ORLANDO, Fla — “My favorite is their Big Mac meal. That’s always been my favorite,” said life-long McDonald’s customer Margie Tyson.
But she isn’t loving her recent experiences with the McDonald’s mobile app.
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Tyson told Action 9 Consumer Investigator Jeff Deal, “Kept thinking about it and wondering… I wonder, how many people that happened to.”
She claims the app charged her for mobile orders, but when she showed up, her orders had been canceled and neither her local McDonald’s restaurant, nor the app would refund her money.
“I raised my kids at McDonald’s and had birthdays at McDonald’s, and I worked at McDonald’s,” Tyson explained.
So, when McDonald’s starting pushing its mobile app, she downloaded it and gave it a try for order ahead pick-up.
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Margie Tyson had no problems on a few orders, but in mid-May, after ordering a Sausage McMuffin and vanilla milkshake, she got a surprise when she showed up to the pick-up window at the McDonald’s on Hiawassee and Silver Star Road in Orlando.
She said, “I give them the code, and they said that order was canceled by the customer. And I start laughing, and I go, ‘But I’m the customer. I didn’t cancel that. That’s why I’m here.’”
The restaurant wouldn’t refund her on the spot, but promised the money would be automatically refunded on her card within 24-hours. Tyson didn’t think anything of it until about two weeks later when she had the same experience at a McDonald’s in Ocoee. For some reason, the order had been canceled and once again she was promised a refund in 24-hours.
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“And then I remember the first time it happened to me. And I start wondering, ‘Did I ever get a refund?’ I never checked,” she said.
When Tyson did check, she found the charge on her account, but no refund. As the days passed, she didn’t get an automatic refund for the Ocoee order either.
She showed Action 9 an email from McDonald’s customer service that shows the refund, “must come directly from the restaurant location in which the order was purchased.”
She decided to return to the first restaurant. Tyson was optimistic but prepared herself for rejection.
“And the young lady tells me, the young supervisor says, ‘I can’t help you with that, because it’s a third-party app, so we have nothing to do with that,’” she explained.
It was only after she disputed the charges with her bank, did she get a refund. Now Margie Tyson is left wondering how her orders were canceled in the first place and why McDonald’s doesn’t have a clear process for helping customers get refunded for mobile orders.
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Consumer Investigator Jeff Deal asked, “What do you think about customer service telling you one thing in the store telling you something different?”
Tyson answered, “What a mess. Nobody has... they’re not focused on the same thing. Everybody’s just kind of passing the buck basically.”
Action 9 reached out to McDonald’s with questions about this experience, but so far the company hasn’t responded.
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