I don’t eat there so the jokes on them!
Fast food is supposed to be trash and cheap. It now is just trash.
Last time, I was at McDonald’s, they got my order wrong, it took forever and on my way back home, I got a speeding ticket.
How did they make sure you got a speeding ticket? Seems like an over-reach even for a multi national corporation.
I see it as karma for being stupid enough to go to McDick’s
Fair.
The rat bastards.
He fit the description of the Hamburglar.
What I as a German take from this is fucking hell was McD in the US cheap before. O.o
I mean it inflated a lot here too, but wow.
That’s really the main reason why any of us ate there. I haven’t gone there for about 5 years now.
Stop buying shitty, overpriced food from a dumpster organization.
If you stop buying it, you’ll help signal to the dumpster organization that their prices are too high.
It has been suggested that’s part of the reason for the price surge. A lot of people just aren’t buying from McDumpster anymore and so in order to hit the same levels of year over year profit increase they’ve raised their prices to make up for lost sales. So they have significantly fewer people paying significantly more money for the same shitty food. Ultimately this will lead to a death spiral, but they’re so massive it’s going to take a really really long time before they hit the bottom.
But here’s the really annoying thing about McDonald’s: they don’t care if their sales trend towards zero. McDonald’s makes all their money on the real estate values of their restaurants, not on food sales.
How’s that?
Say you want to open your own McDonald’s branch. You pass their financial vetting, get on their waiting list, go through McDonald’s boot camp, then McDonald’s corporate builds a new McDonald’s restaurant on land they own (or acquires land before doing so), then they lease the land to you, sell you all the equipment for the kitchen, the furniture for the dining area, and all the food and other supplies you need.
The prices are set according to their rules, the food is provided to you by them, the recipes are all very simple (you learn them at boot camp), all you do is hire and train the staff and operate the restaurant. You pay McDonald’s for everything, your profits are entirely based on sales, they own the land your restaurant sits on. If you decide you want out they’ll find someone else to take over.
Just as residential real estate has skyrocketed in price, so has commercial real estate (even more so). If you decide you’re out and McDonald’s corporate decides that location is no longer profitable then they sell the property with a large return on their investment.
Single establishment commercial space may be pretty expensive still but there’s an awful lot of bigger buildings starting to feel the burn from work from home. I wonder how many of the big buildings would have to fall before the commercial real estate industry takes a serious dive and they lose a crap ton of bank?
A lot I think. McDonald’s doesn’t just build restaurants anywhere. They conduct rigorous market analyses to determine where they want to buy real estate. They don’t buy unless they expect a place to be growing.
They have the benefit of all the data from their restaurants. They can compare that with publicly available data from local city councils. This is one of the reasons big companies seem to be immortal. They just have so much data, experience, and understanding of exactly how the business works at a local level.
Of course what they can’t anticipate (and few can) are global economic slowdowns and other major trends or even sudden events.
Thanks for the detailed response.
I haven’t eaten “fast” “food” in basically forever. It’s been decades. Unless 2010-ish Subway counts, and that was only consumed b/c I was driving cross-country and one whole sub was a day’s eats that I could stash as-needed.
These prices blow my mind. I can’t believe that people are paying so much for so little, and for crappy fried heart-attack and diabetes fare too. I can eat for a day for the price of one of these “burgers” (or “meals” - just because there’s more than one item in the bag doesn’t make it a “meal” no matter how much the marketers use the term). For the price of a “quarter pounder” here, I can get at least three big cans of “chunky”-style soup, each of which is a meal in itself - all you need is a bowl and a microwave and a spoon and a few minutes to heat. For the price of that burger I can (and do) get 3-4 boxes of cereal at Walmart, each of which will, along with a little milk in a bowl, provide a week’s-worth of breakfasts.
Frozen veggies, basics from the Winco bulk aisles, a bit of dairy maybe, a little spice, and maybe a worn, curled recipe book you got from the used bookstore (or not, if you already have the intuition for cooking) and you can eat incredibly cheaply (and well, if you’re careful) in the US. No need to fill your body with expensive McShit just because the ads tell you to and justify your doing it. Everything changes if you’re already homeless of course, that’s gonna cost you, but just be aware that McEating is going to get you to that state of being all the sooner.
I think that people eating all this McShit and justifying it as some kind of necessity (“too busy shop and cook!”) are just addicted to sugar/fat/salt/industrial-chemicals and who demand “treats” of such things each and every goddamn day (vs maybe once every few weeks 40 yrs ago) because that’s what they “deserve”. I understand, a treat is all you can aspire to, you’re never going to buy a house or have a decent job, but blowing what little $ you have on ruining your health and mobility and sanity doesn’t seem to me like it’s going to help get more out of life. No more than a daily 12-pack of McBeer would, and for that you wouldn’t have to wait in line.
Prices fit for a billionaire who wears depends
More reason to stop eating fast food.
Not Worth it their food is not very good anyways its average.
2024 their sales went down for the first time, so they cut the prices a bit on some meals, but you get a small drink and a small frie like we’re fucking stupid. If you up it back to medium fries and drink it’s the same shitty overpriced deal.
It got me over the idea of stopping for fast food. Fuckem
Plenty small restaurants have not seen price increases this stark over this period of time. Eat there instead.
Don’t eat fast food. It is really bad for you and will eventually kill you.
I mean, do whatever you want to your own body, but for gods sake don’t feed that utter shit to your kids!
What’s actually infuriating are those bar charts.
It’s largely because of new tiered pricing. They want to extract the maximum price while not losing any customers.
To do this, they first double or triple all their prices. Then, for those who are willing to stand on one leg, pat their head, and rub their stomach* while ordering the right things, they’ll charge you half price.
(*By this I mean use their app. The main purpose of the app and the deals are to charge everyone what they’re willing to pay.)
I’m surprised they are not all 200%, didn’t the money supply double in that time period?
200% is 3x
Also, money supply metric is a bad proxy for inflation
Is that little girl in the picture to blame?
That bitch stealin Wendy’s do though. Bout to see them throw down.