The Chain Gang

Someone Paid $96,000 for a Bottle of McDonald’s Special Sauce

Probably not worth it.
Probably not worth it. Photo: McDonalds

The Big Mac turns 50 this year — the perfect occasion, McDonald’s crackerjack PR team figured, to hype the sandwich by auctioning off the first-ever bottle of special sauce in the U.K. To ensure a frenzy, the chain created an eBay listing two weeks ago that read: “This is the only bottle of Big Mac Sauce that’s ever been available to the public in the UK and isn’t available for sale anywhere else in the country.” The starting bid was £3 (about $4.33), but with this kind of scarcity, people sort of expect a couple Martin Shkrelis of the fast-food-novelty world to hijack the bidding and run the price up to something truly outlandish — like say £1,000. Nope, chump change: By day two, the bottle had cracked five figures, and when the listing closed yesterday, some 232 bids later, it had reached £65,900. (Which is about $96,000.)

The big winner at least gets a couple of freebies on top of the special sauce, which literally is nothing more than mayo, mustard, and relish mixed with a smattering of artificial ingredients. There’s also a fancy black box it comes in, and what can best be described as a caulking gun (for dispensing purposes). The chain threw in refrigerated delivery service, too.

This is probably a bad time to tell the new mystery owner that McDonald’s just pulled the same stunt down in Australia, but with 4,000 bottles instead of only one, and a list price of $4.99. They could’ve saved $90K, round-trip airfare included.

[Metro]

McDonald’s Sold Special Sauce for Almost $100K