White, 36, from SoCal, never heard it. I’d believe the expression was a “black thing,” but McDonald’s itself certainly isn’t. I ate there many times as a kid; my dad would take me every week after Tumbling Toddlers class, and I cultivated quite the collection of Happy Meal toys throughout my childhood. In fact, I still have “Lefty,” the donkey beanie baby a (white) friend gave me in high school when McDonald’s got into that craze. Their commercials have long featured a racially diverse cast (of nonetheless uniformly young and pretty people, when if any stereotypes come to my mind when I think of McDonald’s, it’s old people drinking coffee.) But I’m not surprised that some white folks feel affronted by, and act dismissive of, anything not billed as being exclusively for them.
Exactly this. Additional examples from my childhood:
Do you have Pizza Hut money?
Do you have Toys-R-Us money?
Do you have video game (arcade) money?
Do you have Air Jordan money?
Do you have hanging out at the mall money?
The lessons I learned were (1) “want” is only the first part of the equation and (2) don’t expect others to fund what you “want”.
Over the years I learned to save up for the things I really wanted. And since most of things I wanted back then were transitory and ephemeral I eventually learned that it’s best to stop and think about what you’re going to have left once you do eventually spend your hard earned savings.
It took a lot of time and sweat to mow those 2 lawns…and I just spent it all in 30min on getting my ass kicked in Street Fighter. Somehow this isn’t the ROI I was expecting.
“Tumbling Toddlers class”, on the other hand, sounds like an extremely white thing.
Either a white thing or a support group for those beaten as children.
Never heard it before today. I almost thought it was like Monopoly money, i.e. fake money.
Nope. Never heard the phrase. Just that we got burgers at home.
Yup. We were the whitest whiteys to ever white, and we were still all over McDonald’s.
Perhaps significantly, in addition to never hearing the phrase “McDonald’s money,” the underlying concept never really occurred to me. We weren’t filthy rich, but McDonald’s wasn’t considered a splurge. When I first saw the thread title, I wasn’t even able to guess what it meant; I thought maybe it referred to the scads of money the company rakes in across all franchises (“she’s only the heiress to a small regional chain; it’s not like she has McDonald’s money”) or perhaps the opposite–only enough money to eat at McDonald’s, not someplace nicer.
I’m amending my answer.
I don’t remember ever hearing “do you have McDonald’s money” but I do remember hearing “do you have money for _____?” But the implication that I understood was not that my parents couldn’t afford ____, but that they thought that the thing asked for was a waste of money and they weren’t going to spend anything on it. I could, but it would be better if I used my money in a different way.
It could have been that they couldn’t afford it (looking back now, that wouldn’t surprise me for many of the things we asked for), but the impression they gave us is that it was beneath us, not out of our reach.
It’s not that it’s a splurge (necessarily) anymore than it’s about McDonald’s specifically. It’s in the context of a child asking for something that costs money. The answer to that tends to (at least in my firmly middle class experience) boil down to “no,” whether it comes as…
*No.
You got McDonald’s money?
You paying for it?
So would I, have you got some?
We’re having chicken tonight.
Maybe later.
Clean your room and we’ll talk.*
And so on. While applying an attribute noun to refer to “types” of money rather than “money for the purpose of” might indeed be a regional or cultural thing that tends to be more or less prevalent amongst African Americans, its got nothing to do with McDonald’s.
Asking “Have you ever heard of McDonald’s money?” is not the same as asking “Have you ever heard of Monopoly money?” it’s more like “Have you ever heard of anyone responding to their kid asking for something by sarcastically asking the kid in turn if/how they intend to pay for it?”
Because while the answer to the former is “I don’t think so,” the answer to the latter is “what, you mean you haven’t?”
there weren’t many maccas around when we were growing up, and it was way more expensive than shark n taties, so very rare for us.
Never heard of the concept of “McDonalds Money” - but value for money was very much a thing
Is “treat” a better word than “splurge”? The premise seems to be that McDonald’s costs more than making an equivalent meal at home, and monstro and others were taught not to take that extra money for granted. My point was that, in my family, that extra money didn’t register. My parents were thrifty about some things, but it wouldn’t have occurred to me to refrain from asking for McDonald’s to, as monstro put it, save my asks for bigger things.
That’s not to say my parents bought me every little thing. I got an allowance, and I was mostly expected to buy whatever silly trinkets I wanted with that money. But food was different; at least reasonably-priced restaurant meals were things my parents just paid for. (Certain more expensive restaurants might have been classed as an entertainment expense and treated differently.) I think this is relevant to the OP, but monstro is free to correct me on that.
I’m white, grew up middle class, never heard the phrase “McDonalds money” or about Black Twitter until this thread.
The idea that McDonalds is a black thing is stupid. Blacks having a slight preference for McDonalds over other fast food restaurants does not make it a black thing. McDonalds striving to expand their customer base does not make it a black thing. Indeed, the fact that they expressly state (bolding added)
that specifically implies that their historical customer base is white. Ethnic population is growing while white population is not. Ergo, the fastest-growing customer segment is the ethnic community. Which includes not just Blacks, but Hispanics, and Asian Americans. Also, while those are the larger segments, I’m sure other ethnicities provide a growing base, like South Asians, Middle Easterners, and new African immigrants. Realizing that it might take a different attitude to reach out to those groups is hardly making McDonalds a “Black thing”.
In fact, McDonalds has a large customer base of middle class white folks taking their kids there for the Happy Meal and playground (though those are going away).
Has McDonalds specifically targeted low-income Black neighborhoods? Cite? Or has McDonalds targeted every neighborhood, trying to blanket saturate the market? In fact, McDonalds use to be the epitome of market saturation, stores on every corner, etc.*
Enough of the hijack. Back to monstro’s OP.
It appears from her post that the specific question concerns the specific phrase “McDonalds money”, not a generic “____ money” for whatever interest a person has. Anyway, I’ve never heard the particular construction “____ money”, McDonalds or otherwise. I’m sure many people have encountered some generic response of “Do you have money for that?” But the phrase “McDonalds money” appears to be a specific phrase common to monstro’s experience separate from any generic statement of a similar construction.
- Of course, now they’ve been beat out by a lot of other companies. Starbucks’ probably leads, but Subway is also up there. I did an informal survey of my area a couple years ago, and I found for every McDonalds I could locate, I could find two Subways.
White 'burbs kid, born mid-Sixties, never heard it.
I grew up in an artsy little town full of hippies and celebrities, and the town’s rules specified no chain fast food. The only fast-food restaurant we had near us was KFC, and it was out past the edge of town on the way to a larger town. We got a McDonald’s later (and a Wendy’s, both also out past the city limits), but when I was growing up we only had McDonald’s when we went to the larger town on weekends. My dad liked it too, so we had lunch there at least a couple Saturdays a month during our weekly shopping trip. I didn’t eat at Taco Bell or Burger King until I was in college.
But yeah, never heard that expression.
White urban kid from the early fifties. Mom was a single parent with 5 kids (Dad died when I was a toddler) who worked as a day maid off the books for five different families. McDonald’s didn’t show here until I was a teenager. We had two fast food places on Leavenworth Street. One was, and still is, Bronco’s. They serve burgers, fries and chicken. The other was a loose meat sandwich shop called The Quickie. I rarely had money to eat at either, but once I was able to mow lawns and shovel snow I did spent some of my “fast food money” at these places.
Or, from Time After Time, “that Scottish place.”
I heard it but most of my friends and my step-family were black. So not sure if my parents said it or just other parents.
Also, a lot of people in this thread are really getting stuck on the literalness of this “McDonald’s Money” thing, though I am not sure how to articulate what I mean. It’s not literally like a gift certificate or money that only can be spent at McDonald’s. It’s more in reference to adequate excess cash to obtain that thing, and I am 100% sure I have heard it with other things “Blank Money” and I am a middle-aged white guy. Of course there is “F U Money,” and I would hope most posters would understand what that means without taking it literally. Hell, I wish I had “5 Guys Money” but I certainly don’t because I pretty much have to budget to eat groceries.
That is not what I thought she meant at all,
But, ironically, we often did have that kind of McDonald’s money. Kids gave out those gift cards (particularly at birthday parties). Teachers might give them. You got them on Halloween, literally being given away like candy. We’d have something from a promotion or bottle cap. Or a coupon so that we’d eat free if our parents ate. Or even a full free meal for all students offered by McDonald’s for students for the annual McDonald’s-sponsored pep rally at McDonald’s.
It’s odd to me now thinking back about how big a role McDonald’s played in my life.
My favorite random McDonald’s memory.
It’s fourth grade, close to the end of the year. Ms. Twiggs, who is the strictest teacher I’d ever had up to that point, decides she is going to treat everyone to ice cream at the McDonalds up the street from the school. We walk the half-mile to the place, get ice cream, and then play in the playground area for a good long time. There is this merry-go-round thing that the entire class climbs on at the same time, and no one tells us what we’re doing is potentially dangerous or destructive. Not even Ms. Twiggs, who is just watching and smiling from the sidelines. Then we walk back to school, hopped up on ice cream and appreciation for our “mean” teacher. There was nothing educational about the excursion at all.
It was so sweet that Ms. Twiggs (who was black) spent her precious McDonald’s money on us.
I have never heard the base formulation at all, not just the McDonald’s version. And frankly it strikes me as an assholish way to say “no” to a kid. I can’t imagine my mother ever talking to me like that.
I don’t think anyone who has done a thorough reading of the thread is still under the impression that the phrase in this context refers to McDonald’s gift certificates, even though since they are or were a thing it’s easily confused at first glance. And few of us – even the ones who did not know this formulation – were foreign to phrases like “does it look like I’m made of money?” In addition we, or at least I, am familiar with phrases like “bus money” for money that has already been earmarked by the user for such activity.
I just haven’t heard the phrase “do you have money?” as a rhetorical phrase pointing out that an activity is too expensive by way of asking if they have money which most likely does not exist and even if it had has not as of yet been earmarked for such activity yet.