When I caught an old roommate of mine removing all the condiments from the refrigerator and stacking them into a precarious pyramid in the middle of the kitchen, she simply smiled sheepishly, shrugged and said, “Just having fun with no money again.”
A similar ethos seems to have led a young hacker to release an instructional video on how to crack the McDonald’s self-service menu to get one free hamburger—and 10 free burger-free burgers, aka pickle-and-ketchup sandwiches.
The helpful video gives detailed instructions on how to save one whole dollar, while creating an inordinate amount of food waste. Basically, order a burger off the dollar menu, then customize the burger by subtracting the beef patty, which, according to the hacker, “takes $1.10 off the dollar hamburger,” resulting in a balance of negative 10 cents. Repeat that 10 times so you end up with “10 pattyless burgers” in your order, and then add one regular hamburger to the order.
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“When it gets to this screen, you’ll find that all the pattyless burgers have $1.10 taken off them so they’re all -$.10 and there’s a regular burger, which is just a buck, leaving the total at $0,” says the ingenious cheapskate narrating the video. It’s a fairly useless hack that results in a lot of food waste (although the burger-less burger is one of the few vegan options at McDonald’s), but it’s certainly one way to have fun with no money.
We reached out to McDonald’s for comment and will update if we hear back.
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