Woman Trades McDonald’s Szechuan Sauce for a Car

Much like beauty, value is truly in the eye of the beholder: A woman traded a single packet of a McDonald’s nugget dipping sauce for a car. It wasn’t just lowly barbecue or sweet-and-sour, however: According to The Drive, it was a packet of Szechuan Sauce, the condiment that was just temporarily pulled out of retirement thanks to nostalgic fandom stoked by the creators of Rick & Morty.

Rachel Marie of Macomb, Wisconsin, managed to get her hands on one packet of the stuff, and listed it up for trade on a Facebook group for swapping pins. Somehow, she instead managed to exchange it for a red 2004 Volkswagen GTI.

Enthusiasm for the sauce’s one-day revival this past weekend reached such a fever pitch that police had to be called to one McDonald’s in La Brea, California, where hundreds of people swarmed in an attempt to procure one of just 20 packets of the sauce that the store had received. The fast-food chain has now promised to bring the sauce back this winter in more plentiful quantities.

Strangely enough, this isn’t the first time a McDonald’s sauce has reached an insane valuation: A coveted bottle of a special Mulan edition of the Szechuan Sauce fetched $14,000 on eBay earlier this year, while a bottle of Big Mac Sauce once went for around $16,000. In 2017, a lucrative career as a McDonald’s sauce broker seems like an actual possibility.

• Woman Trades Packet of McDonald's Szechuan Sauce for Volkswagen [The Drive]
• McDonald’s Sends ‘Rick and Morty’ Creators a Bottle of Szechuan Sauce [E]