UX.Unmasked — The McDonald's Sanitizer Incident: A Tale of Mistaken Identity

A few weeks ago my friend and I went to the mall because we were bored. As usual, we stopped at H&M and looked at a few clothes - my friend was looking for these jeans he wanted to buy since, before the pandemic, he was waiting for the SALE. We visited a lot of shops. Not going to lie, but window shopping is fun. Later, we stopped at McDonald's and got two burgers, which were okay, and fries, oh, I love McDonald's fries with peri-peri seasoning 🍟.

Photo by Visual Karsa on Unsplash

Everything was going well. We finished the meal and washed our hands. I told my friend we should sanitize our hands because it has become a habit. My friend was looking for hand sanitizer. He spotted it at McDonald's counter, there was only one guy behind the counter, and he was looking at us. My friend took the bottle labeled sanitizer, and we used it.

As we were leaving, the guy behind the counter said, and I quote, "sir, it's not a hand sanitizer. It's a table cleaning agent."

I looked at my friend, and he looked back at me, and we started laughing. I asked him, "Did you read the label? What did it say?" He said, "Yes, and it was sanitizer."

I noticed there was another identical bottle at the end of the counter.

I asked the guy at the counter, Why is the table cleaner in the sanitizer bottle? Why is it at the counter? How did you know it was the table cleaner, not hand sanitizer?

Again he said, and I quote, "there's a black tick mark on the bottle of table cleaner, and that's how we separate table cleaner from sanitizer."

He gave us the sanitizer bottle, and we used that.

As we were leaving, another guy from McDonald's Kitchen came to the counter, and I overheard the first guy telling him that "these two a**holes used the table cleaner instead of sanitizer." They both were laughing. I had to leave without reacting.

What happened here?

Who is to blame?

What do you guys think?

Is this a human error or a design flaw?

Because I'm telling you, using table cleaner as hand sanitizer is not hygienic. I'm sure it smelled funny.