The 12 Worst Mistakes In McDonald's History

When a big chain like McDonald's is in hot water, the mistake can seem even worse than it is because of the chain's size and popularity. The recent onion recall, for example, would be bad no matter what brand had to deal with it. However, the sheer size of the company and the number of people who eat there meant that many more people were affected and exposed to E. coli.

In this case, the root of the problem was not the fault of McDonald's — the affected onions were apparently contaminated before they reached the restaurants. Today, McDonald's remains a favorite of many despite the recall. However, the company has made some stunning mistakes of its own that could have you scratching your head, trying to figure out how on earth a successful corporation could have made such strange choices. Take a look at the 12 worst mistakes in McDonald's history, and be thankful that the decisions that led to these mistakes were reversed.

The hot coffee lawsuit, or Liebeck v. McDonald's, is really the biggest mistake that the company has ever made. Not only did it turn out that locations were serving coffee that was much hotter than it should have been, but the McDonald's defense team also left a bad impression. Unfortunately, much of the details never made it to the public, so many people still think of the lawsuit as one that was frivolous.

There's too much detail to list here, but in a nutshell: 79-year-old Stella Liebeck and her grandson went to get coffee at McDonald's. Liebeck was a passenger, and her grandson was driving. They parked, and Liebeck tried to remove the lid on the coffee cup after steadying the cup between her legs. All of the coffee spilled in her lap, and she suffered third-degree burns. Much of her skin on her genitals and inner thighs burned away, requiring skin grafts and hospitalization, and it took two years for her to recover.

Liebeck wanted the company to cover $20,000 in medical bills, and she sent McDonald's a letter. The company countered with a minimal payment, the case went to court, and the legal team for McDonald's messed up. The jury felt like the company wasn't taking the burns seriously, despite expert testimony, including from a McDonald's manager — they confirmed that the coffee was much too hot when sold and that many other people had been burned. The court awarded Liebeck millions more than she originally asked for.

One of the more mind-boggling mistakes that McDonald's has made was a 2019 promotion for Halloween at its Portugal locations. The promotion featured a strawberry dessert with the name of "Sundae Bloody Sundae." You know, like the song by U2. However, as anyone who knows why U2 wrote the song can tell you, the "Bloody Sunday" in question was a massacre of 14 people in Northern Ireland in 1972. British soldiers shot at protestors who were unarmed, which is not an event that you'd really want linked to a joke involving a strawberry sundae.

There were actually two Bloody Sundays; the one in 1972 and an earlier one in 1920, when British troops fired on people at a Gaelic football match in Ireland while looking for Irish Republican Army members. That little play on words for the promotion was doubly painful for people in both Ireland and Northern Ireland. McDonald's apologized and removed all material related to the Halloween promotion.

In 2016, McDonald's debuted a Happy Meal toy fitness tracker called the Step-it activity wristband that was meant to help kids become more active. There was some question about whether this would help kids seek out more physical activity, or if it would just turn out to be a marketing ploy by McDonald's. Instead, it turned into one of the worst mistakes the company had ever made when parents started to report that the tracker gave their children physical burns.

One woman reported that her child had played with the tracker for fewer than 10 minutes before being burned. Some parents reported blisters, and over 70 reports in total convinced McDonald's to discontinue the tracker immediately. The company recalled the trackers that had already been distributed and apologized to consumers. To add insult to those injuries, reviews of the tracker claimed it wasn't that good to begin with.

For a brief time, McDonald's offered an all-day breakfast menu. You could get hash browns or other breakfast foods well into the evening, and customers loved the options they had to choose from. In 2020, however, McDonald's ended the all-day breakfast menu. Many customers blamed it on the pandemic, but it turns out that wasn't the real reason why the change was made.

Having the breakfast menu open all day took up a lot of room on the grill, used up preparation space and ingredients that could have been used for lunch and dinner, and generally drove employees mad. When the all-day breakfast was pulled, workers and franchise owners both started lobbying to keep the all-day menu a thing of the past. Rumors surfaced in 2022 that the all-day menu might come back, but it turned out that the rumor was based on someone posting a copy of a press release from 2015.

Before the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, McDonald's decided to offer a related promotion. Customers would get a scratch-off card with a random Olympic event. If the U.S. won a medal in that same event, the customer could get a free item, which varied according to the metal type of the medal. Gold got you a free Big Mac — not too shabby — while silver got you free fries, and bronze would get you a free soda. It didn't seem like a huge risk because the company had done it before during the 1976 Olympics, when the U.S. placed third in the medal count.

This 1984 promotion was founded on good intentions, but the company miscalculated the outcome badly due of a unique geopolitical event. The 1984 Olympics were the ones in which the Soviet Union, along with East Germany and other countries, boycotted the L.A. summer games in response to the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow summer games. That meant that the U.S.'s main rivals were no longer in competition, and the U.S. swept the total medal count. Customers received a lot of free items, and some locations reportedly ran out of Big Macs on some days. One medal win could lead to many card redemptions — and those free orders came with another card. No one outside of McDonald's knows the actual dollar amount lost in the promotion.

McDonald's has different promotions and menu items around the world, and one Norwegian promotion again landed the company in very hot water. In 2002, the company created the McAfrika burger, a pita sandwich with tomatoes, beef, and cheese, and it was meant to be an entry in an exotic-food promotion the company was running in the country. Unfortunately, at the same time the McAfrika was released in the very rich country of Norway, people in countries in southern Africa were starving in a terrible famine.

The promotion received very swift backlash from aid groups in Norway, with one actually having people stand outside an Oslo McDonald's while offering customers energy biscuits like those used in famines. The problem wasn't so much that McDonald's had featured a "McAfrika" burger, but that it was sold right when the famine was taking hold, which seemed tone-deaf. As a result, McDonald's apologized and allowed aid organizations to place collection boxes in locations selling the McAfrika while the sandwich was on the menu.

The Arch Deluxe was a creation in 1996 that was marketed as a burger for grown-ups. It was a little fancier than the company's usual offerings, and by all accounts, it didn't taste bad. In fact, people really liked the taste of this burger with peppered bacon, stone-ground mustard, mayo sauce, and veggies on a potato bun. The burger was the brainchild of a fine-dining chef, Andrew Selvaggio, and it was forecast to be a huge seller. However, the marketing went way off the mark and became known as one of the biggest advertising failures in the history of McDonald's.

The marketing included commercials showing children becoming disgusted at the sight of the ingredients in this burger that wasn't supposed to be for kids (although they weren't forbidden from actually ordering it). Instead of being seen as a humorous dig at the Arch Deluxe's supposed sophistication, it was just seen as a drag for franchisees because of the new ingredients that no other burger used — and customers just weren't into separating McDonald's into adult and children's versions. Reports place the marketing campaign spending between $150 million and $200 million — remember, these are late-1990s dollars — and the Arch Deluxe was pulled from menus in 2000.

McDonald's adopted kiosks where customers could order food and pay long before remote transactions became necessary during the pandemic. The intent was to help customers get their food more quickly, especially those who had simple orders that didn't need any modification. The problem was that the kiosks didn't accept cash, and that was a huge issue for the 30% of McDonald's customers in the U.S. who typically pay with cash, according to Restaurant Dive. It wasn't that they were just nostalgic about paying with cash; many customers were truly unbanked, meaning they had no account and no card that they could use for payments. (Prepaid debit cards have fees that someone on a tight budget might not be able to afford.)

The company finally rolled out cash-accepting kiosks in 2024. These are optional, and franchisees can add or refuse them as they see fit. As you can imagine, the kiosks are apparently in more demand in states that have higher minimum wages. Not all of the reception has been positive, with some customers complaining that the kiosks are slow. The new kiosks also affect the digital menu signboards; at newer locations with the kiosks, the signs behind the counter will no longer show the full menu.

This mistake may not be Numero Uno on this list, but it's no doubt the worst mistake ever in the minds of many fans. This mistake is the one McDonald's made when it ceased producing the original fried apple pie in the U.S. and introduced a baked version. In 1992, the company switched because the baked version was supposed to be healthier. It actually wasn't that much healthier, but the chain remained determined to sell this baked version, even though it was highly unpopular.

Rumors over the years had various McDonald's outposts still selling the fried pies, and of course, there was that amazing time back in 2014 when chef Eric Greenspan found a supply of frozen fried pies from a supplier and struck a deal to sell them at his restaurant. Now, however, there are only two locations where you can get the fried pies. One is the throwback McDonald's in Downey, the one that's constantly photographed for its retro architecture. It has more leeway in what it sells compared to other locations. The other place you can go is Hawaii where all McDonald's sell the fried version. When the company switched to the baked version, Hawaii locations followed suit. However, the new pies were so unpopular that there was a mass change back to the fried version in that one state. McDonald's does occasionally tweak the recipe for the baked pie, and newer versions have gotten more positive reviews.

Ray Kroc may have been a savvy businessman most of the time, coming up with brilliant ways to increase the company's sales, but he had his share of stinkers. One early and decisive fail was the Hula Burger, which was literally a round slice of grilled pineapple with slices of American cheese on a burger bun. The company wanted to have a menu item that Catholics could order on Fridays when they abstained from meat.

The Hula Burger was only one choice; the second was the Filet-O-Fish, which another franchisee had created. When the two were made available, sales of the Filet-O-Fish quickly outpaced the sales of the Hula Burger, leading the chain to discontinue the pineapple sandwich rather quickly. It lives on in the memories of "worst-of" lists and nostalgic social media accounts that look at little-known dishes.

In the past, most people who went to McDonald's took advantage of the dollar menu at some point. The list of items you could get for $1 helped a lot of people avoid being hungry and let many more have a small treat without destroying their budget. Around 2013, though, McDonald's started revamping the dollar menu, and the results weren't good. The menu the company came up with — called the Dollar Menu & More — had a mix of items for different prices, with only a few items like pies and apple slices still priced at a dollar.

It only got worse from there as the company tried to compete with higher-end burger chains that were ostensibly taking away the customer base. That led to a backlash about complicated menus and not enough value items. In 2015, the company introduced a two-for-$2 menu, which in 2016 became the McPick 2 for $2 promotion. The promotion was cut off early — it lasted only until February 2016 — but the company replaced it with a $5 value menu. By 2018, the company was still having problems stemming from its lack of a true low-cost menu (it now promoted a "$1 $2 $3 Dollar Menu"), and the company had its biggest drop in stock price as a result. In March 2024, the company was called out for having a dollar menu that had no $1 items on it at all.

The definition of the "main character" on Twitter didn't exist until 2019, but the concept was certainly present long before that. The main character is that person or thing that becomes the subject of much of that day's tweets, which are often negative. The goal, according to the original tweet that coined the phrase, was never to be that main character. Back in 2012, before Twitter had become X, McDonald's tried to do a little self-promotion using hashtags. Unfortunately, people took the opportunity to turn the company into the main character of the day, and the hashtag promotion ended up being one of McDonald's biggest mistakes.

What McDonald's did probably sounded good on paper. It wanted to spotlight the farmers who were providing the chain with produce, and it decided to create a couple of hashtags to connect the tweets. One was for the farmers, and another, #McDStories, was supposed to be a happy stream of positive stories. What McDonald's didn't anticipate was Twitter users' gleeful habit of appropriating hashtags. After the company sent out a couple of tweets with the hashtags, users started posting their own stories — negative ones. Some were merely sarcastic about the chain in general, but others listed bad experiences with things like food poisoning. The company stopped the campaign within a couple of hours, but Twitter users kept posting with the hashtag for about a week.