I can live with 100 burgers = rent, if burger=$10, but not $18.
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Introducing the new McCardboard, made out of 100% recycled cardboard!
I had a crazy-busy day about 2-months ago and found myself hitting up a McDonald’s drive-thru for an order of fries just to tide me over for the drive home.
I didn’t pay attention to the pricing—it was only fries—and when I got to the window I handed them a five, fully expecting a couple of bucks in change.
The attendant just looked at me. I laughed as I realized a regular order of fries was more than five-bucks.
And yet, I STILL am hard pressed to believe a Big Mac meal is currently $18…
I’m not paying $20 for the same shit that was bare minimum of food at $5.
The Big Mac set in Japan is ¥750 right now. Which converts to $5.07.
Does McDonald’s America think each restaurant is a theme park or something?
They kind of used to be. The big old play areas are mostly gone. One in my area even had an N64 in one of those bubble kiosks. Gone. I can’t imagine why kids these days still give a shit about Micky D.
I don’t necessarily blame them as workers would have to go in and hose urine out of the play structure each night.
Nothing worth doing is easy, they say 🤣
That explains why I married such a difficult woman. lol
Coming in hot with the boomer jokes over here lmfao go lose a cold war, old ass 🤪
Cold war is what I call losing the fight for blankets to the wife and cat. lol
They look like this now. Pretty much the most inoffensively hostile environment imaginable.
Bland yet uninviting
It clearly sends the message, “Come on in, then get the fuck out as quickly as possible.”
Don’t forget to piss on the bathroom floor. Lord knows everyone else has.
It looks like a McMansion kitchen/dining.
I guess that’s why “Mc” is in the term.
Originally mcmansion meant they were like the low quality fast food of houses. But it seems like we have some convergent evolution happening now.
In Australia it is $12.80 AUD for a large Big Mac meal which is $8.36 USD. For $18.5 USD I can get a much better burger and still a meal deal at either Five Guys or Grilld.
Small big Mac meal is $12.80, Large is AUD$14.40, USD$9.39 pretty sure.
Been a while since I have been now that kids are not interested in it, but that still translates to about to half the price of the US prices.
Can’t read the article without effort, but I very much doubt numbers and the context is missing. Every one I’ve been to here on the East Coast USA has been about $12.
Which is still way too much for fucking McDonald’s.
Not really a big Mac will feed ya for a half day and it’s a great quick snack meal if you are on the run. I make it a point to hit them up every once in a while for breakfast too. People hate on McDonald’s way too much.
A big Mac will not feed anyone for half a day. It’s all bun.
It’s also awful
🤷♂️ gets me there
The Big Mac set in Japan is ¥750 right now.
And Burger King is even cheaper.
It baffles my mind that people would pay $18 USD for that shit. I visited the US last year and while prices in general had definitely gone up since the last time I was there, there is absolutely no justification to pay $18 for McDonald’s. It’s crazy.
You can get some proper good food for that price in a normal restaurant here in Austria.
Same in America. You can at least get a decent lunch that was made in a proper kitchen, with good ingredients. Maybe not dinner.
I live in Texas and had a sweet potato hash with pulled pork, kale, and a poached egg for lunch yesterday for $15. If $18 for a McDonald’s meal is true, people would be crazy to go there, there are a ton of more affordable and way better options.
It is insane that a meal at Red Robin with bottomless fries is actually less expensive than McDonald’s… I literally don’t go to these types of restaurants unless there is some app deal because fastfood retail prices have gone insane.
I don’t know where they’re getting this $18 price from as my local McDonalds aren’t charging anywhere near that much for any of their meals.
Australia pricing. It’s around $12 in the states
Someone was able to bypass the paywall and said it’s some McDonalds at a rest stop in Connecticut, which is just an outlier like any gas station charging $1.50/gal more because they’re right off a busy freeway exit.
I think they are/were trying to rebrand away from being a place to get cheap low quality burgers.
Well that does not work if you only increase the price.
Now they’re a place to get overpriced low quality burgers.
Yes.
So how is in and out able to keep their prices much lower, but with higher quality ingredients and better employee pay?
In N Out is still a privately held company, while McDonald’s is public and beholden to shareholders. They’re also always slammed, and have a much simpler menu.
I’ll just get my four for $4 from Wendy’s thanks.
Even that is four for $5 near me now.
Yup. They got rid of the 4 for $4 and replaced it with the $5 biggie bag or a $6 biggie bag.
It’s the same exact items just a dollar extra
Wtf. I thought the big mac was cheap in America. Here I’m complaining about the price and it turns out I’m getting quite the deal.
It’s $12 for the meal in most places. The article is garbage designed to rile people up.
Geez, and I thought our 11 euro meal was expensive here in the Netherlands…
The company really has lost track of why people went there in the first place. They used to be cheap and fast; that’s what mattered. Nobody gave a shit that the food was just OK or that you ate it off a plastic tray while sitting in a plastic bench seat.
But in the 90’s, things went downhill. They made the restaurants ‘fancy’ and added a lot to the menu. Which meant you were now paying more for food and waiting longer to get it. Before the self order kiosks were installed, the staff also couldn’t keep up with menu changes, which meant more order errors as well.
They also invested more in things like healthy options and added specific McCafe coffee corners to sell better coffee. As if that was something we went to McD’s for…
They really need to get back to basics. A ten item menu, sold cheap, in a who-gives-a-shit what it looks like restaurant.
In Canada, McDonalds is the best chain to go to for a decent cheap coffee. Our national chain, Tim Hortons, went downhill maybe a decade or two ago, and Starbucks is too expensive, lol
They can do whatever they want but a competitor should fill in the void, but that’s also not happening, all the other big names are just as bad and no new kids on the block anywhere. Have you tried the five guys in Utrecht? It’s really nice but you leave with a 30€ per person bill for some basic stuff, it’s mad.
So glad I live in the land of in n out. Fuck McDonald’s.
I worked at the 2nd or 3rd biggest McDonald’s (by revenue) in Australia for a couple of years and I can assure you that plenty of people wanted the McCafe coffee and cakes. The morning rush was ffffffffffffffucking insane.
With regards to healthy options, my reading of it was that they include it on the menu knowing that most people won’t order it - but people like the fact that they could order it if they wanted to (while scarfing down their triple cheese burger with extra bacon).
The absurdly large menu they have these days is a disaster though. I pity the people that have to work there now.
They didn’t lose track. People are now addicted to the salt and sugar bomb. They know it and capitalize on it.
I generally agree with your post except for -
and added specific McCafe coffee corners to sell better coffee. As if that was something we went to McD’s for…
Australian here. In the last 40 years or so we have morphed (somehow) into notorious coffee snobs. Possibly due to a large number of Italian migrants in the 1950’s - 1970’s who wanted a decent espresso , who knows? But I digress.
McCafe coffee isn’t the best coffee around, but it’s a consistent quality that means you can go to nearly any McDonald’s in Australia and get the same without playing the dreaded guessing game of “will this coffee be undrinkable dishwater?” that you do when visiting random cafes.
Coupled with their efficiency in drive-thru operations it means you can grab a coffee with a known quality in a fairly well known timeframe, something that is sorely lacking in your average cafe.
Fair enough, you might not always have a decent, consistent chain nearby. Especially if you’re not in a larger city.
Here in the Netherlands we’re certainly spoilt for choice in that regard. You can get decent coffee just about everywhere. So it doesn’t really add much in that regard.
They’ve paid attention to affordability so far. They’re paying close attention to how much they can charge before people can no longer afford it.
Like all gougers do.
You’re describing essentially every business ever.
Hell, more than business even. You presumably wouldn’t voluntarily take a pay cut, no? McDonald’s isn’t going to voluntarily charge less than they can either.
Every business gouges their customers? Ok. Sounds about right.
I’m a human. McDonalds is a legal fiction. I don’t care how much money they make. You care about nothing else.
Essentially every business charges an amount just under that which would cause their average customer to switch to a competitor, yes.
McDonald’s may be a legal fiction, but the franchise owner who set this particular price is not; he’s a very real person exploiting the value derived from being one of very few options at a rest stop. Expecting him to do anything else is not a particularly practical strategy. If this is seen as objectionable, you need to eliminate that scarcity value by either opening the space up to additional competitors or using government to mandate as part of the rest stop leases that profit margins stay within a reasonable level.
There are actual solutions here, but wagging your finger is not one of them.
Don’t like being gouged? Don’t like others being gouged? Just have enough money to take on the largest fast food chain in the world! Why didn’t I think of that?
Or just rant on niche forums I guess; you do you mate.
Just don’t go there anymore. If we all got on the same page and normalize boycotting corporations for the slightest reason we could hit them where it hurts; their profits. It’s the only way we can fight back against corporate greed… Use the capitalist system they have used to divide and conquer against them. Make them fear us.
Gotta cook at home.
Any alternative options run $5 for 800 calories in San Francisco, besides home cooking?
Ah! Taco Bell does have ‘em beat:
Anywhere else I think you’d need [app] coupons to achieve parity, though I could be wrong.
I swear Domino’s pizza is the best calorie to dollar ratio here. You can get a pizza that’s probably more than your daily calorie requirement for under $5 if you buy something like a Hawaiian at lunch time.
Just checked and a deep pan pepperoni is over 1200kcal and is AUD7 (USD4.60).
A bottle of oil is more than your daily calorie requirements and is probably cheaper.
Ding ding ding!
Have to use one of their permanent coupons, otherwise it’s more than twice as expensive ($18.99).
Has between 2550-2640 calories as built, so:
Taco Bell: 3.38/420=0.008
Domino’s: 7.99/2600=0.0031
.8 cents per calorie versus .3 cents per calorie. What a deal! (Health evaluation not included :) )
Omg a cheesy bean and rice burrito used to be like $1.29 or so just a few years ago.
Used to be 99c and had pico on it. I still will eat them but they’re not the same :(
[boycotting] is the only way we can fight back against corporate greed
this is a symptom of a greater problem in the united states. boycotting is never going to be as effective as legislative change because boycotts take a monumental amount of effort to organize and it’s very easy for people to lose interest/move on as time passes. the government needs to start doing something about these companies being too greedy (e.g. break them up, force price caps, nationalize them, etc)
because boycotts take a monumental amount of effort to organize
It really doesn’t. If you don’t like something about a company, tell them and don’t spend your money there. It does not need to be organised. The greater issue is not that it requires monumental effort but that people are not even willing of minimal effort. “Sure Amazon is bad… But I can’t live without prime….”
Sure. But for a successful boycott you need hundreds of thousands to millions of participants over weeks to months. Can you organize that? You’re taking for granted the type of publicity campaign needed to organize a boycott like this and then you’d need to actually find enough people who care enough and have the willpower to participate. No one’s going to care if 100M people boycott a place that were already not going there. You need to convince those who regularly patronize that business.
If you don’t like something about a company, tell them and don’t spend your money there.
That’s not a boycott, it’s an individual change of spending habits
It’s not a boycott if you’re alone
I belive that it is. As far as I know there are no size requirements to qualify for a boycott
here’s the full sentence you’re quoting:
boycotting is never going to be as effective as legislative change because boycotts take a monumental amount of effort to organize and it’s very easy for people to lose interest/move on as time passes.
sure, you can simply decide to do a one-person boycott of a company, and that wouldn’t take much effort at all to organize. but when it comes to actually changing the behavior of a company, the actions of one consumer are not going to be nearly as effective as a piece of legislation. so, you’ll probably need to get many people to band together and collectively decide to stop buying a company’s products. this leads back to the “monumental effort” part of the sentence.
also, in order for people to decide that they don’t like what a company is doing, they need to first be told that the company is doing those things. who’s going to tell them?
I’d argue that if people do not like something a company does, and simply stop buying from it, it’s the same as an organised boycott. I assume that I won’t be the only one disliking the companys actions and that there will be more who do the same.
People simply need to realise that as consumers, we have the power to change things. It’s not too different to voting. Your actions count, even though they may seem small. If we all react instead of maindleslt consuming, companies will listen. They may not react but they will listen.
They already know everything about their consumers and adjust their products accordingly to maximize sales. If people start writing to them that they have stopped buying their products or services because of this or that, they will definetelly notice
It’s also the absolute only thing they listen to. We’ve seen it time and time again, they’ll go back on their promises, actively harm their own customers, lie and make excuses on social media, and more for that tiny little bit of extra profit…
We’re all so fucking broken by consumerist propaganda we think adhering to the fundamental laws of capitalist economics is “boycotting” now. When prices go too high, you’re supposed to stop buying.
Cigarettes are expensive, disgusting and unhealthy too, but people spend a lot of money on it. U really don’t get either of it. I think itl’s rather pick up smoking tho.
Hmmm, food or lung cancer? What a decision to make. Yeah calling McDonald’s food is a stretch but at least it feeds people. Cigarettes are a stupid habit.
Where on earth is a Big Mac $18? I’m not paying to read that article.
If you follow the linked NY Post article in the article, you can find out that it is a McDonald’s at a rest stop in Connecticut.
Again, not paying to read an article.
If you’d like to read it (and almost any other article) without paying I’d recommend this:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/view-articles-reader-view-firefox-android
I could access the entire thing with a single click
Awesome! Thanks!
Our family was priced out of fast food in the US about two years ago. It’s both too expensive and much worse than it was in the past. We got generally priced out of family dining before that, so this was just the natural progression.
I work harder than ever and we just keep sliding down the economic scale. We lost the class war.
Well yeah how can workers win class war when they haven’t been fighting it in generations??
One of the rule of war is that it’s a “Two No, One Yes” situation. To avoid one, both sides have to say no. Either side can say yes and then you’re in a war whether you want it or not.
The rich said yes, the middeclass/below said no and we lost by default.
My whole life (now too many decades) the media propaganda has been saying how great deregulation, no taxes, and business-style government leadership is. Too many people believed those lies by the rich. So, here we are: in a new Guilded Age and making peanuts for our labor while our children’s future is quite dim.
I’ve found fast food in the US is actually quite a bit more expensive and worse quality than locally owned places. I realize not everywhere has access to those options though, especially outside urban areas
We lost the class war because a third of the country sided with, checks notes, wallstreet. Wtf yall?
