A woman is shocked and upset after ordering a Shamrock Shake from McDonald’s and receiving a beverage she didn’t recognize.
TikTok user Lia (@cocoaliia) posted a video about her misfortune on March 9. It has since amassed 690,000 views. The video shows Lia in her vehicle, presumably just after a visit through the McDonald’s drive-thru. “Girl, I just went to McDonald’s to get a Shamrock Shake… They gave me this [expletive] Shamrake Shock.”
Lia holds up her shake for the audience to inspect. It is obviously not the green hue you’d expect from a St. Patrick’s Day tribute beverage.
Viewers react to the ‘Shamrake Shock’
In the comments, viewers took aim at the state of Lia’s so-called Shamrock Shake. Others asked if Lia was referencing a viral video from February, in which TikTok user Kyla (@kkt_snoopy) failed to pronounce the famous seasonal shake.
“Is this a reference to the girl who couldn’t say Shamrock Shake?” one user asked. Lia replied in the affirmative.
“That’s a SCAMrock shake,” a second user insisted.
“Concepts of a Shamrock Shake,” a third user wrote.
Another blamed it on politics. “It’s so gentrified.”
Why isn’t this Shamrock Shake green?
According to McDonald’s, the Shamrock Shake was invented in 1967 by a McDonald’s owner/operator based in Connecticut named Hal Rosen. The mint shake, of course intended to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, debuted across the U.S. in 1970.
The shake was so popular that sales of it helped build the first-ever Ronald McDonald House in Philadelphia four years later. For a time, the drink remained at select locations for limited periods of time, but it went nationwide for the first time in 2012.
The drink is currently made with vanilla soft serve blended with whipped cream and mint syrup. There’s no clear record online of how the company tweaked its recipe over time, although there is plenty of speculation online.
Is the Shamrock Shake going downhill?
In a Reddit post to r/GenX from three years ago, a user asked if anyone else remembered the shakes tasting better back in the day. “I can’t describe how it used to taste, but the stuff they serve these days is just not it. This stuff is just their standard vanilla with some mint flavoring barely mixed in. That’s not what the Shamrock Shake of the 80s and 90s was,” the user wrote. “Am I crazy or did they change the formula?
Many users in the comments agreed that the shake doesn’t taste as good as they remember it tasting in the past. “Yes!” wrote one user. “When I was a kid, they were delicious. Last time I had one in the early aughts, it tasted like toothpaste water.”
Of course, other users just cracked jokes. “Grinding up of Leprechauns was made illegal in 1997,” wrote one. Someone else said, “It’s no longer made with real Shamrocks.”
Other users insisted that it’s merely nostalgia making people think the shakes were better in the past when they weren’t. It’s unclear what went wrong with Lia’s Shamrock Shake. Perhaps it’s a simple case of operator error.
The Daily Dot reached out to Lia via TikTok comment and direct message. In response, she wrote, “I’m pleased at how everyone was able to laugh with me. I’ve been enjoying scrolling through the comments. I’m even more pleased that some people were able to pick up on the very niche ‘shamrake shock’ reference.”
@cocoaliia 🫤
♬ original sound – Lia 🧚🏽♀️
We also contacted McDonald’s via email for comment.
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