McJob is slang for a low-pay, low-prestige, dead-end, mindless job. The term comes from the fast-food restaurant McDonald's, but applies to any low-status job where little training is required and the worker's activities are tightly regulated. Most perceived McJobs are in the service industry, particularly fast food and retail sales.

The term is used to emphasize the fact that many desirable middle-class jobs are being eliminated, either due to productivity gains (often the result of automation) or due to the shifting of operations to second- or third-world countries where labor costs are cheaper. For example, manufacturing, call-center, accounting, and computer programming jobs are not as abundant in developed countries, as they used to be, as firms have looked abroad to meet these needs, frustrating many people who used to work in these industries. These displaced workers often spent many years gaining specialized education, training, and experience, and don't want to start over at the bottom rung in a new industry. However, many older workers may have no choice but to take a "McJob", because an employer will prefer to hire a younger person who has just finished college for an entry level job.

According to Jim Cantalupo, CEO of McDonald's, the perception of fast-food work being boring and mindless is inaccurate, and over 1,000 of the men and women who now own McDonald's franchises started life in the working world behind the counter serving customers.

The term was coined in 1991 in Douglas Coupland's book Generation X. The word McJob was added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary in late 2003.


McJOBS (plural, uppercase) was first registered as a trademark by McDonald's on May 16 1984, as a name and image for "training handicapped persons as restaurant employees". The trademarked lapsed in February 1992, and was declared 'Dead' by the United States Patent Office. Following the publication of Generation X in paperback in October 1992 McDonald's restored the trademark.