an American actor to speak with an accent. When he first comes on screen, he’s introduced as “Person with British Accent.” 
 
 If you’re one of the few who would line up to get a STRAW, do it soon. McDonald’s only produced 2,000 suction devices, which it’ll make available in 12 states on February 24. However, only certain locations in those states have been chosen to distribute straws and people will have to show up at specific times if they want one. 
 
 McDonald’s is not the first fast food restaurant to try and appeal to younger demographics with techie gimmicks. KFC has constantly tried pushing limited edition products, too. The fried chicken restaurant has produced smart keyboard trays, edible nail polish and a chicken bucket that doubles as a Bluetooth photo printer.
– A new McDonald's marketing stunt has managed to catch the attention of tech and food blogs because of its weird premise: the redesign of the humble straw. The chain hired two respected engineering firms—people behind Google, NASA, and DARPA projects—to build a straw that allows for the perfectly-proportioned sucking of its dual-layer Chocolate Shamrock Shake, reports Engadget. For the uninitiated, the seasonal shake is essentially a mint shake on top of a chocolate shake—so how to get both flavors at once? The robotic and aerospace engineers concocted a rigid, muti-holed, J-shaped gizmo that looks "more like mountain-climbing equipment than any straw we've ever seen," notes a post at GoodFood. (It adds that complaints about McDonald's straws in regard to shakes are real and have been around for a while.) The weird part? "It works," writes a blogger at Fast Company, though he found that he couldn't get to the very bottom of the shake with the efficiency of an old-fashioned straw. Yes, it's "comedic over-engineering," as he puts it, and McDonald's is playing along with the grandiose acronym of STRAW, which stands for Suction Tube for Reverse Axial Withdrawal. As Vocativ notes, the company's video pushing the product seems to be a jokey parody of an Apple rollout. McDonald's has released a limited-edition run of 2,000 STRAWs at 80 locations nationwide. If it's a hit, the chain might bring it back later for a wider audience. (The condom, too, has recently undergone a major redesign.)