McIavellian

“How can you get free food from McDonald’s?”

At 7pm on Monday 23rd March fast-food giants McDonald’s closed every one of their 1,300 UK restaurants in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. Naturally this impacted many, from the underpaid staff crew to the billionaires on the board of directors, not to mention the many harried mothers and TikTokking teens who typically dine there. But it was a particular aggravation for myself, catching me half-way through a project to obtain and consume as much McDonald’s produce as I could for free.

The adage goes that there’s “no such thing as a free lunch”, but I say that there must be, and indeed there should be. Fellow mammals like cows get to chill, fuck and sleep in sweeping plains of their favourite food for free, whilst I have to sweat in an office all day to keep me in drab Tesco meal deals. And as I was stomping about town on my one-hour break I realised that I really, really did not want to pay for whatever crusty, lukewarm fuel I was about to call lunch, and that I should formally assemble a comprehensive list of ways in which I or anyone can eat for free. Of course for it to be any sort of valid experiment, all these methods would have to be conducted at the same restaurant chain.

I neither love nor hate McDonald’s food – their McMuffins are admirable constipation aids and I survived sixth-form on a diet of little else but their pancakes & syrup. McDonald’s was selected as the unwitting subject of this because:

• they’re worth over £125 billion, so aren’t going to feel the pinch of a few comped nuggets.
• the daily customer volume is immense (1 in every 100 people eat McDonald’s for their main meal of the day), providing an ideal crowd to hide among as I pull these ploys.
• the chain is ubiquitous, so this advice benefits all. McDonald’s restaurants are everywhere, across 118 countries, with a new store opening on average every 8 hours. You have a McDonald’s near you, I have a McDonald’s near me, there’s even a McDonald’s in Guantanamo Bay:

Having scoured the Internet, spooling largely through Reddit threads of ex-McDonald’s employees, in addition to dreaming up some of my own ruses, I eventually had a potential list of 51 ideas to get free food from the ruthlessly profit-driven Golden Arches. As I type this now crouched in corona-based lockdown I have attempted about half that list, and am proud to have consumed 17,618 calories of free food.

With the world still coughing and no recovery date set I’m at something of an impasse for this project so I’m sharing where I’ve got to so far, particularly as I now have the perfect hostage audience of interminably bored, self-isolating readers. If and when we’re allowed back outside again hopefully some of these methods will still stand as worthy advice.

Method 1: Hack the machines

Perhaps to avoid the shame of voicing your lunch request aloud to another human, 90% of McDonald’s orders are now processed at the self-serve touchscreen monoliths which stand by the entrance (and, another Matt Fact, when swabbed by microbiologists every single one of these McDonald’s screens tested positive for coliforms, the bacteria found in human shit). Indeed if you search “how to get free McDonald’s” online as I did on day 1 of this undertaking, the very first place Google shepherds you to is a video of two Australian lads confusing these machines for a completely free burger.

A couple of friends and I found out a way to get free food from Maccas, probably don’t have long before they patch it so go nuts
byu/pleshka inaustralia

The crux of their scheme is to order a hamburger but use the customise option on the self-order kiosk to remove the meat, which chaotically reduces the overall price to minus 10 cents. If you repeat this ten times then you’re at negative one dollar, meaning when you order a regular burger for a buck the total becomes nil and you don’t get charged. You leave with a standard burger plus ten empty buns at absolutely no expense to yourself.

This stunt garnered quite a bit of fanfare when it appeared last year, earning some fluff pieces in “newspapers” like The Sun and The Mail, so this strategy seemed like a good place for me to start. Unfortunately it also snared McDonald’s attention who swiftly patched this loophole, so that when I went to a nearby branch and ordered a cheeseburger with no cheese, meat, pickles, sauce or bun at all, I had no discount applied and the machine still wanted to charge me 99p.

I proceeded with the payment to see what would happen, and after a palpable ripple of confusion from behind the counter one of the managers handed to me a simple empty box.

“Is this what you wanted?” he asked with confusion and concern, “or did you just want a box with pickles and mustard in?” I pretended I’d fumbled the order and was actually after a sauceless burger, which I received promptly along with the knowledge that this Australian hack was soundly debunked. However that evening I found an alternative approach to bamboozling these machines courtesy of the ILPT (“Illegal Life Pro Tips”) subreddit:

All you’ve got to do is place your order on one of the self serve machines and when it asks for payment click cancel on the card reader. Next it asks you if you’d like to pay at the till just click yes, it will print out a ticket with an order number but no price which your suppose to take to a till and pay for. But, if you just wait around by the collection point they will call your number as normal and just give you your food. If this fails and they take your food to the till either: a) pay for it or b) just pretend it wasn’t you.

Redditor Beck758 added:

I also work in McDonald’s but in UK. This would work 80% of the time in my store, the order comes up as normal on the screen, except at the bottom in tiny letters it says to be paid, which is VERY easily missed especially of we are busy.

I returned to McDonald’s at the busiest time conceivable, a rainy lunchtime during the half-term break, ordered a coffee from the self-service plinth and when it came time to insert my card I hit ‘Cancel’. This generated a stubby receipt asking me to queue and pay at one of the manned tills, but regardless I saw my order number appear on the ‘Please collect’ screens hanging above the kitchen and less than a minute later an amicable chap was passing me a coffee. “Enjoy!” he said warmly, as I took my first free McDonald’s item of many.

“Lovin’ it mate,” I replied, and strode out feeling like Frank Abagnale Jr.

This is probably the most practical advice you will draw from this article. I doubt the McDonald’s legal department will approve of what I’m about to say, but you must try it out for yourselves!

Verdict: Successful.

 

Method 2: Loyalty cards

As I smugly glugged my complimentary coffee from the above scheme I realised another method of snagging free sustenance was staring me right in the face. Every McDonald’s coffee, or “McCafé”, has a sticker of a coffee bean embossed onto the cup; collect six of these on a loyalty card and you get a free hot drink of choice. It dawned on me that if I could find a way to harvest these stickers in great numbers I’d be privy to an endless supply of free lattes, so I got to work immediately.

The above, for reference, is how a one-third completed loyalty card looks. My initial plans were to forge my own coffee bean stamps by drawing them in tippex slicked over with nail polish, but it gave me chest pains just imagining how atrocious those would look. You may think it would be simple to traipse about a McDonald’s restaurant on the hunt for stickered cups which diners have left behind, however store cleaners are instructed that the very maximum a vacant table can remain with litter on is 10 minutes so they are ruthless in cleaning away the detritus of others and of course rummaging through bins is for some reason socially unacceptable. I developed a third eye for empty McCafé cups on the street everywhere I went, probably looking like a conscientious litter-picker until I peeled the sticker off then threw the cup back to the ground.

Fortunately this can all be massively expedited by simply purchasing reams of the loyalty stickers on eBay, something McDonald’s are aware of and really not happy about. I bought 120 stickers for £4 (“UV-light tested!” the listing boasted) – the first batch didn’t arrive with no explanation or apology, but I repurchased from a second source and upon arrival they looked indistinguishable from the real things.

That’s 20 cups of coffee there, which after the £4 outlay mean 17 of those are free. I actually didn’t have enough loyalty cards to accommodate all these stickers, so scanned one to myself and printed it off, backed it with some card then scuffed the edges with a pair of scissors for a realistic perforated effect, and in doing so only sliced my finger open once!

Eventually I had a pocket of counterfeited loyalty cards plastered in ill-gotten stickers, and they all worked a treat. Even a cryptoanalyst would struggle to discern between an earnestly accumulated loyalty card and one coated in eBay stickers, so a stressed McDonald’s worker wasn’t going to spot anything awry from beneath the brim of their contractually-obligated baseball cap. Through a combination of the illicit stickers I purchased and the real ones I found, I drank 32 free coffees from McDonald’s in the space of a couple of months without a single snag.

There has admittedly been a crackdown upon this recently – in December last year a Bradford lad was pulled over for drug-driving but had to face an extra charge of fraud when police found sheets of these McDonald’s loyalty stickers in his car. But don’t let that dissuade you as having a wallets-worth of full McCafé loyalty cards, no matter how they were obtained, makes you appear a better, kinder person. I’ve dished these out to the homeless, I’ve gifted them to friends, and when Chloe at work lamented how she had bought a hot chocolate that morning but forgot and left it in her car I just wordlessly threw a completed loyalty card on her desk. People were awed, and rightly so.

McDonald’s coffees are underwhelming at any rate so I feel validated in disclosing how you can swipe one for free. They usually taste of soap as cleaning fluid in the coffee machines isn’t thoroughly flushed out, and see below how my toffee latte (on the left) compared against expectations:

Verdict: Successful.

 

Method 3: The ol’ switcheroo

For this ruse, which I devised myself, you will need two disguises. The grift is to order and pay for a burger, collect and eat your meal whilst keeping hold of the receipt, change into an entirely different set of clothes in the toilets, then reemerge with your receipt claiming you never got your food and that someone else (a differently-dressed person) must have taken it. All going to plan, you’ll get a free replacement burger.

I ambled into McDonald’s on a cold Saturday afternoon wearing a bucket hat and sporting a small goatee I’d grown, feeling somewhat apprehensive about my plan. Having ordered a double cheeseburger from a self-service machine I hung around the counter until my food arrived, pretending to take a phone call and speaking loudly in a pseudo Australian accent. Soon my burger appeared which I raced upstairs to eat, clattering physically into a redheaded worker as I did so.

With the burger down I retired to the toilets for a hasty shave:

From the comfort of a cubicle I changed into a formal shirt paired with a salmon pink tie and my girlfriend’s sunglasses, then returned to the counter with receipt in hand.

“Sorry,” I said (not Australian now), “I ordered a double cheeseburger a minute ago but then had to nip to the loo, and I’ve come back to see it’s no longer on the screen, is there a chance someone else has taken it?”

A lovely worker said she would sort it, and then I watched in horror as she walked straight to the redheaded manager I had collided with bodily just moments ago whilst wearing a bucket hat and beard. This became a huddle of 4 employees all discussing what to do, occasionally looking up as one to me as I nervously played on my phone. After what felt like a fortnight the original girl returned clutching another double cheeseburger which she handed over to me along with an apology.

I will never know exactly what was said in the huddle of staff that afternoon, but I can confidently guess it was confused. Would any ostensibly self-respecting man, they must have deliberated, actually run upstairs to wet shave and reappear looking like a blind croupier solely to claim a free double cheeseburger? Well, the verdict speaks for itself.

Verdict: Successful.

 

Method 4: The app

Like everything now, McDonald’s has an app. You are asked for a substantial amount of information as you sign up (I’m reasonably sure McDonald’s sell nuggets of data as well as offal), but upon doing so I was treated to a completely free cheeseburger.

This promotion changes over time but whenever you sign up you’re usually granted something complimentary. Additional daily deals dribble into the app every so often as well: Fridays occasionally become “Fry-days” equating to a medium-sized pouch of chips on the house, I checked my phone to find two free espressos randomly waiting for me of a Tuesday morning which I downed simultaneously over the protests of my heart, and I trudged through a raging whiskey hangover first thing of a drizzly Sunday morning to claim an app-subsidised sausage & egg McMuffin as breakfast.

I quickly surmised that creating a new email address and logging into this app under a different name refreshes all these giveaways for a technically unlimited trawl of free food. To test this I created 12 new email accounts naming them each after one of Jesus’ apostles in order to keep track (please see 5 below, for flavour), and on a particularly hungry day I paced the half-mile trek between my two local McDonald’s chains signing in-between profiles as I went to eat six free cheeseburgers for dinner, three of which I combined into one monstrously beautiful creation.

Even as I shifted from theladthezealot@gmail.com to badboyjudaslol@yahoo.co.uk to snag my sixth cheeseburger of the day not a single eyebrow was raised at any point during this enterprise, for a sum of 1,806 calories at no expense to me. Thanks Jesus!

Verdict: Successful.

 

Method 5: It’s your Birthday!

As my 30th Birthday dawned my girlfriend Rowena perpetually asked “what would you like to do for it?” and my answer was always the same: “the one thing I have to do is go to McDonald’s.”

Various food chains will treat you to a menu item for free if you can prove it’s your Birthday – Krispy Kreme stores in particular are notable for this. So fuelled by prosecco and existential dread I marched up to the McDonald’s counter on the day I turned thirty.

“It’s my Birthday, my thirtieth no less!” I announced to the manager serving on shift that afternoon, a shiny Asian man with oblong glasses and a wispy beard.

“Congratulations” he said dispassionately, and we shook hands.

“Can I get a free ice cream?” I asked.

“No.”

“Go onnn…”

“No.”

“Can I get a free anything?”

“No.”

That’ll be a no then.

Verdict: Failure.

 

Method 6: Pretending to be homeless

Now this looks bad, so let me preface this piece with the assurance that any free McDonald’s obtained in this fashion I would genuinely be giving to actual homeless people who of course need it more than I.

From what I’d read McDonald’s seem to hate the homeless, largely refusing to even give them water, as I suppose they are innately one of the most profit-driven conglomerates on the planet and hence the destitute and sick are just empty wallets in their eyes. That said I was curious to see whether I could finagle any free grub were I residentially-challenged myself.

Portraying myself as a homeless man was not a far cry from the state I usually shamble about town in, however I did regrow some facial hair and shuffle up to McDonald’s in an itchy cap carrying a rucksack stuffed with blankets in order to go fully method:

I rubbed my eyes and explained to the stout, mustachioed worker that I was homeless and just after a hamburger and a cup of tea to see me through the night, hoping the use of “a cup of tea” would stir some deep-seated British sympathy within the server. He said he would check and disappeared for a moment, then returned with heart-warming news: “I’ve worked my magic!” he said.

“Your magic?” I asked excitedly, visualising a free burger coming my way.

Turns out I’d misheard him. “No, what I said was… I’ve spoke with my manager,” he iterated, louder.

“Oh.”

“We can’t give any items away, because of the stocktake,” he explained.

I fired him one last pitiable look but management had spoken, all hail the stocktake. It surprised me that a corporation the size of McDonald’s would even still bother with an exhaustive totting up of stock and turnover after each shift, but I gather it’s tiresome measures like this which have made them the wealthiest fast-food chain ever. It does mean that every last lettuce head and beef puck are accounted for nightly, so you’re unlikely to be given anything for free just by pootling up to the counter looking a bit tired and dirty.

Resolving not to give up just yet, I changed tack. I bought a crucifix online (19 pence!) and some new shoes, combed my hair and printed out some information packs on homelessness. Now I was Bartholomew Kent, volunteer at the nearby night shelter, looking for some handouts from McDonald’s I could take to feed some of the residents we currently had. For authenticity’s sake I even had a business card made featuring a photo of me drunk at a wedding.

I feel I must stress again that had I been passed a box overflowing with free McDonald’s food I would genuinely have been straight to the nearest shelter to distribute it, maybe helping myself to just one bacon double cheeseburger as a reward for my efforts. Rowena was horrified when she saw my ensemble for this, comparing me to both a serial killer and a cultist. It was true, I looked like the protagonist of shows depressed girls binge on Netlix.

This was a busy McDonald’s set inside a gigantic ASDA store which I walked to through a gauntlet of homeless folk, awkwardly muttering that I had no change as I gripped my laminated help-pack and my crucifix bounced with each step. A tall, raven-haired employee with braces faltered at my introduction as Bart.

“I’m from St Paul’s,” I explained softly, “and as it’s almost 9pm and you guys are closing soon I was wondering if you had any hot food going spare to help those less fortunate?”

“No,” the girl said, “I’m afraid I won’t be able to help.”

I maintained the pressure. “It’s just… it’s awful cold out tonight, and we have a lot of hungry mouths to feed?”

“No, sorry” I was told again. “We try to only cook to demand. Even though there is some wastage, the food has to be thrown away afterwards, and there’s nothing we can do about that.”

Reluctantly I nodded my head and said I understood. “God bless,” I parted with, and she winced. I left disheartened that McDonald’s would rather hurl mountains of perfectly edible produce out into an alley to fatten up the gulls rather than let saintly Bart take it away for those in need.

However I wasn’t quite done yet. There is a lifestyle choice known as “freeganism” that largely consists of foraging through supermarket bins for discarded foodstuffs which are still good to eat – I employed this practice rigorously as a student and thanks to Co-Op’s trash I didn’t have to pay for bread all year – so I donned a hi-viz jacket (for hi-viz jackets can get you almost anywhere) adorned with a sign I knocked together on Microsoft Paint, and skulked the perimeter of a McDonald’s at midnight on the lookout for refuse sacks of free greasy goodness.

Unfortunately, whether it be to keep out rats or gonzo journalists, McDonald’s keep their waste locked up tight. Without any trusty bolt cutters to hand I had no way of accessing even the food deemed not longer fit for human consumption.

Verdict: Failure.

 

Method 7: The Nugget Box

Food waste is a charged topic at the moment, a fashionable facet of trying to save the Earth alongside turning vegan or drinking all your drinks through a paper straw. There are apps that try to minimise this, such as TooGoodToGo where participating restaurants will advertise produce they have remaining at the end of the day and sell it at a heavy discount, and Olio which is a privatised version of this whereabouts people will list food that would otherwise be binned for others to pick up for free, if you have the energy to trek round a stranger’s house for a jar of expired picalilli. I downloaded both in case either listed any free McDonald’s to sadly no joy, but I was fascinated by the dross users bothered uploading to Olio – please see two examples I found below and imagine actually making the drive out to pick these up:

I wondered if I could use this public fear of food waste to my advantage, specifically to get some McNuggets. It slowly dawned on me that if I could construct a fake food-bank for diners to deposit food they’d else be throwing away, then not only would I be preventing waste but I’d have my own personal source of free McDonald’s. And lo the nugget box was born, a customised plastic storage container with a hole at the top for dropping chicken nuggets in and some spiel on the sides to encourage precisely that.

The NUGGET DEPOSIT BOX
We’re all passionate about the environment, but it’s not nearly as passionate about us! Did you know each year in the UK we waste around 9.5 million tonnes of food – that’s more than Basingstoke weighs!! In turn, this produces more than 25 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions annually.
Us here at The TASTY NOT WASTEY Project for Hants & Dorset are keen to reduce those scary numbers. That’s why we have scattered these mini recycling boxes in restaurants around the country!
Have you just bought an extra large meal and found yourself too full to finish those last few chicken nuggets? Don’t throw them away, drop them into this box! We can recycle uneaten nuggets either as salted kibble for racehorses around the UK, or they can be burnt as fuel to power freighter ships out at sea.
Let’s work together for a cleaner, brighter future. So remember, don’t bin it, box it!
Only chicken nuggets to be deposited please! :)

On a Saturday lunchtime I headed to McDonald’s and inconspicuously left my nugget box on a vacant table, then sat at the other side of the restaurant to spectate while nursing a strawberry milkshake. I’d already popped a handful of my own nuggets in the box thinking that might help get the ball rolling but I needn’t have bothered – within literally seconds my creation had caught the attention of two lads one of whom leapt up and placed in a nugget of his own, Instagramming the whole thing for posterity.

[as a side note, is that not the seediest looking highchair you’ve ever fucking seen?]

That was free meat! That was 43 calories I had obtained without spending a penny. 9 more such contributions then a quick zap in the microwave back home and that’d be lunch sorted!

Sadly, after such a promising start, I saw my box had also been noticed by a bemused member of staff:

This chap (with the stupid name, I spied from his tag, of “Dale”) didn’t know what to make of what he saw. He would walk off for a moment and then return to rewipe the table or pick up a microscopic shred of lettuce so he could read my Tasty Not Wastey diatribe again. Having repeated this four times he seemed to make a marked mental decision and pointedly strode towards the counter, taking him past where I was sat.

“Excuse me buddy!” I called out to Dale, trying to stall him. “Sorry mate is the… WiFi free here?”

“Erm…yeah,” he said uncertainly.

I still wanted to delay him, or try to force the memory of my box from his head entirely, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say. “So it’s definitely free? The WiFi. You’re sure?”

Dale confirmed it was and soon, as feared, returned with a manager in tow to gesture at the suspect container sat on table 17.

The manager had a quick read of the Tasty Not Wastey ethos (whilst the original beanie-hatted nugget-depositor sat nearby, bristling awkwardly) before muttering some quiet instruction to Dale, who then began pulling my box to pieces there in the middle of the restaurant and transferring its contents to the bin.

McDonald’s dedicate a whole page of their website to how they minimise food waste but I feel this is somewhat disingenuous, and can supply little evidence more damning than staff destroying and dispensing of my artisanal food-bank. This scheme however did technically work, I would have got that free nugget had I been quicker, so I can recommend this so long as you’re ready to leap in and run off with your poultry earnings as soon as a cleaner gives it a long glance.

Verdict: Plausible.

 

Method 8: Crowdfunding

With altruism capacities of McDonald’s staff seemingly non-existent, I moved on to test if I could squeeze a free Maccies out of my family and friends. The obvious method to coerce people into mindlessly giving you money is of course to create a Kickstarter, and I set my goal at procuring a large Big Tasty meal from that.

Firstly I visited McDonald’s, bought a Big Tasty burger and threw it straight into a river. My aim was to spin a story that I had accidentally dropped my deluxe burger, tug on some heartstrings and amass the pity funds to go and buy myself a full meal. This may look like an exercise in recouping idiotically self-inflicted losses but the intention was to get a meal this time rather than a burger alone, and you have to speculate to accumulate. I thought the pathos of seeing an expensive lunch cascade into filthy water on a grey day might even propel my campaign to viral levels and see me way over target – I might get enough for seven Big Tastys and eat them all in one day and die.

I wanted to capture my “drop” on film for more sustenance to my Kickstarter page, although it’s actually quite tricky to drop things deliberately and therefore my video looked appallingly staged.

Any ideas that perhaps I was being too self-critical disappeared when I showed it to Rowena and she squealed with laughter at how hammy my acting was, so I decided then to simply use a screenshot of the burger as it floated away alongside the following text:

On a rainy, steely grey afternoon in Bournemouth I treated myself to something from the upper ranks of the McDonald’s menu – The Big Tasty burger with bacon, 850 calories of cramp-inducing beef, cheese, salt, speck and shame. Pacing home with burger box clutched to my bosom I slipped on slick leaf mulch and watched, helplessly, as my luxury burger escaped its box and cascaded into the filthy waters of the River Bourne. I was at once shocked, angry, hungry, and ultimately outraged at the injustice of it all. I’m a good guy and I pay my taxes. I write a blog – https://fatprosemattrose.wordpress.com/ – at great personal expense to bring regular amusing yet intriguing content for the masses. And this is how I’m rewarded? If this story has touched you in any way, and you feel that Matt Rose maybe does deserve his Big Tasty meal, then please consider donating whatever you can. Thank you, God Bless, and have a fantastic day.

Building my Kickstarter page was an easy enough affair which I did in bed over a beer and a fish sandwich. I was then told my project would take four business days to review before it could go live, however mine was subsequently rejected inside of 12 hours. Apparently the knowledge that I, somewhere, was eating a burger, was a concept not tangible enough for Kickstarter to back.

Thankfully Kickstarter has many imitators and I had seen a similar site Buy Me A Coffee plugged by indie artists on Twitter. The ideals were all the same, it was still essentially formalised begging, and although the site alluded to coffee I could still spend my scroungings on a Big Tasty, it’s just Buymeaburger.com isn’t as sexy a name for a website.

You can see my Buy Me A Coffee page here (you can even still donate to it if you really like) but after spamming the link across my Facebook & Twitter I only received one donation, and that was a sympathy pledge from Rowena. It came in after fees at £1.85, which I used that weekend having awoken hungover on a broken bed with a bleeding thumb and a lost phone to buy a McDonald’s Sprite for my aching kidneys.

This plan could possibly work if your friends aren’t misers like mine, and for that reason I include the screen-grab of my drowned Big Tasty below to use should you wish to set up your own similar crowdfunding page:

For me however we sadly have to chalk this one up as another Verdict: Failure.

 

Method 9: Craigslist

If friends won’t get you a free McDonald’s, maybe strangers will? I recall once reading a post on Gumtree many years ago from someone looking to give away a half-eaten Big Mac meal, so I saw no harm in wading back into this odd corner of the Internet on the hunt for neighbourhood freaks to buy me food. I left this under the ‘Activity Partners’ section of my local Craigslist page:

The next morning, having forgotten entirely that I’d posted the above last night, I woke to 11 emails in my Inbox. Largely they were from guys probing to work out if I was a woman indulging in some choice roleplay e.g. a John who said he’d happily give me gherkins but then upon my reply messaged back “Sorry Matt, I was hoping to share my gherkin with a girl.”

Most noteworthy was Tiago, who promisingly struck up something akin to normal conversation and our patter went back and forth all morning. I told him about my job and where I live, he spoke of his interests which were largely gym-based, and he even sent me a photo of him working out, topless. He looked like he kept himself in shape and seemed a perfectly pleasant, unassuming man, ideal to visit a McDonald’s with.

Then this happened:

I enjoyed that Google proffered automated responses for that question and I plumped for “No, you?”. Tiago however was undeterred, and swiftly responded for clarity’s sake “I am looking for a wank buddy. Happy to sort u burgers.”

This put me at something of a quandary. Obviously I did not want to masturbate a man in a McDonald’s thus was keen to keep Tiago at arm’s length so to speak, but then again signing up to a wankbuddy reward scheme did seem to be a viable means of gleaning free hamburgers making it my journalistic duty to pursue. This is how the conversation progressed:

Matt – “I’ll level with you – I’m a straight man in a happy relationship with a girl, I’m not into any wank buddy stuff. That said, I am interested in anything that will get me a free McDonald’s, it’s just what I like.
So, basically, if I came to you, what is the least I could get away with doing in exchange for you buying me a cheeseburger? :)”

Tiago – “I can wank u so…”

Matt – “Yeah I’m not sure that’s for me mate. How about I come to you, you buy me a burger, we have like 20 minutes of great chat, then I leave and you can wank later in the comfort of your own home over what great witty banter we’ve just shared? Let me know.”

Tiago – “U can toss me off?”

Matt – “I’ve never tossed anyone off for a burger before and to be honest I’m pretty keen to keep it that way. I feel we’re going in different directions here buddy. Nice talking to you anyway.”

After a brief pause Tiago came back to me with one of the most exquisitely unusual offers I have ever received from someone – it is absurd both in and out of context, and in my opinion is sheer poetry:

I didn’t reply to this and likewise the other Craigslist responses went cold, failing ultimately to secure me any free McDonald’s. Be that as it may I am loath to condemn this tactic as an outright failure: Craigslist posts do hinge almost entirely around sex, predominantly men looking for women (comprising 59% of listings) or men looking for men (27%), so were I a straight girl or a gay lad happy to handle man-meat in return for a quarter pounder this method may have come up trumps for me.

Verdict: Plausible.

 

Method 10: Lurking

I noticed during a lot of McDonald’s lunch rushes when all the order numbers were at about 18 or 19 there was usually still one exasperated worker yelling out “order number two!” for an unclaimed box of fries. It makes sense that some customers might accidentally order twice, or order and then have to dash out for some reason, leaving a poor server fruitlessly shouting their number into the void, but it always intrigued me how easy it would be to stride up and claim such a meal. Staff rarely check your receipt number anyway, so if you stepped forward and finally said “oh my gosh, number two, yes that is me, I’m really sorry,” surely any worker would be so relieved to finally get this order out they’d usher you your chips whatever you showed them.

I’d amassed a fair trove of McDonald’s receipts by now (mainly reading a final transaction price of £0.00) so I took them to a restaurant to play a bit of lurking, like an odd variant of bingo.

It was pleasingly busy on this evening as I stood near the back of the crowd and waited for the numbers to be called. About 5 minutes passed before a furiously perspiring staff member hollered “33? Thirty-three??” to no reaction. I watched my fellow diners intently, yet they all remained still. In my mind I was to let her say 33 one more time and then I would pounce, however irritatingly she walked off after just two calls of the order! I would have to be quicker.

“Forty six? Forty six??” I heard. Among my stash of old receipts I actually did have an order number 46, so when this too looked to be going unclaimed I marched straight up.

“Yep, 46,” I confirmed. The staff didn’t even check my supposed receipt and I scarpered quickly with my purloined meal.

The only issue with this plan is you have no control over what foodstuffs you’re going to receive, but I feel I came out of it OK – one BBQ bacon & chicken grilled wrap (366 calories) plus a Happy Meal with some regular fries (337 calories), 4 McNuggets (173 calories) and best of all mini fucking Jenga (0 calories). I scarfed the meal and took Jenga to the pub to play against my friend Mark, tequila shots acting as the penalty for whoever knocked down the tower each time.

Verdict: Successful.

 

Method 11: Illness

My next stratagem involved faking a public hypoglycemic episode. The plan was to shiver up to the McDonald’s counter wearing gym gear, all pallid and slurring my words, explaining I was a diabetic and my blood sugar levels were plummeting. I wanted to see if staff would let me slink off with a free ice cream or even just a free sugary cup of tea, the alternative being I potentially collapse to the floor with a hollow thump in the middle of their family-friendly restaurant.

For extra realism I fast for my whole, hangry work day, then that evening changed into my token gym outfit and jogged to McDonald’s through the rain. By the time I arrived I genuinely was shaky and drained, crashing up to the till and tapping it impatiently as a crew member ambled over.

“H-hello,” I started, “so I’m hypoglycemic, and I’ve just been to the gym and forgotten my glucose tablets. Is there anything sweet I could maybe grab like a small milkshake or a little ice cream? The only issue is I don’t have my wallet with me so I have no money, but I need something sugary soon otherwise I’m going to be in trouble..” I signed off with a nervous laugh.

The guy looked terrified. “E-Emma!” he called out to the kitchen. “Help!”

I repeated my story for Emma, the manager that had just appeared who was much less rattled. “Yes, we’ve had this a few times before,” she said unfazed, almost bored, “and we have the sugar sticks you can use?” She pointed at the single-serve sugar sachets over by the napkins and condiment pumps.

It was hardly the free sweet banquet I was expecting. I looked at my ostensible salvation and asked “Oh, is that it?”

Reluctantly she poured me a cup of warm water I could dissolve my sugar in. I was vastly disappointed as you can get sugar and water free at McDonald’s anyway without pretending to be dying, but it was 8pm and I’d run here and consumed zero calories so far that day so I did end up guzzling it like a big mad hummingbird.

McDonald’s will keep you alive so long as you don’t put a dent in their stocktake, it seems. I trudged back home through the freezing rain in my stupid gym clothes.

Verdict: Failure.

 

Method 12: Compliment

It is a little known fact that if you write to a company simply commending them for a job well done then there’s a good chance they’ll respond with vouchers or some other token of their appreciation. I discovered this by writing to Utterly Butterly as a teenager, facetiously informing them I planned to eat their margarine and that alone for the next 30 days for charity, and they replied with a voucher for a free tub (although pointedly did not advocate my plan).

So I sat down to write the McDonald’s Headquarters in North London a letter. My impulse was that a hand-written note would heft more of an emotional gut-punch, and from there it seemed obvious I should write it under the guise of a charming old man:

My handwriting is terrible anyway let alone when trying to impersonate an 80-year-old, so please find it transcribed legibly below:

Dear McDonald’s,
I know hand-writing letters is considered a little ‘old hat’ these days, but I just wanted to put down on paper quite how much I love your restaurant’s food. I have eaten it man and boy, and even now as an old codger I like nothing more than to sit with a cup of tea and a Big Mac and watch the world go by.
I even met my first wife, Clarissa, in a McDonald’s in Greenwich! We went on to have two beautiful boys and another boy.
Sorry if I’m boring you, but I just wanted to pass along my praises whilst I still can. Whilst I can’t much afford them any more, the Big Mac is my favourite sandwich to have.
Keep up the good work, and don’t go changing that Big Mac recipe now!

I found two postage stamps in my wallet wedged between fake McCafé loyalty cards, and excessively stuck them both on the envelope much as a bewildered elderly gentleman might. My aim was to post something that would make even a hardened McDonald’s admin rep burst into tears and I’m pleased to announce I think I did – a week later I received a heartfelt reply from Charlotte on the customer services team (“It’s always so lovely to hear our Customers love our food as much as we do” etc, ad nauseam) enclosing vouchers worth £10.

Staff at my local Maccies branch (who I’m sure by now were beginning to notice my face popping up in their anxiety dreams) were flummoxed by these vouchers and it was an ordeal paying with them, various kitchen crew and managers running around searching for an apocryphal key that apparently opened the seldom-used voucher drawer of the till. Eventually I got my lunch: a large Big Tasty with Bacon meal including fries and a banana milkshake, cheese melt dippers and a Maltesars McFlurry, usually £9.97 but for me and my geriatric penmanship, free.

In case you feel I deserve some form of karmic punishment for pretending to be a doddering old man for my own fatty gains, on the same day I consumed this beastly lunch it was with mixed feelings I heard the managing director at work announce our figures were so good we were all getting a free McDonald’s, right now. Everyone whooped excitedly as I rubbed my gut with unease, but there was no way I was going to turn down a free McDonald’s whilst entrenched in a project to get exactly that. Consequently over the course of 1 working day I consumed 3,278 calories of McDonald’s and at one point genuinely thought I was going blind.

Verdict: Successful.

 

Method 13: Complaint

Complaining about your meal is a tried-and-tested way to score free food. If it’s too hot, too cold, too dry, too hairy, too anything, a good establishment knows to replace it swiftly and with no fuss, usually offering perhaps a free drink or dessert to make up for any undue distress. As McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc once famously said “look after the customer and the business will take care of itself.”

With this in mind I sourced a step-by-step tutorial video which delineated the easiest way to bag some free McDonald’s by complaining: you order a meal via UberEats, then once your food has arrived you select “My order had missing or incorrect food items” under ‘Issues’ on the app. It won’t be long before an UberEats Help representative will message you and if you explain the meal was inedible (our YouTube tutor in their example types “The food was all cold and it was clearly not fresh”) you should automatically receive a full refund, leaving you with food you have acquired at no expenditure.

That night I ordered a Quarter Pounder with cheese via UberEats which arrived adequately warm, and once I’d eaten it I leapt straight onto the Help Chat complaining my food was not edible. I followed the instructional video to a tee, so I was surprised the next morning when a message waited for me from a ‘ZR’ reading “We’re sorry to hear that your order didn’t meet your expectations. Unfortunately, we’re unable to provide a refund under these circumstances.” Puzzled and angered, I shot back a reply:

This battle raged on over the course of the whole day, with a new chat agent messaging me back each time. Saqib explained “there are several areas that we investigate with a temperature complaint such as duration of the order, the time at the restaurant, the time en-route etc. We have looked into this and can see that your order arrived in an acceptable amount of time. Paired with the fact that our delivery partners carry insulated bags to ensure the food arrives in an acceptable condition, we are unable to offer a refund on this occasion.”

Essentially I was being called a liar, which was absolutely true but smarted nonetheless. I threw my all into one last plea:

Even this did no good, and after speaking further with a ‘TK’ and an ‘RR’ the matter was closed for me:

It surprised me to have to debunk this video’s method which I’d assumed would be an easy success. Perhaps UberEats have clamped down on their refund policy since this technique was splashed across YouTube, they certainly now seem armed with some distance-time-temperature algorithm of sorts from which to calculate if your food truly was cold when it arrived.

I was mulling this over at work when I caught my colleague Chloe idly talking about McDonald’s, and instinctively asked her if she’d ever managed to snag any for free. She instantly recounted how she used to order a burger with no gherkins whilst her friend/accomplice would order a burger with extra gherkins, then they would reconvene outside and transfer those surplus pickles into the plain burger. Chloe would storm back in complaining the burger she’d specifically ordered plain had gherkins in which she was allergic to, her glands were bloating already and the staff better act quick with some free cheese dippers and McFlurrys else she was about to cause one hell of a scene.

An allergen complaint sounded a terrific idea to me so I decided to suddenly become lactose intolerant. I pinched a couple of American cheese slices from home (which I’m certain everyone has at the back of the fridge somewhere, whether they know it or not) and headed to a backwater McDonald’s operating out of an industrial estate.

I ordered a Big Mac with no cheese, slunk outside and round the corner to slyly insert my own cheese slice and then returned trying to look perturbed. The plan was to complain under the pretence of my supposed aversion to dairy, receive a new Big Mac with no cheese thereby leaving me with two Big Macs one of which would be free.

“Sorry to bother you,” I said, flagging down a young manager with a ponytail and cakey foundation, “but I’m severely lactose intolerant, I’ve just bought this Big Mac and…” I showed her the evidence featuring my home cheese.

“I’m so, so sorry,” she said, seemingly genuine with lots of concerned eye squinting. “Let me get you a new one straight away.” She went to take my illicitly cheesed burger from me and I recoiled.

“No, I was thinking I could keep this,” I explained, “as I hate food waste and I have a flatmate who will eat it!”

“I can’t do that,” she apologised, “we need this for wastage,” politely but firmly peeling the Big Mac from my grasp as we spoke.

Eventually I relinquished, and after 2 minutes and much yelling of the word “cheese” from the kitchen I had my plain Big Mac back which I numbly ate on the walk home. Perhaps I should have thrown in some histrionics to scare the staff into paying me off with free stock much as Chloe does; the only alternative would be McDonald’s having to publicly accuse me of being a man who carries around his own cheese with him for just such ruses, and I don’t think they’d want to do that.

Never mind, as the truly significant complaint every fast-food chain lives in fear of is finding an inanimate foreign object in the meal. McDonald’s is no stranger to this, with previous discoveries including a dead mouse in a coffee in Canada, a tooth in an order of fries in Japan, a used condom in a girl’s Happy Meal in Switzerland, and from here in England a 5-inch wire brush found tucked inside a Chicken Legend burger.

I thought I could ride on the coattails of these stories and so when I next ate at McDonald’s I snuck a red penlid into my meal:

This time I took to Twitter, sending @McDonaldsUK the incriminating photo above and a civil message that I’d found this in my Big Mac, wasn’t overly happy but was aware mistakes happened. I received absolutely no reply so moved up a level, emailing their customer service desk and CC’ing in McDonald’s CEO Paul Pomroy (should you need to do this for your own complaint, it’s paul.pomroy@uk.mcd.com). This certainly did the trick and a fortnight later I received a grovelling response from Tatiana:

“I understand from your email that you have purchased Big Mac and were shocked to find out the pen lid inside,” it read. “This is unacceptable and you shouldn’t have been served a product that didn’t meet the quality standards you rightly expect. Please accept my apologies…. With this in mind, I would like to send you some vouchers as a gesture of our goodwill.”

Fifteen pounds worth of vouchers there, making complaining officially £5 more effective than complimenting. I used these over the next three days to buy all sorts: donuts, iced lattes, a disappointing breakfast bagel that looked like an infected anus, and every time they caused havoc at the till. As I bought a McChicken sandwich the stressed manager serving me took one, went to give me some cash change, hesitated, and asked “do I give you change if you’ve paid with a voucher?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “I don’t work here.”

A lot of trouble, all told, for what I thought would be one of the simpler methods, but it ultimately secured me 2,343 free calories so ironically I’m not going to complain.

Verdict: Successful.

 

If you’re thirsty and after a free fizzy drink from McDonald’s you can simply swipe a cup from a table and serve yourself at the soda fountains. Sadly a lot of McDonald’s chains no longer have these refillable soda taps for this very reason, so here are three quick alternative ways to get a beverage on the house:

Method 14: The Spill

Ten years ago I worked at a fast-food joint for the summer selling hot dogs, an independent eatery called “Sausage Shack” owned by two men both named Mike Whittaker, no relation to one another. When I was dragging myself through my shifts if any customer came to me saying they’d spilt their drink, even if it was just an inch of Cokey backwash they’d knocked over, I’d pour them a full fresh cup for free. Of course Sausage Shack wasn’t the most orthodox of food outlets – it took management weeks to realise their veggie sausage actually contained pork after which it was quietly removed from the menu, for instance – so I was keen to see if this method would still pay dividends at a more conventional business as McDonald’s. There’s certainly precedent: in 1994 Stella Liebeck spilt a hot McCafé (admittedly all over herself), sued McDonald’s for $640,000 and won!

Rather than scald myself for this I simply snatched a discarded cup from a table, took it into the bathroom, filled it with warm tap water and then sloshed the lot over my belly.

I squelched to the counter where the crew member did a double-take when he saw the big stain down me. “I’ve just managed to spill my whole cup of Fanta,” I explained, my crest-faux-fallen.

Before I could even ask for a replacement he was wordlessly taking my cup and pouring me a fresh drink. “No ice this time please mate,” I called out after him.

In the rainstorm I got caught in afterwards as I drank my free Fanta my shirt became as indistinguishably wet as the rest of me, so this is a good ruse to pull if you sense the weather is about to turn – you’ve literally got nothing to lose.

Method 15: Minesweeping

Minesweeping is the insalubrious way to get drunk for free at nightclubs whereabouts you steal and down any unattended drinks you come across, under the omnipresent threat you might inadvertently neck a goblet of piss. Could you get free McDonald’s from similar means?

I was in the Golden Arches actually scoping out a different ploy entirely when I watched a lad cram an entire wrap into his mouth and walk out still chewing, leaving a completely untouched Fanta at his table too perfect not to minesweep. Slurped direct from the cup rather than the straw in case he had herpes, this was unequivocally another batch of free McDonald’s (95 calories).

I did find myself flagging at work a few hours following this and might have panickedly Googled how long it takes for rohypnol to kick in, relieved to see effects typically become evident within 20 minutes. It would have been odd practice to spike people’s drinks in a McDonald’s but you can never be too sure these days.

Method 16: Flat Pop

I pocketed another empty McDonald’s cup, took it home and filled it with tap water. Next I added some ice and the juice of a lemon – still basically free for me as I always have ice in my freezer for my scotches and lemons in my fridge for my gins.

Returning to McDonald’s before the ice melted I argued that I’d literally just bought this Sprite and it was completely flat, “it tastes more like lemony water!” The worker didn’t even seem surprised, she nodded her head and instantly went to make me a fresh one.

“Actually can I have a Diet Coke this time?” I asked.

“No problem,” I was told.

Three techniques there for you to try. Only fools still pay for their McDonald’s drinks.

Of course not all of these free food hacks worked. You’ve read some of my more spectacular failings above, but even methods I thought would be a doddle have proved troublesome. I’m not ready to give up on some of these plots yet, however you’d be amazed how difficult it is to get a valid student card when you’re not really a student in order to benefit from McDonald’s free cheeseburger offer, and likewise with the discounts for NHS staff and the military.

I’m confident by now I have at least attempted every plausible method of attaining free McDonald’s. There’s a secret shoppers scheme called Gapbusting where you are paid to dine at fast-food joints and review the quality of your experience, a site I have checked every goddamned day for new McDonald’s gigs to no avail. I’ve also tried every way I can imagine to become a food tester to trial, for free, new McMenu items launched (to be told repeatedly by McDonald’s that “these people are picked at random”.) I even thought back to when I briefly moonlit as a restaurant critic writing for a local food & drink magazine which netted me some free meals, so I conceived my own fictitious restaurant guide focused entirely on fast food (titled “Fast Forward”) and under the pseudonym of one David Ratner bugged McDonald’s to let me come and dine in exchange for a glowing review, to be told firmly “it is our policy not to consider unsolicited ideas from outside the McDonald’s system.”

And finally, speaking of failures, we have free cheeseburger Mike.

Method 17: Free Cheeseburger Mike

I was in the hypnagogic state between wakefulness and sleep, methods of obtaining free McDonald’s heavy on my mind. I’d been trying to devise a scheme on the premise that seagulls steal food – could I train a bird to walk into a McDonald’s, pinch someone’s chips and bring them back to me? That would technically be McDonald’s produce I had secured for free. Could I buy or build a robot seagull to be flown into restaurants to steal food??

From out of nowhere the fully-formed idea of Free Cheeseburger Mike suddenly came to me. I could picture him already, a friendly yet reticent man who had eaten so many cheeseburgers that McDonald’s recognised his achievement and bestowed him the ultimate honour of free cheeseburgers for life. Now he roams about town from McDonald’s to McDonald’s wearing a T-shirt and cap emblazoned with “FREE CHEESEBURGER MIKE”, believing himself to be a minor local celebrity. It was a character I wanted to bring to life immediately, so I shelved the robot seagull idea for now and ordered myself some iron-on decals. Three weeks passed before they arrived, in an A4 ‘Do Not Bend’ envelope which had been bent into my postbox.

I felt Mike needed a corroborating letter from McDonald’s themselves, which I tapped up as follows:

Dear Mike,
Here at McDonald’s we are absolutely thrilled that you have reached the 50,000 cheeseburger milestone, what an achievement. We are delighted to have played such a big part in your life and honoured to be your cheeseburger restaurant of choice.
A huge further thank you for your wonderful donations to The Ronald McDonald Charity, as well as the lavish gifts you have sent us here at Head Office. We are grateful from the bottom of our hearts.
In recognition of everything I am proud to offer you the privilege of free cheeseburgers for life from any of our McDonald’s outlets across Europe and North America.
Mike, our sincere thanks once again. All of us here wish you and your family a long, happy future.

Printing the letter out it looked pretty respectable with its own logo, reference number and signature (of fictitious McDonald’s CEO Steve Westbrook), but it seemed too crisp and clean for a piece of prized correspondence Mike would have taken everywhere with him. To that end I folded and crumpled the paper a little, and dunked the corner in ketchup for a realistic stain.

I ventured to a McDonald’s where they wouldn’t recognise me, only realising when I got there that a) in the cold my “Free Cheeseburger Mike” T-shirt exhibited my nipples obscenely and b) to the unaware this probably looked like a gang member named ‘Cheeseburger Mike’ had been wrongfully incarcerated and I was campaigning for his release.

A huge, ursine fellow named Sam was serving as I asked for a cheeseburger. “Yep, that’ll be 99p please,” he said.

As I’d practised I indicated my T-shirt and said “no, you see, I’m free cheeseburger Mike, so…”

Sam laughed, then realised I wasn’t laughing. There was a pause. I produced my letter from my pocket, managing to tear the damn thing as I did so. Sam took it over to his manager and they both read it in the kitchen.

The tall chap in the tie then went to fetch his manager, a petite blonde woman who scrutinised the letter herself. A few more staff members congregated to read Mike’s McDonald’s contract, and I thought I should probably amble over.

“Sorry, just making sure everything’s alright?” I ventured.

They all looked up as one and suddenly I had a lot of eyes on me. One of the workers, a Spanish lady, shrieked with laughter and pointed. “Ohh you’re Free Cheeseburger Mike!” she declared. “I just thought we’d received this letter in the post!”

The blonde manager calmed everyone down and took me to one side. “Is there a problem?” I asked. “In London I use this letter and get free cheeseburgers all the time?”

“That’s the issue,” she explained gently, “here in Bournemouth unfortunately we’re franchised.” She said the word “franchise” oddly, like “fronshise”, but she had a point: 70% of McDonald’s restaurants are independently owned and operated by franchisees, so handing out discounts is entirely at their discretion. It means there may be some benevolent McDonald’s based out of Kent or Leeds that would humour Mike with the very foodstuff and price-point he’s known for, but here in Bournemouth it wasn’t going to fly.

I returned to the counter and paid Sam £1 for my cheeseburger, telling him he could keep the change. “If it had been up to me mate,” he said with a grin, “I’d have let you have it.”

“I know, Sam,” I told him, “you’re a good lad.”

Verdict: Failure.

 

That about draws the line under my McSperiments for now. Thanks to the ten successful means listed above I have gorged myself for free over the past few months to the extent it now feels galling and unnatural to actually have to pay for my McDonald’s food.

On the assumption that our current plague doesn’t wither the planet to a husk and restaurants do start opening again, as mentioned the scheme I recommend most is method 1. Hitting ‘Cancel’ at the self-service payment screen is not only effortless but easily excusable should you get caught out, you can simply maintain that you were confused whereabouts you had to queue. It works the majority of the time too, making it more reliable even than approaching the counter on your Birthday as a homeless, lactose-intolerant, diabetic saint in a “Free Filet-O-Fish Jimmy” shirt.

Single Post Navigation

← Older Entry

Newer Entry →