‘I make them wait another 10 seconds lol’: McDonald’s workers reveal why customers who yell this greeting get ignored

If there’s something better than satisfying a craving for McDonald’s, it’s going through the drive-thru. Ordering a double cheeseburger or breakfast at any time of day is more enjoyable when you don’t even have to leave your vehicle. But next time you pull up to the Golden Arches to pick up a pre-work McGriddle or a Genshin Impact collab meal, something unexpected might happen.

Since the fast food chain has been around since 1940 and customers have used the drive-thru since 1975, McDonald’s has become a staple of many people’s lives. You know the whole menu (but maybe not as well as Trump does), and have likely eaten there more times than you can even remember. But have you heard why some customers are being ignored?

McDonald’s employees ignoring drive-thru customers, explained

There are many reasons why customers should be ignored. If they’re mean, disrespectful, or aggressive, they should be refused service. But that’s not why drive-thru customers have tried to place an order for McNuggets and had to wait. So what’s going on?

According to The Irish Mirror, TikTok user @maccaworkaddict shared that when some customers say “hello” impatiently the second they pull up to a McDonald’s drive-thru, some employees won’t help them immediately and will make them wait. She wrote on her video, “You can’t keep ignoring the car in the drive-thru because they screamed hello as soon as they get there.” One user told her, “Each time they say hello I make them wait another 10 seconds lol.” In any case, it would appear that the issue isn’t greeting the drive-thru workers, it’s implicitly demanding immediate service.

As The Irish Mirror pointed out, some people thought that retaliating by ignoring the offending drive-thru patrons was the wrong thing for an employee to do, and others felt that anyone working at McDonald’s could at least say it’s going to be a minute, so the customer knows that they can order soon. It’s easy to imagine that it’s stressful working at a fast food drive-thru and of course everyone deserves to be shown respect and compassion. But customers who say hi are, more than likely, just trying to be polite.

How often does this happen? I’d argue it’s probably not happening all the time or at every single location, since that seems pretty impossible. But, given the low wages and unfair nature of working in the retail or service industry, it’s easy to understand why people are fed up. According to EPI’s Wage Tracker, some people earn an hourly wage of less than $10 at McDonald’s (23% to be exact), which is awful.

It’s no secret that people can behave poorly in fast food or other restaurants. After the TikTok was posted (it appears, after searching TikTok for the username, that it may have now been deleted), The New York Post spoke to other McDonald’s employees about bad behavior. If you order at the drive-thru, you need to share what you want right away instead of causing a big slow-down. A man named Gregory who works at the chain said, “People are less caring nowadays than they used to be. They are less patient.”

The New York Post also suggests that McDonald’s customers should stop claiming there was a hair in the food they just ate so they can get another free meal, which is just terrible behavior. High schoolers apparently “throw pickles at the wall” according to someone who used to work at the fast food chain if they don’t want to eat them. That’s definitely not cool… but it does sound like something a teenager would do.

Despite the debate about whether you should say hello or not, going through the McDonald’s drive-thru is still convenient and great. It’s also not going to take you very long. The Hill reported on a 2023 study of the time it took people to go through the drive-thrus of various fast food chains. While McDonald’s was the second longest at 413.06 seconds, that’s still not a long wait for some hot, crispy French fries.