Back in 1962, a McDonald’s franchise owner in Cincinnati named Lou Groen had a problem. His neighborhood was heavily Catholic, and on Fridays, his customers wouldn’t touch a burger. They’d go somewhere else entirely. So Groen came up with the Filet-O-Fish — a simple breaded fish sandwich that Catholics could eat without breaking their Friday abstinence from meat. It was an instant hit and it’s still on the menu more than sixty years later. But here’s what’s changed: the people making that sandwich today have some opinions about whether you should actually order it. And the Filet-O-Fish isn’t the only menu item that fast food workers quietly steer clear of.
The fish problem
The McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish has a reputation issue among the people who actually assemble it. The core complaint isn’t about the quality of the fish itself — McDonald’s switched from Atlantic cod to Alaskan pollock years ago, and that’s fine. The filet is square-shaped for consistency, which is also fine. Nobody’s really arguing about the ingredients.
The issue is freshness. Or rather, the lack of it. Because the Filet-O-Fish isn’t one of the big sellers at most locations, it gets cooked in batches and then sits in a warming cabinet until someone finally orders one. That could be minutes. It could be hours. One McDonald’s employee put it bluntly in a Reddit thread about fast food items to avoid: “Fish doesn’t get ordered very often unless it is Lint. They cook it at transition, and then it stays there until they have sold it all.” (They clearly meant Lent, but the point stands.) That same worker said that when they ran the shift, they’d toss the old fish. But they didn’t run every shift.
Now, this isn’t universal. Some locations move fish sandwiches quickly — one employee noted that their store sells a surprising amount and on busy days, a fish filet won’t last ten minutes. Another said their town’s McDonald’s sells more Filet-O-Fish sandwiches than almost anything else. So it really depends on the location. But if your local McDonald’s isn’t exactly a fish-sandwich hotspot, that sandwich in your hand might have been sitting around for a while.
A “fresh” one might not be
You’d think the easy fix would be to just ask for a fresh one. And to be fair, some employees say that works. Ask for your Filet-O-Fish to be “cooked to order” and you’ll wait about five extra minutes, but you’ll get one straight out of the fryer. That phrase — cooked to order — apparently works for other menu items too, not just the fish.
But not every crew member is going to honor that request the way you’d hope. One fast food worker admitted on Reddit: “Idk if it’s anything like the fast food place I work at we’ll just dump an old one in the fryer for a few seconds to heat it up and tell you it’s fresh.” Which, honestly, is kind of disheartening. You think you’re getting a freshly cooked filet and instead you’re getting a reheated one that’s been given a quick warm bath.
There’s a workaround, though. If you customize the sandwich — swap the tartar sauce for Big Mac sauce, add pickles and mustard, ask for extra cheese or no cheese, request lettuce and tomato — you’re more likely to force a fresh build. Any modification that takes the sandwich off the standard template means they probably can’t just pull a pre-made one out of the warmer. Some people even go full European and build what McDonald’s calls a Royal-O-Fish: add cucumber slices, swap in cheddar, throw on some lettuce. It’s a clever little hack that gives you a better shot at something that wasn’t cooked an hour ago.
The McRib situation
Speaking of McDonald’s items that employees have strong feelings about — the McRib. This thing comes and goes from the menu like a comet, and every time it returns, a certain group of fans loses their minds. But ask the people who actually have to make and serve it, and you’ll get a very different reaction.
One employee described the McRib as “weird-looking pork patties sitting in old BBQ sauce for HOURS without being cleaned or changed.” Multiple Reddit threads are full of workers venting about this sandwich in language that would make a sailor blush. The sauce, apparently, is the biggest offender. Workers say it gets absolutely everywhere — on trays, on uniforms, on surfaces that have nothing to do with the sandwich. Some claim it’s turned them off barbecue sauce for life. Others say the trays need to go through the dishwasher multiple times before the sauce comes off. One person compared it to ectoplasm, which is a reference I didn’t expect to encounter in a conversation about fast food but here we are.
The underlying problem is similar to the Filet-O-Fish issue: the McRib patties sit in warming trays full of that sauce for extended periods. When it’s not a high-volume seller at a particular location, that sitting time gets long. And when the sauce has been stewing for hours? Employees say they genuinely feel bad handing it over to customers. That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement.
What about the drinks?
This one goes beyond McDonald’s and applies to fast food joints in general. A lot of employees across various chains have raised concerns about soda fountains, soda guns, and slushie machines. The worry isn’t about the drinks themselves — it’s about how often (or how rarely) the machines get cleaned.
One bartender on Reddit coined the term “soda gun snakes” to describe what builds up inside the nozzles when they’re not properly maintained. Their description: imagine a tube-shaped mass that looks like a kombucha mother, likely caused by sugar, yeast, moisture, and neglect. That’s vivid enough that I almost didn’t want to include it, but you deserve to know. And it’s not just bars — pizza places and fast food restaurants that have active yeast in the air can apparently make the problem worse.
Slushie machines are another frequent target. Workers at multiple chains — Sonic gets called out by name more than once — say these machines are extremely difficult to clean properly. When a machine is hard to clean, it tends to not get cleaned as often as it should. That seems like the kind of design flaw that should’ve been caught before rolling the machines out to thousands of locations, but apparently nobody asked the employees who actually use them.
Subway’s tuna and chicken
That brings up another thing: Subway. You might remember the big legal battle over whether Subway’s tuna was actually tuna. The short answer is yes, it is real tuna. But employees still suggest skipping it, and the reason isn’t the fish. It’s the mayo. One worker explained that jugs of mayonnaise are sometimes improperly stored, and since tuna salad is basically tuna swimming in mayo, that’s a concern. Multiple employees have noted that the tuna-to-mayo ratio is wild — one described it as a 1-to-1 ratio by volume. That is a staggering amount of mayonnaise.
And apparently the ratio varies depending on who’s making it that day. There’s no real standardization at every location. One store might halve the mayo to make it palatable, while another dumps it in like they’re getting paid per ounce. Even if you love mayo, there’s a threshold, and Subway’s tuna seems to consistently cross it.
Along the same lines, Subway’s chicken strips have their own issue. Workers from multiple locations mention the smell — one described it as “a fart that’s been vacuum-sealed for freshness,” which is the kind of sentence that stays with you. Managers apparently warn new employees about the chicken smell on their first day and assure them it’s normal. When the smell of your food requires an advance warning and a reassurance speech, that probably tells you something. The cold cut subs, by contrast, seem to get much better marks from the people who actually work there.
Soups, shakes, and raw chicken
A few more items that employees across various chains flag as skip-worthy. Soups at fast food restaurants come up repeatedly. The concerns range from sitting in warming stations all day to being the destination for leftovers and badly cooked food that can’t be served on its own. One worker raised a point I hadn’t considered: soups are often prepped in batches too large to cool down effectively, which means they spend time at temperatures where bacteria thrive. Others mention frozen soups reheated in bags, with occasional bits of plastic making their way into the bowl. None of this is great.
Steak ‘n Shake’s milkshakes are an interesting case. The shakes themselves are hand-dipped and made with strict guidelines, so the product should be good. But the base ice cream is apparently so hard to scoop that employees dread milkshake duty. With only two to three minutes to get a shake made and orders backing up, cleanliness takes a back seat. One worker put it plainly: when you’re short-staffed and buried in shake orders, sanitization isn’t the priority. The shake might taste fine, but the conditions it was made under might give you pause.
And then there’s Burger King’s chicken sandwiches. Social media has a surprising number of posts from people who’ve received raw or undercooked chicken from BK. Employees suggest it could be a fryer temperature issue, different cooking times for different chicken products of varying thicknesses, or just plain carelessness during rushes. One secondhand account claimed that during busy periods, workers “pretty much never temp them to make sure they are fully cooked.” That’s the kind of shortcut that can actually make someone sick. So if your BK chicken sandwich looks even slightly pink in the middle, don’t power through it. Send it back. Or better yet, just order something else.
