McDonald’s new menu hacks are a stoner’s dream come true

That being said, the fan-inspired creations are a lazy marketing ploy.

Food
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If a 550-calorie Big Mac isn’t enough to fill you up, McDonalds just introduced a monstrous new addition to its menu: Starting January 31, customers will be able to combine different meals to create rather chaotic, sloppy sandwiches.

McDonald’s is calling their new party trick “menu hacks,” which so far will consist of four limited edition sandwiches: the “Crunchy Double,” which will be McNuggets stuffed into a Double Cheeseburger; the “Surf+Turf,” which will be Filet-O-Fish and a Double Cheeseburger combined; “Hash Brown McMuffin,” which is honestly the only one I can’t hate on; and my personal least favorite, “Land, Air & Sea,” which will be a Big Mac, McChicken, and Filet-O-Fish crammed into a burger that can barely stand upright.

The kicker? You’ll get the individual items and have to assemble the burgers on your own, probably because it’s actually impossible to keep them from falling apart. Ordering these munchies high will be easy. The rest, perhaps not so much.

Although some outlets are calling McDonald’s new menu a “really smart” business move, honestly, long COVID hasn’t given any of us enough cognitive impairment to fall for it. Sure, it’s going to help McDonald’s bottom line because they won’t have to train their employees to prepare entirely new meals and they already have all the ingredients.

But it also feels like the perfect example of corporations doing what’s convenient for them, tying it in a bow, getting all of us to get excited and expecting us to forget that they’re actually horrible. It wasn’t long ago that workers were protesting the company for its alleged culture of sexual harassment. These new menu items prove, to me at least, that McDonalds doesn’t actually care about making their food healthier, even though they keep claiming that they do.

Their marketing ploy is based on menu hacks that were inspired by young people on social media, particularly TikTok, who have been mixing and matching items for years, including using hash browns as breakfast sandwich buns. Although the fast food chain will be working with TikTok food influencers to promote their meal hacks, so far it doesn’t seem like any creators have been credited on McDonald’s website for coming up with these ideas and I wonder if any of them will get the check they deserve.