You must log in or register to comment.
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.
Thanks for the detailed response.
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.
It’s called inflation right? Try to compare it with a cryptocurrency instead of the dollar ;P
Don’t eat fast food, make your own.
If you’re already at home it’s faster too.
These figures should be inflation adjusted
Also why no big Mac?
2014 $5.39 inflation adjusted to 2024 $7.18
They should also compare shrinkflation. If a burger price rises by 25% but it’s size shrinks by 10%, the cost is much higher as you’re paying more for less.
Agreed, but only if wages and especialy minimum wage was inflation adjusted
Sooooo, stop eating there? It’s expensive enough bowing to the grocery cartels, who can afford to eat out?
God I wish that plane went down
Yet another reason to stop eating there
You mean providing a photo opportunity for a billionaire to roleplay being a poor to help him get elected wasn’t enough to get progressive to boycott them? I think that’s much more actively politically involved than Hobby Lobby or Chic Fil A.
I can blame McDonald’s for a lot of things, but not this. They didn’t really get a choice.
Beat meat to it.
Also nice username.
were the bar lengths randomly generated? they make no sense
Well of course they had to make room for the picture of a child eating McDonald’s. How else would people know what they’re looking at, and who would they feel bad for?
They’re dollars. Really not a great way to display the data.
The qtr pounder $5.39 is shorter than the oreo $4.49
Yeah but some prices double and the 2024 bar is less than 2× as high, other prices that are also double have 2024 bars more than 2× as high. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The quality has also fallen dramatically. I used to like their standard hamburgers (the little ones), but the buns are leathery these days, and the meat seems smaller than it used to be.
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 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.
I was just talking about this with a friend the other day, but it’s really not worth it to go to these fast food places anymore even if you do like the food. I remember when, speaking to my friend, we would go to BK in high school and get a couple of “buck doubles”, because Burger King used to run a promotion where you could get two double cheeseburgers for two dollars. It was honestly a great deal. Then the shrinkflation kicked in and over time the size of the food became smaller and smaller. Then, the actual currency inflation hit, and fast food companies used the increased price of beef, chicken and other such ingredients as an excuse to gouge the hell out of their prices. Now, if I were to go to BK and get my usual fare, I would be lucky to leave paying less than $16. For like, $4 extra (not including tip) I could go to the Chili’s across the street and get an actual restaurant quality burger, and a side, and a beverage and be more than satisfied.
These fast food places are completely off their rocker if they think these prices are reasonable. Inflation is going down, so we as consumers need to stop buying their shit so they can’t justify keeping prices so insanely high. McDonalds and other fast food places are the biggest bulk purchaser of raw ingredients, so you bet that they have an insane amount of negotiating power to convince farmers and ranchers to supply the stuff they need for below market rate in bulk quantities.
If you are really craving that unique fast food flavor that you can only get at your favorite chain, let me tell you, there are YouTube channels with copycat recipes that can be made quicker and cheaper than the time it takes to drive to the nearest chain location, order, pay, get your food, leave, and come back to your house to eat it. And they taste almost the same or better in most cases because you make it yourself so you can add as much of the flavorful stuff as you want.
Kind of crazy that I can get a large pizza and a 2 liter from Pizza Hut for the cost of a single meal at Jack in the Box.
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.
The graph itself’s utter lack of proportion is more infuriating than the content.
I don’t always ruin my graphs, but when i do it’s to advertise for the company the graph is dumping on
Must eat at McDonald’s.
Back ~2010/11 I used to go to McD’s once a week with friends after practice. I’d order a McChicken, a mcdouble, and a medium fry and pay with just random loose change from my car. Thanks for confirming this for me with this infographic, these are the prices I remember paying.
The two inflation calculators that I found said that a dollar in 2014 should be worth $1.33 in 2025. That’s significantly lower than the lowest price increase in this infographic.
Also most of that inflation was the last few years, driven mostly by corporate greed. Not from rising company expenses.
