The dark economy of McBucks

In conclusion, fuck McDonald’s. Never work there. Never encourage your kids to work there either. If I’m ever desperate for cash, would I go back? I wouldn’t bet on it.

Would you believe me if I told you that McDonald’s prints its own currency? It sounds ridiculous, but anyone who has worked at Maccas knows that the corporate giant holds many dark secrets. For example, on the 5th of May in 2009 the skeletal remains of the Hamburgler were discovered underneath the frozen coke machine in George St McDonald’s. He had been strangled to death, and Ronald’s fingerprints wereall over the crime scene. Okay, but seriously, for any 14 year old whose first job lay beneath the golden arches, it goes without saying that the work is exploitative. It’s a revolving door of bright eyed impressionable teens eager to start earning their own Patterson’s, only to discover the horrible truth that making money requires you to mop up a child’s vomit on your first day and deep fry your own hand on the second, all while the managers play Candy Crush in their Panopticon office lined with security monitors. Welcome to capitalism, where managers berate you for making your own lunch instead of paying for it. Enjoying the fruits of your labor? Not on our watch!

Fun fact: the paper cups that contain your drink cost more than the drink itself. And that Sprite you’re drinking? It comes from a plastic bag. The soft serve? It comes from a plastic bag. The nuggets, the quarter pounders, the onions? Plastic bag. One can only imagine the skyscraper slaughterhouse from which these processed meats emanate from. But if that cooked sludge wasn’t consumed within twenty minutes, it would be scrapped. Apparently Maccas has enough money to waste food, but not enough to provide free food or 10 minute paid rest breaks, what a joke. Another fun fact: those blaring alarms that you hear all the time? They don’t mean anything. Sure, if some nuggets have finished frying, of course there needs to be an alarm, but every 5 minutes the deep fryer would start beeping to say “stand by”, as if to classically condition us like Pavlov’s dog. I still get nightmares about those beeps and the seemingly endless stress of the lunch rush. There’d be times where I’d get so angry on shift that I’d walk into the freezer to start punching the fry boxes, a nice reprieve from the hotboxed sauna of the kitchen. A younger member of staff told me a secret to surviving the boiling summer shifts: we would fold up a paper towel, run it under cold water, let it freeze in the walk-in, and slip it under our caps (or in our underwear) while we made cheese burgers. Good times. The best thing about working in hospitality are the other chefs. It’s like making friends in the trenches. The managers are not your friends however. They are merely a cabal of brown noses fixated on maintaining the upward trajectory of a line on a graph, all the while ignoring the struggles of the staff they are meant to protect. But every once in a while, they would offer a hollow gesture of compassion. This is where the McBucks come in, the secret economy that McDonald’s doesn’t want you to know about.

What are McBucks? McBucks are flimsy pieces of plastic given to workers who either “did a good job” or sucked up to managers the most. A lot of the younger crew would be begging for the McBucks before their shift even started. None of these McBucks could be traded in for free food – the only thing we yearned for in exchange for our labor – instead we were expected to save these rectangles for an entire year, and only then could we spend them. At the end of the year, the crew would gather like a cult to a yearly function in which staff members would bid on “mystery prizes” using the McBucks we had saved. These prizes were gift wrapped and auctioned to us like a carrot on a stick. You COULD win a brand new iPhone, a TV, a Playstation. But you also had a 50/50 chance of winning a box of Favourites, a magic eight ball, or a keychain instead. People were clambering over each other, bidding thousands of McBucks. Imagine that: hours and hours of sweat, tears and hard labor, only to find out the free Airpods you so desperately wanted turned out to be a cheap little fidget spinner you could get at a two dollar shop. This was all in the name of “fun” of course, but an unintended side effect of the McBuck System were the trades made behind closed doors. It starts off innocently enough, one crew member offering to pay for someone’s lunch in exchange for their McBucks, maybe someone will cover someone else’s shift. But then others would haggle, some would trade things like cigarettes, alcohol, weed, MDMA, ketamine. The manager’s didn’t notice, or sometimes they’d be a part of the trades too. One brave soul decided to photocopy and print out their own McBucks to bid at the auction night, which the managers didn’t notice until it was too late. Hilarious.

I don’t know if McDonald’s still dishes out McBucks, nor do I know when this system began or who first came up with the idea. From my research, I’ve found that McBucks have been in place for at least 17 years, with reports of the currency being used as far as Russia, Italy and America. In some locations, instead of an auction they would have what is called the “McShop”, essentially an end of year merch store snatch and grab for pens, plushies and mugs. One might question what the big deal is. Why get so upset over a company rewarding its employees with shiny objects? Office pizza parties and the McBuck system are ideas cut from the same cloth. There’s no need to ask for a pay rise, or free food, or a 10 minute rest break. Just be thankful that you’ll be getting two slices of Domino's pizza and half a cup of warm coke this Friday.

In conclusion, fuck McDonald’s. Never work there. Never encourage your kids to work there either. If I’m ever desperate for cash, would I go back? I wouldn’t bet on it.