People really want their Happy Meals for adults, and it’s stressing out McDonald’s front-line staff.
On Monday, McDonald’s began selling Happy Meals (usually aimed at children) to adult customers. And, like the children’s Happy Meals, the special offer came with a toy, as part of a collaboration with streetwear brand Cactus Plant Flea Market. The promotion will last until the end of the month.
But while potential customers were excited about the special promotion and limited-edition toys, McDonald’s employees were less excited about dealing with a large number of customers. “I can see the stress among my co-workers,” said one employee my box.
Employees are made on social networks, such as TikTok and Reddit. “Please stop asking them,” one employee posted on TikTok. Another employee wrote, “they went crazy with adult happy meals,” in a video showing the number of Happy Meal orders.
“The new Happy Meals for adults are killing me,” said a post on the McDonald’s employee subreddit.
“We ran out of boxes the first day we had them, ran out of toys the second, and on the third day we had to say the truck isn’t coming until tomorrow,” wrote a commenter elsewhere on the subreddit. “It’s been…not fun.”
Nathan Congleton—NBC via Getty Images
McDonald’s did not immediately respond the fortunethe request for comments.
This isn’t the first time a McDonald’s promotion has caused staff discomfort.
In 2017, McDonald’s revived its Szechuan sauce for a day as part of a marketing exercise with the show Adult Swim Rick and Morty. Desperate fans flocked to restaurants hoping to get some of the limited supply, leading to long lines, disruptive customers and even calls to law enforcement. The chaos was compounded by McDonald’s miscommunication about which restaurants were participating in the promotion, meaning customers flocked to restaurants without the sauce.
Customer mayhem happened again in 2021, when McDonald’s revived its Pokemon Happy Meals, complete with trading cards, to celebrate the video game franchise’s 25th anniversary. Unfortunately, the promotion occurred during a Pokemon trading bubble, where cards could be turned in for a 350x return.
Some restaurants were forced to restrict sales of Pokemon Happy Meals to prevent scalpers from buying up all the Happy Meals available and flipping the included trading cards on eBay.
It’s not just McDonald’s. Last year, a tweet from an alleged Starbucks employee went viral after he complained about customers adding too many modifiers to their drinks, prompting many other baristas to complain about the stress of completing equally complex orders.
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