9 Ways to Become Employee of the Week at McDonald’s

Last Updated on November 13, 2025 by Michael

Look, everyone pretends they’re above McDonald’s. Then 2 AM rolls around and suddenly they know exactly which location has a working ice cream machine.

That Employee of the Week parking spot though? Three feet closer to the door? That’s not just convenience. That’s respect. That’s your grainy security camera photo taped to the break room wall like you just got inducted into the Fast Food Hall of Fame.

You want it. Here’s how you get it.

1. Master the Art of the Fake Smile

There’s this moment at 5:47 AM when someone orders a Filet-O-Fish. Your soul leaves your body. It floats up to the ceiling, looks down at you still smiling, and whispers “what are we doing here?”

But your face? Your face doesn’t flinch.

Here’s the thing about customer service smiles: they’re not about happiness. Happiness at McDonald’s is suspicious. What kind of psychopath is genuinely thrilled about french fries at dawn? No, what you need is something far more powerful—the smile of someone who has transcended human emotion entirely.

Dead eyes, living mouth. It’s a combination that says “I’m professionally pleasant but I haven’t felt anything since the great nugget shortage of 2019.”

You know those people who practice smiling in mirrors? Amateurs. You practice in the walk-in freezer while your extremities go numb. If you can maintain that deranged grin while literally dying of hypothermia, Karen’s meltdown about pickle distribution becomes white noise. Beautiful, irrelevant white noise.

Your facial muscles will develop their own consciousness. Sometimes you’ll be at your grandmother’s funeral and realize you’re beaming like you just won the lottery. This is when you know you’ve made it. (Stop smiling at the funeral though. People talk.)

2. Become the Menu Whisperer

Every McDonald’s has that one employee who knows things. Forbidden things. Things corporate pretends don’t exist.

You’re going to be that employee.

But knowing the secret menu isn’t enough. You need to understand the alchemy. Sprite mixed with Hi-C Orange doesn’t just taste like diabetes—it tastes like the summer of 2003 when your biggest problem was missing Saturday morning cartoons. You’re not serving food. You’re serving nostalgia wrapped in systematic disappointment.

3. The Fryer Will Test You

Let’s be clear: the fryer hates you.

It’s not personal. The fryer hates everyone. It’s a vengeful god that demands sacrifice (usually your forearm hair) and offers nothing but third-degree burns and the permanent smell of canola oil in return. You don’t operate the fryer. You enter into an abusive relationship with it where you’re pretty sure you’re losing but you can’t stop coming back.

True mastery looks like this: four baskets going simultaneously, each at different stages of done-ness, while you’re having a full conversation about last night’s game, never looking down, moving purely on instinct and the rhythm of beeps that haunt your dreams. Your manager watches in awe. OSHA would have a stroke. The fryer finally, grudgingly, respects you.

Your uniform tells the story—a Jackson Pollock of grease splatters, each mark a battle won or lost. Mostly lost. But you’re still standing.

4. Develop the Voice™

Forget your regular voice. It’s dead now.

The McDonald’s Voice exists in a dimension physicists haven’t discovered yet. Three octaves higher than comfortable. Loud enough to penetrate bulletproof glass, soft enough to not scare children, enthusiastic enough to make people question if you’re being held hostage and this is a cry for help.

“WOULD YOU LIKE TO MAKE THAT A MEAL?”

It’s not a question. It’s a battle cry. A declaration. You’re not taking orders—you’re performing a one-person Broadway show about processed food for an audience that’s checking Instagram while you slowly die inside.

5. Become an Efficiency Psychopath

It’s 2 AM. Normal people are sleeping. You’re color-coding sauce packets with a label maker you bought with your own money because the current system is chaos and chaos is the enemy of excellence.

Nobody asked for this. Your manager didn’t want a PowerPoint presentation about “optimizing pickle distribution patterns.” She wanted you to mop. But here you are, explaining the Henderson Method (your last name isn’t Henderson, you just like how it sounds) while she stares at you with a mixture of concern and reluctant admiration.

You’ve created algorithms for predicting ice cream machine failures. Spoiler: it’s always broken, but now you have math to prove it. You’ve developed a proprietary napkin folding technique that saves 0.3 seconds per customer. Over the course of a year, that’s four whole minutes saved. Four. Whole. Minutes.

Your coworkers think you’ve snapped.

They’re right.

But your sauce packets have never been more organized.

6. Drive-Thru ESP

The drive-thru speaker sounds like someone’s trying to communicate through a kazoo underwater during a tornado.

“Mmmph… twenty… nugggmmm… no… orange thing.”

Everyone else hears static and sadness. You hear “Twenty-piece nuggets, no sauce, large Hi-C Orange, and they’re about to ask if you still have Szechuan sauce from that Rick and Morty thing.”

You don’t just take orders. You predict them. Ford F-150 at 11:47 PM? That’s a McGangBang and shame. Prius at lunch? Salad and superiority complex. Minivan at 3:15? A parent who’s one spilled apple juice away from driving into the sunset and never coming back.

7. Morning Shift Madness

Morning shift workers aren’t built like other humans. They’ve evolved. Or devolved. Science isn’t sure.

4 AM: Legally dead but moving
4:30 AM: Blood has been replaced with coffee
5 AM: Can see through time
5:30 AM: Speaking fluent hash brown
6 AM: Achieving speeds that violate several laws of physics
7 AM: “Is seven Red Bulls lethal? Let’s find out!”

You know you’ve truly arrived when you’re having philosophical debates with kitchen equipment. The egg cooker understands you. The coffee machine judges you. The toaster? The toaster has seen things. Terrible things. Like someone ordering ice cream at 5:15 AM. What kind of person does that?

Serial killers. That’s who.

8. The Art of Fake Productivity

Empty McDonald’s. 2:47 PM. The void stares back.

This is when champions are made. Lesser employees lean against counters. You? You’re aggressively wiping the same spot for the ninth time while maintaining unblinking eye contact with your supervisor. You’re not cleaning. You’re declaring war on invisible bacteria with the passion of someone who just remembered they have a college degree and this is what they’re doing with it.

Walk everywhere like you’re late for something incredibly important. Carry random objects. A mop. A box. Your shattered dreams of being a marine biologist. Doesn’t matter. Movement equals productivity in the eyes of management.

You have loud conversations with yourself about “quarterly projections” while restocking napkins. You don’t know what quarterly projections are. Neither does your manager. But it sounds important and that’s what matters.

9. The Nuclear Option: Actually Give a Damn

Okay. This is where things get weird.

What if you actually cared? Not “please don’t fire me” caring. Not “I need this job” caring. But genuine, borderline disturbing investment in whether someone enjoys their nuggets.

You remember that Jim gets seven sugars in his coffee. Seven. Jim has problems, but those problems are between Jim and his pancreas. You notice when an order looks wrong before the customer does. You slip an extra nugget in the 10-piece because life is hard and nuggets are tiny fried pieces of joy in this capitalist hellscape we call existence.

People don’t know how to process this. Their brains short-circuit. “Why is this McDonald’s employee treating me like a human being? Is this a prank? Am I being filmed?”

No prank. You’ve just decided to bring chaos into the world through aggressive competence. Your manager doesn’t know whether to promote you or call an exorcist.

Twenty years from now, you’ll be doing whatever real adults do. Mortgages or whatever. But late at night, when the world is quiet, you’ll remember. The smell of hash browns at dawn. The way you automatically say “my pleasure” even though that’s Chick-fil-A’s thing. The beautiful, shining moment when your terrible security camera photo went up on that wall.

Was it worth it? The permanent fry smell in your DNA? The way you flinch when you hear beeping? The fact that you can never eat nuggets again without critiquing the breading-to-meat ratio?

You bet your McFlurry it was.

Now get out there and show them what happens when someone with nothing left to lose gets access to a heat lamp and a dream.

The ice cream machine is still broken. It always was. It always will be. This is the way.