Update 2:41pm CT, Aug. 15: Luckee told the Daily Dot that she lives very comfortably with what McDonald’s pays her and clarified that her SIM card video was merely satire. Luckee also told the Daily Dot she is trying to break the stigma against having fast-food jobs. Many of her TikTok videos back this up.
“They offer job stability. … They offer great career advancement. … They offer a 401K. … They offer the ability to make over six figures. … They pay for your college,” she said in response to a commenter who compared a job at McDonald’s to the poop emoji. “What about that is the poop emoji?”
“I love my job. … I’m happy. I’m able to take care of the things that I need. I’m able to go to college if I want. They sent me to Chicago. I go on trips. We have outings. We have Christmas parties. We get Christmas bonuses. We get monthly bonuses,” she said, adding that she doesn’t understand the stigma “about McDonald’s not being a good job.”
Original story: If there’s one thing every service industry worker knows, it’s that it’s hard out here. If you can get by without getting into debt, you’re lucky. Sometimes, even when you think you’ve gotten ahead of the game, you end up right where you started. That’s what one hardworking McDonald’s manager found out when she tried to upgrade her work phone.
@luck33one im just tryna use my work phone fam #mcdonalds #iphone ♬ original sound – 🍀
TikToker Luckee (@luck33one)—who uses the shamrock emoji as her handle—has an entire account dedicated to her life as a general manager for an owner-operated McDonald’s franchise. In fact, the Daily Dot has covered a previous post in which she roasts someone making fun of her choice to work as a manager at McDonald’s.
But while she loves her job, she sometimes has to scrape by even when it comes to necessities like her work phone.
In a video posted on July 29 that appears to have since been deleted, Luckee explains that her recent attempt to “upgrade” her work phone to one that doesn’t have a busted screen ended up being a total fail.
“If you’re wondering how cheap McDonald’s is, just ask me,” she tells her viewers as she takes two phones out of her purse. She displays one, an Apple SE that she describes as “mean.” “It shuts off when it wants to. Sometimes, it shuts off when it doesn’t want to,” she says.
She displays the phone’s battered and chipped back and screen. Then she shows her “new” phone. “I’m just tryna use my work phone, fam,” she states in the video’s caption.
“I finally got a new phone,” she tells her fans, showing a lightly used early model SE. “It’s OK. We love a used queen,” the McDonald’s manager says, before continuing.
She says she took the used phone she had just purchased to Verizon only to be told, “This phone is so old, your SIM card won’t work with it.” Because the phone is provided by McDonald’s, that means she must use the same SIM card she used on her old phone, which essentially means her “new” phone is unusable for her job.
She then picks up her old phone, which looks as if it might disintegrate. “Back to old faithful,” she says as she pretends to sob.
“I have the same SE and it looks [just] like that phone LMAO. Mine’s broken too,” one fellow McDonald’s employee wrote in response to the video.
In the comments, Luckee states that though her bosses are “amazing,” “they still are frugal with our pay.”
The Daily Dot has reached out to the McDonald’s manager via TikTok for more information.