A McDonald's Employee's Behind-The-Scenes TikTok Has Viewers Divided

McDonald's is a recurring name on social media platforms, where both workers and customers discuss the fast food chain in great detail. Some employees have taken to Reddit to share what it's like to work at the drive-thru, while one particularly popular behind-the-scenes TikTok account shows how certain menu items are made. Other workers have gone online to share highly unusual orders: In November of 2021, for example, a McDonald's worker said in a TikTok video that she and her colleagues had to fulfill an order for a whopping 6,400 items in only four hours. 

While these kinds of social media posts are often interesting to viewers, they can also stir controversy at times. This was the case in a more recent TikTok video by user @mcdscouple, who demonstrated how she worked on a drive-thru customer's order with the help of the company's point-of-sale (POS) system, as clarified by Daily Dot. The customer had asked for three menu items: hash browns, a drink, and a sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit, which the employee entered into the system separately instead of offering together as a combo meal. This didn't sit well with certain users: One commenter wrote, "I used to work for McDonald's. You forgot to make it a combo...makes it cheaper," while another said, "I'm so annoyed she didn't make it a combo." However, the TikTok user had her response ready and explained that a sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit "cannot be put into a meal."

According to the McDonald's website, the chain does offer a sausage biscuit with egg meal that includes hash browns and a small roast coffee. (It doesn't mention cheese.) However, a TikToker who commented on @mcdscouple's video offered the insight that "the meals are no longer called value meals...they are combos which means there's no extra value in a combo." Someone else said that combo meals may vary across locations, and "only the core combos have to be made into meals."

Other TikTok users took less notice of the combo controversy because they were distracted by the old-fashioned appearance of the McDonald's employee's POS system. Comments ranged from, "Damn, they really haven't changed the POS in a decade" to "they need [to] update those programs...it's looking the 90s on those things." Based on Reddit conversations, it seems like these POS systems are jarring to employees as well. One user, who works at McDonald's, asked others how to overcome his struggles with using the system. The top-rated comment read, "You'll learn it to be at least sufficient in the next week or two, then you'll eventually know it like the back of your hand after [three] months."