The craze for McDonald’s Szechuan Sauce took an interesting turn last week in Michigan, and one woman has a new car to show for it.
Though the lack of inventory resulted in many disappointed customers who couldn’t secure the promotional sauce across the country, Rachel Marie of Macomb, Michigan, was one of the lucky few who managed to snag a packet. She then traded her sauce to someone for a 2004 Volkswagen Golf GTI, according to The Drive.
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The exchange went down on a pin trader group on Facebook, where Marie posted a picture of her sauce with the intention of trading for a new pin collection.
“I didn’t even think I was going to get pin offers,” said Marie, “Then he offered the car.”
Some packets of McDonald’s Szechuan Sauce are selling on Ebay for hundreds of dollars, with the highest auction listing going for $5000.
That is about how much Fox 2 Detroit marked the value of Marie’s new car.
The sauce was first released in 1998 as part of a promotion for Disney’s Mulan. Though it was only around for a limited time, Szechuan Sauce bursted into the cultural zeitgeist after being featured in the Season Three premiere of Rick and Morty, which aired as part of Adult Swim‘s April Fools’ Day event ahead of the show’s return.
In the episode, Rick fabricates a memory of his “origin story” in order to turn the tables on a prison interrogator. In the memory, Rick takes his interrogator to try the McNugget sauce, and in the end of the episode he reveals to Morty that everything he does is to get more Szechuan.
After fans started requesting more and more sauce, McDonald’s gifted Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland with his own supply of the sauce and promised fans they’d get the opportunity to try it.
But after the debacle at McDonald’s restaurants across the country in which fans were unable to obtain the short-supplied sauce, the restaurant announced they would be producing a larger amount so that fans would be able to try it more easily.