It’s fast, affordable, and as convenient as it gets! Fast food has been around since the 1920s and isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, but there is one major downside: the undeniable lack of food safety and cleanliness in some of these restaurants. Fast food employees share their first-hand accounts of disgusting experiences including stories from McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Burger King to name a few. This content has been edited for clarity.
Temperature Control
“While working at McDonald’s in the mid 1980s, I was shocked at some of the things I witnessed going on in the kitchen, but one particular practice stands out as the grossest thing I’ve ever seen done with a hamburger.
It gets really hot standing over a grill and next to a couple of deep fryers, especially in the summertime. The teenaged male cooks, however, came up with a way to stay cool while frying up the meat.
The beef patties were taken straight from the deep freezer and were like hard chunks of ice before being placed on the grill. Those unscupulous burger flippers, when feeling overheated, would place frozen meat patties under their shirts and in each armpit to cool off. Then, because all items were carefully counted, they would remove the burgers from under their arms and throw them on the grill.
The cooks joked about how any germs they’d leave behind would get killed during the grilling process. They didn’t think about how teen boys also have hair and sweat under their arms, and occasionally deodorant.
Unfortunately, I was at the register when a customer approached with a partially eaten quarter-pounder and a look of disgust on his face. He said his burger tasted very strange and he wanted a refund. Before I could respond, his female companion squealed, spit a chunk of meat out onto the table and raced to the counter to show me a wiry black hair on her napkin.
I glared back at those cooks with an infuriating stink-eye, and apologetically refunded the money to the disgusted couple.
I quit that night.
I never told my manager about the cooks’ crude way of cooling off. I was a timid 16-year-old girl, and those boys could be brutally creative with getting even. If they could contaminate the customers’ food, I hated to think about what they could do to me!”
Floor Meat
“Back in the late 80s when I worked at Wendy’s in Tampa, they would keep a stainless steel bin under the oven in the kitchen. The ovens were up on legs so there was a space big enough to cover the bin with about six inches above it. The bin sat there all day and night and the cooks would throw the unused and unsold prepared hamburgers into it which collected dust, debris, and dripped grease.
I thought they, like other fast food restaurants, were putting the meat in this bin to count at night as waste so it could be written off. Unfortunately, I was wrong. They put it in the walk-in refrigerator at the end of the day and ground it up the next day for taco meat on the taco bar (that they used to have) and chili.
I don’t know about you, but there’s something extremely gross about eating old meat that has been sitting on a floor all day. I can’t imagine it was very healthy and I never ate from their taco bar or their chili ever again after witnessing that.
Also, when we would close the restaurant and had to clean up, we were given one washcloth to clean our areas. We had to wipe down the counters, food reciprocals, and anything and everything around us with one washcloth. Even though I would repeatedly rinse the washcloth, I can’t imagine that it was very clean. Wendy’s was disgusting.”
“Leave Them Be”
“If nobody has ever told you before, allow me to be the first: never eat soft-serve ice cream from a fast-food restaurant.
Many years ago, I was employed at a regionally well-known burger joint in the southern U.S. It was my first job and I was excited to learn how to do something productive and earn a few dollars on my own.
The first several weeks for any new employee consisted of learning to clean everything. You cleaned the greasy grill. You mopped fry grease. You washed hundreds of trays and utensils. You even steam-cleaned the dirty bathrooms after entire baseball teams left the restaurant. However, the absolute most disgusting thing I ever saw was when I was taught how to do the weekly cleaning on the soft-serve ice cream machine.
This was an involved process, so there wasn’t time to do it every single day. That meant that there were long periods of time each day when there was nobody in the store, and all that delicious sugary goodness was just sitting in this big metal contraption, undisturbed.
My trainer opened the metal door and started pulling hoses and mysterious plastic bits out. It didn’t seem terribly dirty, so I initially wondered what exactly needed to be cleaned. But then I understood. As he got to the back of the dispenser, he was calmly explaining the disassembly process when all of a sudden we both jumped back in a panic.
Out of the ice cream reservoir crawled half a dozen cockroaches.
I almost threw up thinking about all the kids I’d seen eating cones served from that very machine.
What was the worst part? I asked the guy whether we needed to do anything to keep the roaches from returning and he said, ‘Nah, they get in there all the time.’
Delicious.”
Panda Ex-Gross
“This is funny because to me, all fast-food places are gross in various ways. However, you will not find all of these infractions at every establishment of each fast-food chain. I’m sure you have heard of the sludge in the McDonald’s specialty coffee machine or the disgusting flies and bugs in all these chain’s ice machines. I can even look beyond the once discovered dead rat in the fryer oil vat as well.
If I can look beyond all of these very disgusting infractions because I do not go to these establishments, you may be asking me what do I think is disgusting. To that, I have a very specific story about what grossed me out beyond all things.
Panda Express. You and I may have thought, Panda Express? How could that be anything close to disgusting as all their food is fresh? You can see everything that is cooking right behind you and there are no fancy machines, right? Wrong.
I remember a long time ago, I was friends with this Panda Express employee and he was telling me that a they cook new batches of food most times. However, he said sometimes they would have a batch of something like orange chicken close to closing hours that no one came and bought. The manager taught them to put a lid over the chicken, leave it for the night, and pour some sauce over it the next morning even though it was gross and dried out.
Not only is that gross because chicken was left out overnight, but people do not expect this kind of disgusting practice at places like Panda Express. When I go to Panda Express, I go in hopes of getting better quality food and cleanliness compared to regular fast-food joints, but this abomination makes me lose all hope in humanity.”
What A Mess!
“I work at McDonald’s, and I thought I had seen everything up until a week and a half ago. I was on one of my ten-minute breaks during an eight-hour shift, and as usual, I went to go use the restroom. I usually take all ten minutes of my break to do all of my business, figuring that I’m not paid enough to care about customers needing to use the restroom (hey, they can wait their turn like everyone else).
Little did I know, this would come to bite me in the butt.
As I was sitting there, I heard the door open and heard this guy moaning up a storm. He was saying things like ‘Oh no, come on!’ Understanding it was an actual emergency, I hurried to finish up. As I exited the stall and proceeded toward the sink, I saw what was the most disgusting thing I’ve seen not just in a restaurant, but in my entire life.
This guy who was still moaning was sitting on the sink with his pants down. There was poop EVERYWHERE. It was all over the sink, in the bowl, on the counter, dripping down onto the floor, smeared on the wall, EVERYWHERE. This guy had a jersey or something on that covered his front, so I at least didn’t see anything else but I was absolutely horrified. I had no idea what to do. We made eye contact for about half a second before I rushed out of the restroom.
As I was intensely horrified, I bolted straight into the dining room.
Still amazed and shocked at what I’d just seen, I blurted out, ‘Hey, some guy just pooped all over the sink!’
There were about ten people in the dining room or waiting in line and waiting for their orders and I started hearing a cacophony of noise coming from everyone. I’m sure my managers wanted to either murder me or kill themselves for what I had just said, and I’m not really sure which.
At that point, the perpetrator of the horrendous crime had exited the building, never to be seen again. We should have had him arrested for vandalism or something but he had gotten out of there as quickly as he could.
We called up the head manager for our store who ordered the front supervisor to get some money out of the safe to buy some bleach from the Walgreens across the street. He did so, and under the orders of our leading manager, cleaned up the bathroom. He had a faux mask made of the white cloths we used to clean and earplugs shoved up his nose to block the smell.
This will live on as a legend in our store for years to come. I know that it was the worst day on the job for me, and probably for my manager—massive props to him for being willing to do it.”
Bad Aim
“A couple of months ago, I was working a closing shift at the fast food place I work at. When 10:30 p.m. rolled around, I walked into the women’s restroom with my multifold paper towels, hand soap bottle, stainless steel polish, washcloth, Spic & Span, and trash bags ready to deep clean the bathroom like I did every night shift.
When I walked in, I was immediately grossed out by the smell but figured someone had just not flushed after they were done. I wasn’t about to spend the next half hour cleaning the restroom with that smell assaulting all of my senses, so I opened the stall door to flush the toilet.
What I saw was the most disgusting thing I have ever seen.
There was a literal pile of poop on the floor less than a foot away from the toilet.
I stared at it for a minute and then walked out of the restroom. There was a customer at the counter, but what I had just seen had thrown me so off guard that I ignored the customer and walked straight through the kitchen, all the way to the office in the back of the restaurant.
I told the manager who was working that shift what had happened and that I was not cleaning it up. Honestly, if he had told me to clean it, I would have quit my job on the spot. He ended up having the manager in training do it.
I can’t convey to you how disgusting it was. I don’t want to go into detail because it would definitely gross some people out but the smell was absolutely horrific. It smelled like something was decomposing.
The worst part is that the toilet was literally right there. Like, ten inches away. Whoever it was did it intentionally. They walked into our bathroom and unloaded on the floor. It confused me beyond comprehension.
The only good takeaway (for me) was the joke my coworker made about it being the ‘mystery poop’ because that week we had been expecting a mystery shop. I thought it was really funny at the time.”
It Depends
“This happened at the first restaurant I owned which was a franchise for a small local chain. I was doing some paperwork up by the cash register when a customer came to tell me someone made a mess at the corner booth. I grabbed a little sanitizer bucket with a towel figuring it would involve ketchup or something on the table, but I was terribly wrong. There was poo spread all over the vinyl bench seat, mostly on the back rest, and I noticed a trail of poo leading to the bathroom.
I quickly started cleaning up and out of the bathroom came an older lady and I assume her even older mother who had a shirt tied around her waist and no pants on. I stood there dumbstruck along with several customers as they made for the door as quickly as possible considering grandma was using a walker. I didn’t know what to say, especially since they came in fairly regularly.
Once I got the bench in decent enough shape, I put a reserved sign on it and went to the bathroom. It quickly became apparent that grandma had severly overfilled her Depends they cleaned her up in the bathroom while trying to put her pants and such in the small garbage can. Unfortunately, one of them stepped in the mess and spread it around the floor and carpet on the way out.
It took a while to get it all cleaned up and smelling decent and I had to make a barter with a carpet cleaning guy to get the carpet sanitary again.
Two of my happiest days were opening that place and selling it.”
The Olives Are Moving
“I was the advertising manager for a radio station that broadcast from the main station in the city about 60 miles from me. My sales office was in a smallish country town. We sold local airtime and live broadcast events.
I had been avoiding one local pizza restaurant because of the evil reputation of the owner. But I was begged, literally begged, by this owner one day to help him turn his business around. I tried to tell him we were too booked, but he was persistent. Finally, I said I would see if my boss would okay it. Because it was an opportunity for more money, my boss encouraged working with him and it was the nightmare I expected it to be.
We set up a few live broadcast events and the owner argued over every tiny charge even though I was getting him promotional items for free, the ‘friends and family’ discount on a popular local country and western band, and even added some free airtime, courtesy of my boss. The more business we created, the more this guy resented me.
One day, the owner got a promotional idea he said, smugly, would be better than any of the previous promotions we had done for his business. He informed me that he had set up pony rides for the weekend starting on Friday. He had rented ponies from a local stable to give rides to the kids and he wanted a two-hour live broadcast for the event. The pony ride plan had one major drawback, which I tried to warn him about.
But, before I could explain, he interrupted me, saying, ‘It’s already done, let’s not have your usual negativity.’
His place had a popular outdoor seating area. The tables filled up as families came out to eat pizza and watch their toddlers on the ponies, plodding slowly around in a circle. Unfortunately, ponies tend to leave “piles” behind them, if you know what I mean.
By Saturday afternoon these piles had attracted swarms of flies. I suggested to the owner that maybe he should get one of his employees to remove the mess. He had one of the busboys shovel the horse poo toward the parking lot side, like five yards farther away, making landmines for customers returning to the parking lot.
This only served to agitate the flies and naturally, the aroma of pizza attracted them into the kitchen for a bite of something tastier. The cooks were hustling to put pizzas out for the growing lunch crowd and pretty soon, most of the crowd had pizza at their tables.
Because of the hectic pace, the waitresses didn’t notice that some of the ‘black olives’ on the pizzas were moving. The owner had just come up to me, smirking and bragging about how well his brilliant idea was working, when the fly chaos erupted.
‘EEEW!’
‘ICK!’
‘GROSS!’
And one kid with a piercing voice, ‘Daddy, there’s flies stuck to our pizza!’ that turned heads.
I walked over to the table. Sure enough, there was a fly, wing-side down, stuck to the cheese, not quite dead with his little legs waving slowly. I looked around to see the other diners inspecting their pizzas in horror. They didn’t all have flies in them, but one by one, chairs were pushed back, and children were gathered and bundled out to cars. Customers avoided eye contact with the owner.
In the meantime, he turned bright red and stomped over to me. He began loudly berating me for “my” terrible idea in front the exiting customers. He had quickly figured where to shift the blame, and was making a big show of it. I wasn’t having it.
My louder speech went something like, ‘You are as full of horse poop as this parking lot is! I TRIED to tell you at the beginning. I TRIED to tell you last night. YOU didn’t want to hear it!’
I wasn’t going to have the community blaming my station for this fiasco. And that instant blame shift? Oh, that set me on fire. I don’t exactly remember everything I said, but it covered his rudeness to my crew, how cheap he was, and his ingratitude for all the business we built up for him.
I finished with, ‘You are never going to advertise with us EVER again, and you can take your FLY pizza and stick it where the sun doesn’t shine!’
On Monday, I was pretty sure I was going to be fired so I didn’t wait for the call, but went straight to my boss’s office to find out he LOVED the whole thing! You couldn’t buy this kind of buzz, especially for a small radio station! And he was tickled that I had finally lost it with the rude pizza owner.
I started to laugh, then my boss started to laugh, hard, and the station crew, who had been watching us out of the corners of their eyes, started to laugh. My boss would be wiping his eyes, then someone would say ‘FLY pizza!’ and it would start all over.
I didn’t lose a single customer. I’m pretty sure I gained a couple because of the legend I had unwillingly created.”
Clean Up On Aisle Number Two
“I worked at Hungry Jack’s, basically the Australian Burger King. One day, I saw my manager walk up to some guy who put his hands up in a ‘halt’ way while shaking his head. My manager went up to another person, then another. At that point, I asked him what was up.
A child had pooped on the slide.
Now two things here:
- It wasn’t an open slide.
- It wasn’t solid.
I got to work immediately.
I filled up four buckets of soapy and sanitized water, brought two mops, a food tray (it was later thrown out), and several rubbish bags.
Warning: It’s already gotten gross, but it’s about to get worse.
The slide was dripping through the joint tube bits so I put the food trays beneath that. Next, I covered the exit with rubbish bags multi-lined, backed with a bin. Then I went to the top of the slide and immediately poured two buckets down.
This is when the slow part began.
I got in the slide, feet first in a squatting position, with the two mops in front of me. Using all my strength, I used the mops to clean my way down and control how fast I was going. The fact that I could slip at any second and run my clothes right through the mess was horrifying.
But I did it.
I got to the bottom of the slide not having seen a single bit of the mess except for the bin full of brown water. I went back to the top, poured another bucket down, and did the same thing again. After that, I grabbed the last bucket and hand-scrubbed every inch of the inside of that slide. Then, I gave it a quick rinse with a bucket of hot water.
The bag was disposed of, as were many of the tools I used. Anything we couldn’t throw away had a good reason not to be and was promptly cleaned in the heat room (a room with a hose that has water that reaches 94C/200F).
That slide had never been cleaner, and the playground was locked off for the next two days until proper cleaners could come and do it their way. In the end, my manager was very happy with me and awarded me 50 dollars of free food, but I only used eight dollars of it because I don’t eat much.”
Heat Lamps
“I worked in two different fast food places back in the day. Even though they were the same franchise, Burger King, they were miles apart in terms of management, cleanliness and customer satisfaction. It isn’t the name on the restaurant that determines your experience.
The first Burger King I worked in was during college in Boston. It was almost always clean and the food was cooked fresh as much as possible. Every three hours, we washed the floors and made sure the bathrooms were in good condition. However, the second Burger King I worked at, this was not the case. It was in New York and was never really clean. The two managers I worked for in five months almost never left their office unless we were expecting a visit from corporate headquarters. If you showed up to eat after the rush, odds are your fries would be lukewarm, your burger would have shriveled from sitting under the heat lamps for 30 minutes, and nobody cared whether you enjoyed your food, your day, or your life.
Neither place was really pleasant to work at. When I went home after an eight hour shift, the bottoms of my shoes were too slippery to walk on a wet sidewalk and my hair smelled like french fries. Even at three a.m, I always, always took a shower before getting into bed because waking up to that smell was nauseating.
While the Boston one wasn’t so bad, I wouldn’t touch a burger from that New York Burger King with a ten-foot pole. I haven’t eaten in a fast food place since that second job, unless it was the only option in town.”
