Workers Reveal What It's Like To Work The Night Shift At McDonald's 

A McDonald's drive-thru may be your best (and only) bet when you're jonesing for a burger and fries in the wee hours. While 24/7 operation isn't standard for all McDonald's locations, many employ an all-night crew to pad revenue and make sure you can get your Mickey D's fix at any time. You may imagine those overnight crews standing by idly, drudging along until the next night owl slurs their way through an order at the drive-thru. Turns out, that's only part of the story.

To get the full scoop on what it's really like to work the night shift at McDonald's, we combed the internet for first-hand accounts from employees. Crew members, maintenance workers, and managers revealed interesting experiences as well as some surprising details about typical shift duties. The overnight staff usually starts at 10 or 11 p.m. and works until the early morning when the breakfast shift begins. As you'll read, it takes a special type of person to handle the graveyard shift at one of the many McDonald's restaurants.

Unless you're rolling through a popular or flashy late-night McDonald's, there are likely only a few employees behind the window. Many locations only have three or four workers on the clock during the overnight shift. Employees generally say that's barely enough to keep the operation running, especially when someone calls off or no-shows. The reason franchises skimp on the overnight crew comes down to pure economics.

Extended hours were rare until McDonald's started its 2003 initiative of offering franchisees an advertising bonus to stay open 24/7. The strategy was to increase sales by having existing locations serve more customers rather than open new restaurants that may compete with each other. By 2007, roughly 16% of McDonald's annual sales came during overnight hours (via NBC News). While still a healthy chunk of revenue, the profit margins are not enough to warrant a bigger staff. 

A typically understaffed night is one person on service, one on the grill, plus the manager. On the flip side, a standard day shift will have around 10 to 15 workers. This means the overnighters need to be well-versed in all the restaurant tasks, from grilling and food prep to handling cash and point-of-sale machines.

Everyone knows that a lot of crazy things happen at McDonald's. While fewer customers come through at night, they can be some of the most memorable (wayward bar-hoppers, confused tourists, insomniacs with strong cravings, and so on). According to a former manager's post on a McDonald's Quora thread, most of the customers between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. are intoxicated but friendly. Another employee noted that this constantly brought up the dilemma of whether or not to call the cops on a likely drunk driver.

The thread includes stories of not-so-nice customers, including a woman who threw her drink at the drive-thru operator after waiting too long for an order. There are also more subtly annoying late-night occurrences at the drive-thru window, like customers taking way too long to decide what they want, placing confusing orders, and not speaking into the microphone.

Sure, the day team also deals with befuddled customers, but it's more challenging at night when there may only be two people preparing food and everything is cooked to order. Keep this in mind next time crew members take 15 minutes to serve your late-night value meal.

While first and second shifts focus on serving customers with a side of cleaning, it's the other way around for the third shift. The staff moves into cleaning mode at around midnight, after the inside dining room closes and the drive-thru slows down. That's why overnight is unofficially known as the "cleaning shift." Fast-food restaurants like McDonald's love to use the saying "Don't lean when you can clean" with their employees, and this comes into play a lot overnight when there may only be a few customers for hours at a time.

Routine cleaning tasks include sweeping and mopping every nook and cranny of the dining area. This continues into the bathrooms, kitchen, and food prep areas, where the team must wash dishes and make sure all the counters are spotless. All stainless steel gets wiped with polish, and the self-service kiosks get scrubbed for the last time of the day. The kitchen has no shortage of items that need routine cleaning, from the coffee machines and the burger station to the point-of-sale touchscreen.

Per McDonald's Food Safety Guide, every machine must be cleaned at least once a day and go through a deep cleaning at least once a week. The ideal time to handle the arduous task of disassembling these appliances is at night, when customers are few and far between. That means the third shift usually has the honor of detail cleaning the grills, which can get pretty grimy at day's end. The grill cleaning process involves scraping off all the charred carbon, scrubbing with McDonald's cleaning solution, and then rinsing with warm water (while the grill is hot).

To keep the chain's top-ranked fries tasting good, the team must drain the deep fryer daily. A detailed cleaning requires scrubbing the vats with a scratch pad and fryer cleaner to remove as much grease and fry debris as possible. As tough as all that sounds, the shake and soft serve machine may be the most difficult to clean. That process includes removing several parts for sanitizing, using cleaning brushes of various sizes, and applying an acid-based delimer to remove mineral deposits, which altogether takes four hours to do properly. If you've ever wondered why the shake machine is down so often, it's probably not getting cleaned enough.

When the day shift takes over in the morning, they generally arrive at a clean and fully stocked McDonald's. That's not the case for the night crew, who have the only shift responsible for cleaning the entire restaurant. And after several lunch and dinner rushes, third-shift workers often have their work cut out for them. When you clock in for the night, you can expect to see everything from food and paper throughout the dining room to stacks of dirty dishes in the kitchen. The night staff often bemoans the amount of trash neglected in the evening, and they take pride in how clean they can get the store for the morning team.

In addition to taking the indoor trash out to the dumpsters, workers often need to clean outside the store as well. The maintenance team may handle such tasks during the day, but the understaffed night crew must pick up the slack. Keep in mind that being outside of a McDonald's at night can get scary in some neighborhoods. For security reasons, certain locations don't allow crew members to go outside after the lobby closes. That means the manager has to take out the trash at night.

Depending on the location, McDonald's gets restocking shipments anywhere from twice a week to once a day. These truck deliveries often come in the early hours during the third shift. The overnight crew receives these supply trucks and helps sort everything in the stock cage. If you're imagining lots of frozen hamburgers, produce, soda boxes, Happy Meal toys, and endless sundries, you'd be right.

As part of their food safety checklist, the overnight crew must discard all unusable vegetables, dairy, eggs, meat, and more. Restocking dry supplies is an ongoing task throughout the day, but the evening crew takes it to another level. Every straw, soda lid, drink carrier, and condiment container should be fully stocked and ready for action by the end of the shift. The goal is to prepare the restaurant for the next day's early rush. However, some late-night workers like to play pranks on the morning crew. In a Quora thread, one former McDonald's overnighter said his shift would stack the hamburger bun delivery trays to the ceiling — so high that the next shift would have to take the stockpile outside to remove the top tray.

The third shift catches a break with McDonald's smaller nighttime menu, which runs from roughly midnight to 5 a.m. and omits some of the more complicated meals. Late-night customers can still order MickeyD's classics like McNuggets, McCafé beverages, and All Day Breakfast. Not surprisingly, social media and forum posts suggest that the most popular item for night owls is an order of the delicious "World Famous" fries. That's why nighttime McDonald's employees always need to keep a batch of fries ready, even in the early hours.

Some other go-to late-night orders include the Big Mac, McDouble, and Quarter Pounder. Oddly, the Filet-O-Fish and Snack Wraps are not on the menu, but the Happy Meal is available for kids with a nighttime craving. Of course, the night shift also keeps plenty of coffee and frappés on standby. Pro tip: If you're ordering coffee at night, ask how long the current pot has been sitting around. While some workers take time to brew fresh coffee, others may still be using the same pot from second shift.

The night shift can go from so boring it's difficult to find tasks to insanely busy at a moment's notice. However, overnight hours can actually be fun for crew members — if you get your work done and have a cool manager. Former night shifters said they got away with things like blasting music while cleaning, playing burger hockey, overindulging on soft serve, and experimenting with the party balloon helium tanks. If you're to believe some employees, you could even sneak in a nap on some nights.

There's usually plenty of leftover food during third shift, which means the staff doesn't have to resort to eating McDonald's worst menu items. Workers can expect a fairly quiet breakroom when they're ready for their nightly free meal. And while there are lots of cleaning tasks, there's generally less supervision and a chiller vibe. Of course, that could all change at a moment's notice when the drive-thru gets slammed with club-goers right after closing time.

Disrupting your natural circadian rhythm to work a full-time shift from sundown to sunup can impact your mental health. Add to that the unique pressures of working with difficult customers and a nightly task list to complete before morning, and burnout is inevitable. Many ex-crew members claim that working overnight is harder than the day shift, citing unexpected rushes and juggling cleaning while keeping the drive-thru open as being major sources of burnout. Some workers have even been brought to tears after dealing with irate customers. Others, simply feel unappreciated for their nighttime work.

Flipping burgers is much more difficult today than in previous generations, according to a reporter who took a job at McDonald's. They were surprised to learn how improved technology has led to more employee monitoring and unreasonable expectations. Managers are often hyper-focused on improving their serving times, and some will even put in easy orders of small coffees or sauce packets to artificially lower the average wait time during their shifts. Among other factors, worker burnout led to a fast-food labor shortage during the COVID-19 pandemic. For its part, McDonald's responded by raising its starting pay. 

If you roll up to a 24-hour McDonald's to order a Big Mac at 3 a.m., you could be in for a disappointment. Don't be surprised if the drive-thru operator says they're not accepting cards or, worse, are temporarily closed. McDonald's staff veterans say this happens because they need to shut down the point-of-sale machines nightly. The team can't run cards until they are done closing out credit transactions.

Stores aim to do this task at the slowest time of the night. However, managers note that a customer always happens to show up during the restart. The system close should only take a few minutes, during which the drive-thru operator will either offer to accept cash or ask the customer to wait. Some locations may completely close if the process is taking longer than expected. If you patronize a McDonald's that's closed for over an hour at night, it's likely due to understaffed crews catching up on cleaning.

They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day. And that's certainly true for McDonald's, which garners a quarter to a third of its sales from breakfast. However, the overnight crew provides a crucial assist to ensure the morning rush is as lucrative as possible. The night team spends a significant portion of third shift prepping for breakfast. Morning changeover involves making hash browns, preparing the egg cooker, baking muffins, and rolling lots of burritos, among other food prep tasks.

While they may start earlier if things are slow, overnight teams tend to handle breakfast prep near the end of the shift at around 4:30 a.m. The staff then gets to work making fresh bacon, biscuits, McGriddles, and more. Some locations have crew members work 4 a.m. to 1 p.m. shifts just to get out ahead of breakfast. It's all part of a choreographed changeover where the earliest morning workers arrive for a pre-rush meeting just as the night crew finishes. The process seems to be successful — McDonald's leads all fast-food chains for the breakfast rush, with a 35.4% market share, according to a 2024 Yahoo Finance report.