Kevin Roberts remembers when he could get a bacon cheeseburger, fries and a drink from Five Guys for $10. But that was years ago. When the Virginia high school teacher recently visited the fast-food chain, the food alone without a beverage cost double that amount.
Roberts, 38, now only gets fast food “as a rare treat,” he told CBS MoneyWatch. “Nothing has made me cook at home more than fast-food prices.”
Roberts is hardly alone. Many consumers are expressing frustration at the surge in fast-food prices, which are starting to scare off budget-conscious customers.
A January poll by consulting firm Revenue Management Solutions found that about 25% of people who make under $50,000 were cutting back on fast food, pointing to cost as a concern.
If you can eat at a nicer place for the same amount of money, why would you eat at McDonald’s?
Convenience and familiarity, mostly. If you go to a McDonalds you know exactly what you’ll get and you’ll be able to get it pretty quick.
Name one burger joint that doesn’t have exactly what mcds has and more…this comment is laughable.
People eat at McDonald’s because of marketing.
If you go to a McDonalds you know exactly what you’ll get
A poorly put together “meal” that very likely has been sitting under a heater for a length of time unless you went there when it was busy. And if it was busy, the chance for mistake is high and it’s going to be sloppily put together. What so you can save a few minutes? Most places do take-away… so you call them, place an order, pick it up. No sitting 10-20 minutes in drive-thru. And you got more food, better food, for the exact same price and you probably got it faster on take-out. And dining in… you wait a few minutes… how do you not have a few minutes?
And who actually cares about familiarity? That’s either saying, you go to that one place way to much and your food choices are predictable and boring. Or you’re highly susceptible to advertising. And really, those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.
Obvious food quality and health issues aside, I know some are still boycotting McDonald’s for providing free meals to the IDF. They also exploit forced prison labor to drive profits.
Speed, for one. If I’m traveling across the country and I just want to eat and get back on the road, or even if I just need some breakfast before work, it’s a lot faster.
My go to for this stuff now is truck stops. They’ll usually have a fast food restaurant in them but also healthier options for snacks and meals
Addicted to the absurdly high amount of sugars and preservatives most likely.
If you’re in a hurry mostly.
Not only have the prices become absurd, the quality control has gone to crap.
For years we’ve taken regular road trips and use to stop at fast food places every single time. In the past 3 years we’ve repeatedly been served triple salted food, awful sub sandwiches, “cheese” burgers missing the cheese and condiments, and cold burger patties so old and dry they couldn’t be choked down. When you factor in the amount of waste due to the lousy food, the actual prices are way higher than what’s shown on the menu.
The ridiculous prices and regular bad experiences pushed us to a tipping point and we now find a grocery store along the way for deli sandwiches. It usually only adds about 5 minutes to the trip. Not only are the prices about 30% less but the food is consistently edible which makes the real price probably 1/2 of fast food places.
This is something we wouldn’t have taken he time to do a few years ago, so for us there’s been a big upside to the absurd prices and lousy food. We’re permanently changed our habits and cut fast food out of our diet completely. We are now spending less and getting consistently better quality, healthier food.
Maybe we should send “thank you” notes to the various fast food corporate headquarters.
You can’t pay your employees poverty wages and expect them to care about quality.
It has to hurt for the people who spend their hard earned money on a night off from cooking by ordering out at McDonald’s, but it’s a lesson we all learn the hard way.
it’s very hard to give a shit when you’re making a meal that costs $15 in 30 seconds when you make maybe $9/hr. the math is so plainly unfair and it’s right in front of you all day
All the fasst food places here pay like 15$ minimum, mcdonalds. Bk, Wendy’s, all the big names.
It’s still shit money but it’s not THAT low.
If you’re selling a product that you can’t produce by paying employees a lousy wage, you have to pay what’s needed to produce a salable product. This is the way business works everywhere and is true for both skilled and unskilled labor.
These companies have radically increased their prices while allowing the products produced to go to shit, and their customers are doing what customers always do when faced with crappy products and high prices. We’re going elsewhere.
I usually go to the salad bar of my grocery store and pickup a salad with no protein or dressing, then go to the dressing isle and buy a bottle of the dressing of my choice, finally go to the deli and pickup a cooked chicken. At home I shred the chicken and store it in a container and every day after I just stop buy the salad bar and pickup a hefty salad for $5, add a bit of my shredded chicken and dressing with gusto.
Best lunch ever.
This is a really good idea!
Death of fast food is a treat we can all look forward to. Keep raising those prices geniuses!
It’s not just fast food unfortunately. Sit down restaurants, even mom and pop ones are through the roof in pricing as well. Even groceries to cook at home are crazy these days with the pricing
That’s pure greed at this point…Jimmy John’s is still well in an affordable range. As a rule, I tend to avoid buying food from places with surge pricing as fast food is supposed to be affordable! It’s not fine dining and as a result should be priced appropriately; they’ve forgotten their role in the food space and thus their business will live or die based on future choices.
Jimmy John’s
Yeah, but their owner is a big trump fan, and for some inexplicable reason he’s paying Rudy Giuliani 's legal bills…
Their subs are decent tho and probably cheaper than subway at this point.
Man, subway actually used to be decent too. $5 for a foot long is pretty much what it was worth. And if you knew what you were doing it could have been relatively healthy.
I haven’t been in probably a decade now. But sometimes I still get JJ’s. Just wanted to mention that like a lot of big chains, we really shouldn’t be giving them a lot of money.
Sucks to hear that but thank you the info.
I could be wrong but I don’t believe he owns the company any longer, I think he was bought out.
If you order online, Subway always has a coupon to get footlongs for ~$7, which is about $5 from 2010 adjusted for inflation. They have a lot of perpetual coupons that they rotate the codes on about once per month, but there’s always an up-to-date list on the subway subreddit.
If you order at the right time, you can get salmonella from the lettuce. Guess how I know.
Ugh, if I’m gonna get salmonella, it better be from delicious sprouts, not boring lettuce
We got JJ’s a couple weeks ago. 3 sandwiches and 3 cookies was over $50. That was not worth anywhere near that much.
Yikes! On average (as a single dude) it’s around 19 and some change for delivery. In store I end up paying around 13 dollars! For more than one person, it’s better to eat at a proper sit down restaurant.
Fast food was affordable because they paid sweat shop wages. That’s not the case anymore. In any event… I would argue with the “supposed to be” affordable comment. Just because it was doesn’t mean it’s supposed to be. As far as I’m concerned this can only be good for the health of the public- when fast food prices are at least comparable in price to healthy options.
Edit: lol at all the people comparing the US to Nordic countries. Apparently they think US franchise owners are the same as those in countries where making a profit is akin to a sin. Hahaha. They thought by raising wages, owners would cut into their own bottom lines. “Bruh, in countries where mcmansions don’t happen, this isn’t a problem.” Net profits have not gone up at all compared with the rest of the economy.
And apparently people really like their cheap big macs. Eat something else? And I’m sure many of them were arguing for livable wages over the past five years (I was). This outrage is hilarious.
Edit 2: Apparently people don’t know what “gross” means. If my costs go up, then my prices go up… and my gross returns go up to cover both the costs (expenses) and net proceeds. I’m at a complete loss at the nature of these arguments.
McDonald’s NET growth from end of 2009 to 2023 was 4.56 B to 8.47B. A 186% increase. This is roughly a 5% annualized increase. I intentionally sought pre/post COVID numbers for a reason.
In this same time the US GDP grew from 14.47B to 27.35B. Almost the exact same rate of growth at a 189% increase.
Net profits are what you’re concerned with in your arguments when accounting for greed… not gross. If anything, I’ve shown McDonalds is making less money today. But you know, feels are more important than facts.
My guy, it’s cheaper to get a big mac in Norway than in the US and their lowest wages are more than double ours in the US.
Yes but the owners in Norway aren’t making more profits than last year.
The whole problem isn’t that they’re not making good profits, but that it’s not exponentially growing profits.
Greed.
I won’t believe paying fast workers a liveable wage necessitates the rise in cost unless there’s hard data behind that. Sure, it’s likely a necessity to continue profit growth quarter after quarter, but I’d wager they’re able to continue making massive profits even with having to pay their staff like they’re humans.
I agree with you about fast food though. We’ll be better off without them. Fuck em.
Hey, I can edit too: You never said gross prior to your edit, you were talking about consumer costs. I’m still not yet a believer, but I Iove you :)
Since labor is a cost. You just defeated your argument.
If labor goes up, prices will go up. It’s that simple. Fast food is only profitable at high volumes. Their profit margin is only around 10% which is low.
Bruh, McDonald’s exists in other countries…
A big Mac in the Nordic countries costs like a dollar more than America, and their workers get the equivalent of like $20 some an hour, paid vacation time, and the company actually has to pay taxes.
It ain’t the labor that’s expensive.
It’s not the ingredients either.
It’s the profit rate to keep shareholders happy
If that arrow always has to go up, it’s the one thing that’s literally impossible to ever go down.
2023, McDonald’s net income $8.5B on $25B revenue, or 34% net profit margin.
2009 net income $4.5B on $23B revenue. 20% profit margin.Over the time period that you picked, their profits - the money that they don’t pay to either workers or farmers - nearly doubled as revenues barely changed.
Used to be that people went to fast food because it was good, fast, and cheap.
These guys running the show have managed to reverse all three of those points. Now fast food is shit, slow, and expensive. It’s honestly amazing that people put up with it as long as they did.
The size of the patties are ridiculous.
They’re smaller than the pickles now.
I was running between work and meeting friends for drinks last week. Lost track of time and it got past 10pm. On the way home, saw a Burger King drive-in. Haven’t had fast food in years (we eat at home a lot). What the hell.
Two discoveries:
- A small Whopper meal was over $15!
- My stomach didn’t appreciate it all night and most of the next day.
For that kind of money, you can do much better. Lesson learned.
I’ve got a couple of sealed packs of peanuts in the glove box.
Hey McDonald’s.
This isn’t reddit so you probably won’t see this.
Hashbrowns cost $1. Figure it out. Not here to haggle.
Also can someone sue these MFS giving deals through apps? Like “sorry homeless guy pan-handling out front, medium fry is only free if you have a $200 phone! Sucks to suck.” How is that ok?
Hashbrowns from McD is $2.19 here lol. I stopped buying them long time ago.
Hash browns used to be $.90 ea or 2 for $1.
The apps are fucking awesome though.
I literally get free burgers with no purchase required regularly at the moment thanks to a fast food app.
I’m surprised to see all the replies about the McDonalds app and how its actually a great deal.
Most companies are doing this now, and giving free food regularly as an incentive to keep using it.
Why would these companies spend money to keep us using the app, and keep it installed?
The truth is, they make far more off selling your data then they spend giving away food periodically. Look at the permissions the app needs under the guise of “making it easy to tell when you are near a McDonalds so we can start cooking your food!”.
Lemmy is supposed to be better about privacy and such than this.
Give me a fucking break.
That’s not the only motive. The other is that if people are in the habit of using the phones and kiosks to place their orders, then that’s less money spent on people stuck on order taking. I’d even speculate that is the primary driver of “discounts in the app”.
For many of the restaurants, I’m actually in favor of tapping in the order, since it’s less likely to screw up getting the order right when I’m tapping it in.
I think this is a case where people might actually prefer the kiosks over the cashiers, since like you said, the kiosk doesn’t vet your order wrong.
There can be multiple reasons to do things, and they can definitely add on new ideas on top 9f old ones when they realize an avenue to make more money.
I’m not even saying noone should use these apps, just be aware of what the cost actually is.
I hope people in general figure out this whole “free” stuff scam soon. Drug dealers have been giving out “testers” for hundreds of years but I guess people just assume they aren’t part of the “easy to deceive” crowd.
All big companies are keeping tabs on socials, incl. Lemmy. You think you’re special for using Lemmy? 🤪
There’s not enough of us for any movement here to make their stock price move.
They don’t care. It would be a bad use of their resources.
They will eventually, but they don’t.
Keep convincing yourself that you’re special.
Are you really that dumb to think your comment isn’t scanned by companies?
😂
Smart comeback!
Removed by mod
Well, I just spent a good 5 minutes in Lemmy and encounter nothing but white trash. I am certainly gonna go outside again, but not of your command, wanna-be-master. I’m not your fucking slave.
No one likes you.
They’ve either been banned or deleted their account hahaha
Of course, because people here hate Asians, as I have been trying to point out. Luckily your racist friends like you. Now go dig a hole please, and drop your mom in it first. You motherfucking racist barbarian baboon brain.
All of the megacorps are raising prices because they know consumers cannot do anything about it.
Meanwhile, wages can’t keep pace with inflation because, “tHaT wOuLd MaKe ThE pRoBlEm WoRsE” Yes it would, but only allowing huge corporations to do that shit makes the class disparity worse and not allowing individuals to match is boiling a frog in water.
The thing about boiling the frog in water is that eventually the frog jumps or dies.
Eventually the minor quantitive shifts will result in a sudden and drastic qualitative change.
The only good thing about this is now farm fresh food is about the same as grocery store prices. So now i can better justify shopping local :)
Yup, and all the politicians playing make-believe and making a big show of scratching their heads like they just don’t understand what’s causing inflation has just emboldened them. We’re still living with the price gouging from the pandemic.
I’m surprised they’re not still trying to claim it’s from the stimulus checks lol.
Sounds like Kevin Roberts did something about it.
We’d all do better to let this help us kick the fast food habit
Overdramatic headlines to try to make this more exotic and mysterious than the reality - YOU GREEDY FUCKS HAVE INTENTIONALLY TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF EVERYONE SINCE THE PANDEMIC STARTED. It was never acceptable and you finally pushed fast enough to even upset the wealthy and those who spend outside their means.
You are all broken humans. You chase endless growth without purpose, you are a disease.
News headlines gonna be like “millenials are bankrupting an American institution, the fast food industry”
They need to make up their mind whether they want us on this or the avocado toast
Avocado toast is probably cheaper at this point
tHe MaRkEt WiLl ReGuLaTe ItSelF! Okay sure, for the most profit without regard for the consumer. Corporations need a heavy hand.
good. Maybe people will stop eating shit
You’re kidding yourself if you believe this. When costs are high and incomes are low people tend to eat more processed crap, they just buy it from supermarkets instead of fast food chains.
Source? Look at how well Aldi is doing right now in the US. People are being more conservative with their finances. It should be more expensive to buy processed fast food.
Literally the first Google result amongst hundreds.
https://thrivemarket.com/blog/natural-food-prices
Processed, crappy food will always be more expensive than natural, whole foods like vegetables.
Fast food is more expensive
That’s not what my comment says. I’ve said that processed food will always be cheaper, so you’re just replacing shit for shit.
not always
The ridiculous part of this is that fast food is already subsidized by cheap corn, soy and dairy so their customers are getting screwed at both ends. I’m guessing we’ll see record fast food profits soon if we haven’t already.
I wish we’d end corn subsidies… They put it in everything. Just move those subsidies to hemp so people can have real sugar. Hemp would be there much better crop to subsidize since it does everything.
Ah, but you see - the proles might find a way to get high using hemp and that would hurt productivity. Better to drown them in corn syrup and obese corn fed factory farmed animals, then we can sell them diabetes medications and end of life care too.
Also obesity and other such diseases kill people at around the point they’re reaching retirement age, meaning that the typical prole can create wealth for others during the full or almost full period of wealth creation and then likely die just before or just after retiring, saving on post-retirement and old-age costs.
For the owner class in Capitalism, the perfect life expectation for proles is the one that exactly matches the retirement age.
Ironically The War of Independence, The French and Indian War, and The War of 1812 were all fought, in part, over hemp production or taxes.
Not only does it do everything, it captures carbon better than any other plant. It’s so effective at it, that one harvest of one acre of hemp removes almost 10 times the carbon that one acre of trees would capture. Thing is that hemp does that in 3 months allowing 4 harvests per year, while trees take 150 years on average to grow. It also stores 85% of that carbon in the roots of the plant, the “waste” part as far as we are concerned, so we could produce biofuel, paper, clothing, food, and housing from the stuff without harming the effectiveness of the carbon capture. All we would need to do is collect the roots, compress them into a density that will not float, and dump them into the Marianas Trench. That way that carbon will be trapped down there for a few hundred million years.
We won’t end corn subsidies because Iowa gets first pick in presidential elections.
The corn subsidies are here for a purpose. To ensure that we maintain a surplus so that we can avoid mass food shortages if a natural disaster such as the dust bowl of the 1930s wipes out several years of harvests. Hemp can’t be used as a food source.
So during a famine, we’ll have to live on what, canned corn for the duration? I think I’d rather eat the hemp.
I’m no farmer, so I could be way off, but I feel like there are much better crops we could keep in surplus in case of famine.
Corn is used in cereals, tortillas, chips, as a sugar substitute, and as animal feed. The one thing you won’t be eating is canned corn because that’s not the kind of corn that we subsidize.
Corn is actually probably one of the most effective crops we could use in a surplus
It’s used in all of those things, but it’s not the only ingredient. On it’s own, corn can’t make a ton of unique products, you have to mix in other crops/ingredients and process it.
Hemp is a complete protein. Corn is not. Remember the gruel that Scrooge was eating? That’s hempseed. Hemp can be used for food, clothing, shelter, paper, biofuel, and a fuckton of other uses.
I’m not meaning to disparage the other uses of hemp.
I’m not an expert in the uses of hemp for food but we already have the cultural palate and infrastructure for cornmeal and cornflour products, not so much for hempseed right now. If we had that back in the depression, maybe we would have subsidized hemp instead. Maybe attitudes could change in the future and we could shift to subsidizing hemp in the future. I know of a couple big hemp farms that have popped up near me, it’s possible. But it’s not feasible right now.
That’s the exact same argument that my parents, and a ton of other Democrats, hit me with about Bernie in 2016. I love how any progress at all is never feasible right now.
Don’t forget the beef subsidies, too!
Per a 2015 Berkeley study, witjouy the beef and dairy subsidies, a Big Mac would cost $13 and a pound of beef would cost $30. Obviously both would be more now since inflation has raised prices by about 1/3 across the board and food prices have definitely grown faster than the average.
Right, and beef is in turn subsidized by corn and soy subsidies as cheap feed - plus whatever industrial surplus feed they can find, like Skittles, which are subsided again via corn.
Explaining a dystopia to an american: imagine no burgers
🎵 Imagine there’s no burgers It’s easy if you try Imagine paying $8 For the apple pie 🎶
about 25% of people who make under $50,000 were cutting back on fast food
Only 25%? Who hasn’t cut back, even if it’s subconsciously?
I know it’s just an anecdote, but my wife and I make a lot more than that and we’ve had to cut how often we get fast food because it’s become way too expensive.
Shit, half the time we just get sit-down service because the cost isn’t that much higher. Why would we get low quality fast food for $30 when we can go to a local sit-down restaurant and get higher quality food for $40, tip included?
to me restaurants are now for special occasions, I can cook well enough that restaurants just feel disappointing.
a lot of people are addicts when it comes to fast food, take out, and delivery.
it’s the convenience they are addicted to.
I may not be proud of it, but I haven’t cut back.
My lunch ritual is go through a drive thru and eat in my car while playing on my phone. Between apps and coupons, I can usually eat for $5-7, sometimes I order something at full price because it sounds particularly good that day.
I know there are so many other better options, but my neurodivergency doesn’t like it when I change up a ritual that’s been going on for so many years.
Without context of that poll, that doesn’t mean much. Someone who eat fast food or have it often might not have to cut back on eating it.
I was flabbergasted yesterday when I got 2 happy meals for the kids, a mcrispy and a filet of fish, and the teller said $30. My wife and I just stared. Wtf happened. We went there for a quick easy cheap meal while road tripping. Next time we’re packing sandwiches.
I don’t know your family composition, but even here in Europe, 30€ for a quick meal for 4 is fucking cheap. Like, under the poverty-line cheap.
It wasn’t even full meals. No drinks no sides for the adults. Just 2 sandwiches. And the kids got small happy meal portions. This is fast food. This is junk food.
In Europe there is actually about 20% (it varies from country to country) VAT in such meals and in the countries were the price of those MacDonald’s products would be that high, the minimum salary (which is what most of people working for McD get paid) is actually high enough for people to be able to afford it.
Were I am - Portugal - a Happy Meal is about €5, but then again the local minimum wage is €820 (per month, for 40h/week, so about $5.5 per hour)
At this point any restaurant meal we can get under 100 is good value lol
are you still staring? did you end the road trip? you really just left the story hanging there.
We stared as long as socially acceptable before accepting and paying.
