Why you should not buy McDonald's gift cards

I know.. I know.. why would you not want to buy a McDonald's gift card during the pandemic? This general advice is probably good for most restaurants during the pandemic. The problem is that the restaurants have not taken their gift cards into consideration when they implemented their take out systems.

It's hard to think that a huge corporation such as McDonald's wouldn't think of something as simple as implementing their gift cards to their McDonald's app. Alas it doesn't show up as a form of payment on their app. The only form of payment on their app are credit cards. This might be totally different when you're using an outsourced takeout service such as UberEats or DoorDash.

The problem is that these gift cards are known to McDonald's and you can't use them on their own McDonald's app. That just doesn't make sense at all. To make matters worse if you go into the restaurant and you want to use the gift card as payment you can't use one of their convenient kiosks. It's as if they didn't know that the gift cards exist.

McDonald's tries to make it increasingly difficult to use any form of payment outside of credit cards. This is despite the fact that their gift cards are electronic and register on their systems.

In order to use their gift cards you will have to go directly to the cashier and that's if they have a cashier. You can probably use it through the drive-thru as well. If you use the kiosk you will have to take your receipt from the kiosk only to go back in line to the cashier to make your payment.

To make matters worse there is a ton of turnover in the service industry. A lot of the cashiers that are working are use to a certain flow and gift cards aren't often seen. There's a very good chance that they won't know how to get them to work. You might just be the person holding everyone back and the guilt and shame of this might get to you as well.

You would think that a large company like this would have thought of ways of getting gift cards to work conveniently. Instead when you buy a gift card for someone you may be causing them bigger headaches than you think. A lot of the restaurants had to rush into getting their take out systems to work. The process of getting their systems working may have meant that they had to take a few shortcuts to get things to work properly.

I don't totally blame all of these restaurants not to have a proper gift card transaction system. This pandemic has been tough for all of us. What I'm saying is that if you're looking to buy a gift card for someone you may want to rethink that process. Your thoughts are in the right place but try to figure out if the person who is receiving the card will be able to use it easily.

Maybe when things go back to normal gift cards might be used more readily but I kind of doubt it. I think that the whole gift card situation for restaurants is more of a hassle than just giving a person a Visa/Mastercard gift card. At least the Visa/Mastercard gift card would allow someone to be able to use the gift card anywhere that takes credit cards. The only negative to Visa/Mastercard gift cards is that there is a certain percentage that is taken off every purchase. So the full amount of the gift card really isn't the full amount being spent.