Times That Fast Food Restaurants Cheated Customers

Burger King ended 2017 by settling a class action lawsuit claiming Maryland customers had been cheated for almost two years. According to Fox News, the lawsuit was filed by Koleta Anderson of Maryland, and she claimed customers who used a Buy One, Get One coupon for BK's Croissan'wich were paying an inflated price. Anderson says when she used the coupon, she was charged for a single sandwich at $3.19. Without the coupon, she was charged $2.16 for the same sandwich.

Anderson says she tried it at a few different Burger King locations, and her lawyer's investigator did, too. They said they got the same result and claimed BK was hiking the price for coupon-using customers. BK denied there was any funny business going on, but it still settled the matter and agreed to hand out some $2 and $5 gift cards.

It was a rough 2017 for Dunkin' Donuts. The company made headlines a few times when it was accused of using ingredients that weren't exactly as advertised, and it started that April. That's when The Boston Globe says a Massachusetts customer got a settlement out of a lawsuit filed against the coffee and donut chain claiming customers at a group of 20 locations were being served margarine or butter substitute, even if they asked for butter. The suit had been in the works for a few years after it came to light franchisees almost always used butter substitute, saying it was easier to spread. It's also worth noting that the 10 plaintiffs were awarded $500 each, while the attorneys took home a whopping $500,000.

In June, Boston.com reported on another lawsuit filed in New York. This time, the company was being accused of using ground beef in its steak-and-egg sandwiches. The ingredients list officially says "Angus beef," which the plaintiffs say isn't actually the "steak" advertisements describe. And in August, yet another class action lawsuit was filed. Today Food says this one claimed products labeled as "blueberry" didn't contain any actual blueberries and instead used sugary "flavored crystals." To be fair, that's not exactly an unheard of practice, but this customer says he wouldn't have paid as much knowing the fruit was artificial.

In 2014, the Star Tribune in Minnesota reported on a class action lawsuit one disgruntled customer brought against Jimmy John's. She claimed she didn't get alfalfa sprouts on her sandwiches when they were very clearly listed on the menu, so she sued for a whole list of offenses like negligent misrepresentation and fraud. Clearly, she takes her sprouts seriously, and here's where the story gets odd.

After an outbreak of E. coli in 2012, Jimmy John's was one of the restaurants named as a source of illness. The culprit? Raw sprouts. Jimmy John's promised to get rid of the ingredient completely, and while it did, the chain didn't change its menus.

It denied wrongdoing, but still settled and agreed to give unhappy customers a voucher for $1.40 that could be redeemed for any side item or soft drink ... but not a side of sprouts.

We're sure you remember hearing about this one, and it went on for so long you've probably forgotten some of the details. With the help of Forbes, let's recap. In 2013, a customer at a Subway in Australia posted a photo of his footlong sub next to a tape measure that showed it was only 11 inches long. The internet was not about to stand for that sort of thing, and a group filed a class action lawsuit against Subway.

It was found the length difference was down to the way bread baked, and since all loaves start from the same amount of dough, you're guaranteed to get a particular amount of bread. In spite of that, the case was settled for $525,000 and that should have ended it. One plaintiff refused to settle, though, and kept the case going.

And going. And going. It wasn't until August 2017 that Reuters reported the entire case was thrown out of a court that condemned not Subway, but the attorneys for trying to milk it for all it was worth. So, while you might not be getting exactly 12 inches of bread, the courts say you're getting your money's worth.

Domino's kick-started its pizza tracker in 2008, and in theory, it's pretty handy. But by 2017, a lot of people were still calling foul when they were continuing to find the tracker didn't match what was actually happening on their doorstep.

According to The Wall Street Journal (via Fox News), customers were saying that not only was the tracker getting delivery times wrong, but it wasn't even getting the delivery person right. Domino's responded to Fox News by saying it was all legit, but alleged employees and angry customers took to Reddit long before that to say that the name of the person making your pizza was usually just the manager's name, and the app is pretty much a 30-minute timer. 

Pizza Hut and Papa John's trackers have had similar skeptics, and according to a former Domino's employee (via Huffington Post), Domino's tracker was sort of legit ... but the problem was that employees could easily fudge the system. Drivers would set up dummy accounts to make it easier for them to combine deliveries into one trip, and employees in the store would mark deliveries as finished to make their numbers better. The moral of the story? Don't believe the tracker.

McDonald's had a ton of problems with its cheese sticks, starting with customers complaining because they found their cheese sticks were missing something important: the cheese. According to NBC Chicago, so many people complained about the quality of the cheese sticks and posted photos of empty breading shells that McDonald's was forced to make a statement saying the cheese seemed to have melted out during cooking, and it was sorry.

Is that how cheese works?

It wasn't long before news outlets were reporting that one California customer filed a lawsuit over the mysteriously melting cheese, claiming it wasn't the "real mozzarella" and "100 percent cheese" they were advertising, but a cheese product made with fillers. McDonald's issued another statement saying, "We intend to defend ourselves vigorously against these allegations."

The company had made promises to address the cheese problem after the first wave of complaints and photos hit social media, but instead it discontinued the mozzarella sticks not long after (via Business Insider).

In 2010, Burger King got in some trouble over a massive misrepresentation of its Tendercrisp burger ... and by "massive," we mean that literally.

You don't expect the items you get served to look exactly like they do in the advertisements, but Burger King represented its new sandwich so badly that the Advertising Standard Authority stepped in. According to a statement (via the BBC), it found "... the visuals in the advert were likely to mislead viewers as to the size and composition of the product."

That's a big deal, and it's impossible to tell how many customers sidled up to the counter and ordered it only to get something that was almost completely different than what they'd seen on TV. The ASA had bought three of the sandwiches in question and found what was actually served was so far removed from the advertisement that it just couldn't let it slide. The ad in question — which showed a man in a hotel room "cheating" on a beef burger by eating the chicken sandwich — was banned.

If you have a sneaking suspicion that your Big Mac isn't as big as it used to be, you're not the only one. McDonald's ever-smaller-appearing burgers have Wendy's "Where's the beef?" commercials from the 1980s playing in our heads. Disgruntled customers on Reddit have posted pictures of McDonald's hamburgers on buns twice as big as the burgers and even entire sandwiches they could measure using the length of their thumb. So, indeed, where is the beef?

When McDonald's in Australia was confronted with customers' accusations that burgers there were getting smaller, it swore the meat patties have remained the same size and weight over the years without changing. However, McDonald's did admit in 2020 that it changed the buns, so you may have noticed them looking different now even if they weigh the same amount they always have.

Some customers think that it's only our point of view that has changed since every other fast food restaurant is supersizing its burgers. But we don't remember ever getting a cookie-sized hamburger from McDonald's back in the day. We know they've always been small, but not that small. Additionally, Zachary Brewer, a former Mickey D's employee, says that the Big Mac originally came with two quarter-pound pieces of meat rather than two 1/10th-pound pieces of meat (via Quora). So, you're actually getting only a fifth of a pound of meat in your Big Mac today in comparison to half a pound of meat in the early 1970s.

Those of us who have been eating at Taco Bell for decades can confirm that the beef doesn't taste anything like it once did. Somewhere along the way, Taco Bell's "seasoned beef" acquired extra ingredients and gained mystery meat status. However, it wasn't until 2011 that customers became involved in a class action lawsuit accusing Taco Bell of using meat that didn't meet the USDA's definition of "beef." There comes a point where a company can add too many seasonings and fillers to its meat to be able to call it beef anymore, and customers thought that was what had happened to Taco Bell's meat.

It turns out that when Taco Bell adds seasoned beef to your taco or burrito, it's adding a mixture of ingredients that starts out as 100% real beef. However, the chain revealed that only 88% of the final mixture is beef, with 12% comprised of other ingredients like oats, onion powder, and cocoa powder that are part of its secret spice and seasoning mixture. So, yes, the seasoned beef starts out with real beef, but other ingredients provide flavor and allow the restaurant to stretch its beef a bit further. All those extra oats probably help keep customer prices down at Taco Bell in the long run since ground beef costs about $4.77 a pound, while oats only cost around $0.33 per pound. So, it's a cheat that ultimately benefits customers' pocketbooks.

Many a child has joked about the school cafeteria meals containing mystery meat like horse meat. However, Burger King actually once served horse meat in Ireland. Wild horses are multiplying out of control, and horse meat is legal to consume in Ireland. However, it's still largely a cultural taboo to eat horses there just as it is in the U.S., where horses are considered pets. So, some Irish Burger King customers were mortified to learn they may have been tricked into eating charbroiled horse meat in their Whoppers.

The horse burgers that Burger King possibly served in 2013 weren't intentional. It turns out that the chain's meat supplier, Silvercrest, was responsible for unknowingly mixing horse meat in with its beef after purchasing some meat from a Polish supplier. Tests revealed horse DNA in some of the meat at the plant and in various burgers that Silvercrest had sold to clients. At the time of testing, none of the burgers that Burger King had in its restaurants came up positive for horse DNA. While Burger King didn't knowingly feed its customers horse meat, it's still possible earlier burger shipments weren't 100% beef. Unsurprisingly, Burger King terminated its contract with Silvercrest in favor of a different meat supplier after the scandal.