The veil has been lifted
After my post on Tuesday explaining that this blog is now a mecca for all things Arch Deluxe, I can’t not share this with you.
Last night, an actually former McDonald’s employee commented on my original Arch Deluxe/Shamrock Shake post, revealing secrets that perhaps explain why the Arch Deluxe so quickly vanished from the fast food giant’s menu.
Gather round, Readers, cause you’re about to become privy to some moderately interesting information.
This was posted by “The.” I’m going to assume “The” was in the process of typing in a longer name, but had to stop short when the McDonald’s branch of the CIA caught wind of the secrets he/she was about to divulge and stormed in, forcing “The” to flee the scene before he/she could finish typing their name, which was surely The Most Badass McDonald’s Employee of All Time.
Okay, here we go. Prepare for your world to be rocked…well, actually, probably just minorly tussled.
“It’s funny; I was 16 when the Arch Deluxe was rolled out. I worked in the local McDonald’s and I remember the sandwich’s tenure vividly. There were all of these internal procedural deviations necessitated in offering the item. For instance, the arc of the crown (I mean the actual curvature of the thing’s bun-top) was much higher than either the ‘reg’ buns (used in hamburgers, cheeseburgers, McChickens, and Filets-O-Fish) or the top-third of a Big Mac bun. But the bun toaster was calibrated for the relatively thin Big Mac, so the top of the bun toaster would be crammed down on top of them–and the potato starch didn’t really agree with the Teflon plates in the toaster, so they’d stick a lot. Then you’ve got the whole business with squirting the ketchup on the bun-heel and Arch Deluxe sauce on the crown. When you’ve been working at McDonald’s for a while, it’s not only sacrilege when you’re told to put sauce on the bottom of a sandwich, it’s an unsettling deviation from procedure in a workplace defined by procedure. (Another oddity; the placement of the cheese–precisely one-half slice–on the bottom of the Filet-O-Fish.)Then you’ve got the pepper bacon, which we used on nothing else, so we were forever running back to the walk-in cooler to get more.
All that said, it was a fine sandwich and the most suspect thing about it was that huge potato roll. And the way the special sauce congealed on the sauce gun, because you never could tell when you were going to have to make one. Plus they had cut too many distribution holes in the canister aperture for the sauce to ever achieve escape velocity…yeah, so that part was bad too. But it was still a pretty tasty sandwich.”
Indeed, it was The Most Badass McDonald’s Employee of All Time, indeed it was.