Current and past McDonalds employees are spilling their McSecrets online and I’m addicted.
The legends over at Buzzfeed have collated 28 of the best behind-the-counter secrets from their community and a thread on Reddit. It’s worth noting these are stories from alleged former McDonalds employees, not confirmed, please don’t sue me.
“Former employee here. I found out that when making five gallons of sweet tea, an entire four-pound bag of sugar goes into it. Sandwiches with a round egg use real, cracked eggs. Folded and scrambled eggs come from packaged goods in the freezer or fridge. I also once had a manager that insisted more people purchased the Filet-O-Fish when it was raining out because they subconsciously associated the watery weather with fish. Anyway, he did some research by looking through sales of Filet-O-Fish sandwiches for months and months and compared it to weather data for each day. He found something like a 3% increase on rainy days and was very pleased with himself.”
“At the drive-thru, the speaker box hears everything from when you pull up until after you drive off. If you talk crap about us, we hear it. If you are arguing with your other passengers or on the phone, we hear it.”
“Management encouraged us to reset timers on cooked food so that the food was never fresh. We were also discouraged from using the word ‘fresh’ to avoid lying to customers. If you ever order a McChicken or a Filet-O-Fish and it’s soggy or floppy, it’s old. Always order food fresh.”
“You should only eat McRibs right at the start of the promotion when the cooked ones are being sold fast enough. They just sit in the sauce pot for the better part of a day before they’re taken off the menu again. I don’t recommend ordering any chicken products at non-busy times except maybe nuggets. They don’t do a good enough job of rotating in fresh ones. If they ever bring back grilled chicken, I don’t recommend it ever. Again, they just don’t sell enough that the employees keep fresh ones.”
“Sauces for sandwiches have the wildest dispensers. Ketchup and mustard are in these really rudimentary plastic funnel things that have a paddle in the handle. When you squeeze it, gravity pushes just the right amount of sauce through holes. The Mac sauce, mayo, and tartar, though, are in caulk tubes that get loaded into caulk guns. You pull the trigger on the handle and a reeeeaally satisfying clanking delivers a powerfully saucy surprise for the awaiting buns.”
“One time, someone accidentally replaced the chocolate syrup in the shake machine with barbecue sauce because the bottles are similar. They’re labeled differently, buuut it still happened. We found out because a few people complained that their chocolate shakes were sour. We remade them for a couple people, and they moved on, but one lady just wouldn’t let it go. My manager tasted the shake and was like WTF, then looked, and we saw the culprit. We had to clean the line after that, so we didn’t have chocolate shakes for a while.”
“If you order fries with no salt, we hate you. We need to make them fresh, but that’s not the problem. The problem is they can’t touch the fry receptacle, and we have to pour SCORCHING HOT, BOILING OIL–COVERED FRIES directly into the fry box. I have burn scars. We all have burn scars. And don’t get me started on people that order a small. It’s PAPER. You’re killing us.”
“The pickles are surprisingly aerodynamic. They stick to walls and, if you have the stones, to managers’ shirts pretty well.”
“I worked at McDonald’s for two years during high school. The majority of the time, I would work at the drive-thru window. Most customers don’t know, but once we place an order, drinks are automatically poured by a machine by the window where customers pick up their food order, so if a customer goes up to the first window where they pay and tries to add more food or drinks to their order, it messes up the flow of the drive-thru because the worker at the pick-up window has to wait for the added drink to be poured by the machine.”
“If you dip your fries in a side of tartar sauce, they taste like dill pickle potato chips.”
