If you’ve ever looked down into your paper sack of fast food and thought, “stingy AF” about your fries pod and took a quick scan of the room for the Hamburglar, you may be on to something.
In a recent askReddit thread called “What did your job want you to hide from customers?” a few anonymous McDonald’s employees revealed that they were taught by their managers to gyp patrons out of a full order of French fries.
“I worked at McDonald’s and they taught me how to pinch the fry carton just right while putting the fries into them so that it looked full, but actually wasn’t,” Reddit user ExperiMENTALbunny said. “I only had 1 customer call me out on it. He shook the fries out into his bag and poured them back into the fry carton himself and it only filled up half way, so I had to give him more fries. I was impressed and embarrassed. It’s been 7 years and I can still see his face.”
And another former employee of the fast food giant backed him up.
“I f—ing hated that practice and basically refused to do it,” wrote user Psychoopiates. “Never got fired, but managed to have a few customers ask me when my shifts were the next week so they could have me filling their fries.”
The disgruntled worker even broke down the economics behind the alleged McDonald’s fry operation.
“The fries were dirt cheap too!” the Redditor said. “Case held 6 bags, each bag made 8 or 12 baskets, and each basket made 4-5 large fries filled my way. They only cost $20 a case, so if they just filled them like I would they would net $288 with all conservative numbers ($8, 4, 1.5) and assuming they were all sold in meals. This is coming from management side because I was shipping manager so I had to know all this s–t.”
But McDonald’s is throwing these claims into the deep fryer, saying the allegations against the company are untrue.
“The notion of a secret trick is absolutely false,” McDonald’s spokesperson Terri Hickey told HuffPost. “There are strict procedures in place to ensure that fry boxes and bags are appropriately filled so our customers can enjoy our World Famous Fries to the fullest.”
