Enough With This TikTok Trend, Already. Fast Food Workers Have Better Things To Do

How will you spend your one wild and precious life? Mastering the art of opening a Champagne bottle, studying the nuances between a chateaubriand and a filet mignon, or otherwise orchestrating the elements of whatever "best life" you aim to achieve? Or will you spend it menacing people at their place of work in a bid to win attention from internet strangers? If you're a perpetrator of social media's dubious "secret menu" stunts for fun and clicks, the bad news is that you've already wasted some of your fleeting moments on this earth. But the good news is that you can change your posting ways, before it's too late.

If you've managed to live online absent these bumbling stabs at fun that do little more than drag innocent food service workers' whole shifts into ruin, it's worse than you think. The made-for-stitch displays are far more elaborate than the comparatively low-lift "animal style" burgers that once became so famous at In-N-Out Burger that their supposed stealth became its own goof. Instead, nouveau "secret" items (take any grotesque Frappuccino adaptation, please) are incongruous mashups that waste staffers' time, delay orders for normal customers, and very likely perpetuate: food waste. And we've yet to find the so-called secret with even a whisper of any culinary merit.

Have you tried the king's ransom Strato Frapp yet? It takes a mocha sauce-lined cup, double blends 2%, coconut milk, hazelnut syrup, lavender powder, and ice, layers the mix with vanilla sweet cream cold foam and white chocolate sauce, and tops it with an affogato shot, hand shaken whipped cream, dark caramel sauce, and a chocolate cake pop. This abomination would be prohibitively expensive, its disparate flavors would become muddled, and, as far as we know, we just made it up. That's the problem with plenty of these so-called secrets: They aren't really go-tos for those in the know, but rather rambled, one-off, clout-seeking customizations.

The internet is haunted with tales of well meaning workers menaced by "secret menu" seeking zombies staggering in with little more than arbitrarily titled hashtags. These eats and drinks simply aren't replicable because, in spite of the popularity that a few thousand likes might imply, most will never achieve the recognition required for ubiquity. While efforts to hunt them may spread like a virus, they seldom go viral enough for any practical achievement. Plenty of stores will still endeavor to build a recipe to whatever specs, but is being up-charged for some absurd amalgam really a moment worth commemorating and, worse, sharing with others? You'd really be better off documenting your frappe-making practice at home — where you might actually learn something without forcing any unwitting bystanders into the frame.