If you’ve been feeling shortchanged by your McDonald’s fry order, there might be a reason.
A couple of anonymous McDonald’s employees claimed they were taught to under-fill fries by their employer. Their confessions were in response to an askReddit thread prompting folks to answer, “What did your job want you to hide from customers?”
Reddit user ExperiMENTALbunny responded with:
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.
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.
That’s a pretty serious claim, and one that was backed up by another user. Psychoopiates, another Reddit user, responded to the above with:
I fucking hated that practice and basically refused to do it. 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 fries were dirt cheap too! 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 shit.
McDonald’s, however, denies these claims.
Terri Hickey, a spokesperson for McDonald’s, told HuffPost via email, “The notion of a secret trick is absolutely false. 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.”
This could be the case of a franchise taking business practices into its own hands, as has happened in the past with billboards. Or it might be “absolutely false,” as McDonald’s states.
We might just need to order some fries to get to the bottom of it.
H/T Grubstreet