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.
Taco Bell’s app is a game changer, can still get a box for like $6. But that’s the only place I’ll get fast food anymore
Taco bell is the only fast food I eat as well. The rewards are pretty good. Free cheesy gordita crunch? Fuck yeah!
Amen, them shits is fire
You might want to look at the T.O.S. closely.
https://www.allrecipes.com/mcdonalds-new-terms-and-conditions-8384841
They should look at McDonald’s TOS closely because they use the Taco Bell app?
The article discusses McDonald’s but hidden gotchas in the TOS are becoming an industry standard. I shared the article because if McD is doing it, then it might be a good idea to look at your Taco Bell ToS closely, just in case.
Clearly I didn’t do a good job at making a clear statement with my previous comment.
And I’m not really anticipating suing a fast food restaurant. I know what I’m getting myself into when I eat there lol
That’s like saying “I have nothing to hide, why do I care if the government listens to all of my calls”.
Why do you think a fast food corporation would want their customers waive their legal right to sue them…?
Why would I care? I’m assuming the risk by eating there in the first place. And anyway, I’m not a litigious person, if I got sick or something I’d just chalk it up as a L and go on with my life
What if you couldn’t just go on? What if their negligence seriously and permanently harmed you i.e. burns from scalding coffee, toxic chemical contamination, etc.?
Is the risk of hospitalization, or major surgery, just an L to shrug off?
Again, I ask you: why do you think a fast food company would want to sneak in an arbitration clause?
Dude just don’t eat there, it’s fine. I’ll continue to eat there using the app, idgaf
I feel real bad for everyone living in a place where Taco Bell won the texmex fast food wars instead of Del Taco. A 1/2 pound bean and cheese burrito is still under $2, the fries I get on the side are more expensive. They were bought out by Jack in the Box so I’m waiting for the quality to start tanking, though.
I feel real bad for everyone living in a place where Taco Bell won the texmex fast food wars instead of Del Taco.
Joke’s on you, we’ve got the three seashells.
My behavior has changed completely. Stay in and make stuff from scratch with my friends instead of going out
It’s not just fast food. They’re getting the attention because they’re supposed to be cheap, but the price of eating out in general has jumped over the last 4 years or so.
For example: We often eat at a local barbecue place, usually getting the same order each time. (During the pandemic, we would get take out.) I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but when I looked it up a while back, I think we were paying ~$15 more now for the essentially the same order. Adding $15 on to a ~$30 order is a huge increase, as a percentage.
In general, our dining out expenses have gone way up since the start of the pandemic, but we aren’t eating out more often or ordering more extravagant foods. The prices have just gone up. (When we go out for meals, we go to a mix of fast food and casual dining places, some with counter service.)
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Five guys is a terrible example, they’ve always been crazy, but even five years ago BK, McDonald’s, Wendy’s had dollar menus with burgers and other substantial food items that poor people could access.
Those prices are suddenly firmly gone, and it happened earlier then and far outpaced even the rampant inflation in the US.
I agree that people shouldn’t be eating that s***** fast food anyway, but a lot of low-income people saw those dollar menus and cheap fast food as lifelines, and within a few years the cheapest items have arbitrarily quadrupled Quinton toppled in price.
There is zero practical reason aside from profit that french fries cost more than they did 5 years ago. Potatoes are just about the easiest thing to grow and there have been no diseases or mitigating circumstances in the past 5 years that explain why someone living on a couple dollars a day can no longer buy a hash brown for a dollar.
You are framing this as an access issue rather than one of predation.
Fast food chains don’t make a cheap menu to help poor people experience their food, they do it to milk every bit of money from a populace.
Don’t expect social justice from corporate entities.
I specifically said this is a profit driven problem.
You’re swimming through self-righteous aggression to vehementally agree with me.
That’s a bit harsh. No aggression intended, or apparent.
Are you OK?
I’m good, I dislike half-baked assumptions and lazy springboarding:
“You are framing this as an access issue rather than one of predation”
I specifically say that the problem is profit-driven; in no way is my comment framed as an access issue.
“Fast food chains don’t make a cheap menu to help poor people experience their food, they do it to milk every bit of money from a populace.”
Nobody said that fast food chains are trying to help people; I noted that the problem of increased fast food prices can only be attributed to corporate greed.
“Don’t expect social justice from corporate entities.”
No comment here expects or advocates for social justice from corporate entities. It is a fact that many fast food companies very recently used to have substantial dollar menus and no longer have dollar menus.
Your comment is immaterial as a reply and reads as populist posturing at the expense and disregard of the comment you’re responding to.
If you agree? Fine. If you disagree? Fine.
Don’t agree with what I’m saying by pretending I said something I didn’t to drum up false controversy.
It was most certainly cheap. Remember the dollar menu? You could get a McDonald’s cheeseburger and fries and drink for about $3 plus tax.
Post said 5 guys has been over priced, not all fast food and not McDs. And that’s right, 5 guys I always found to be… “ok” but dreaded when the work guy would select 5 guys as “the lunch place” on his turn. Always about to spend a lot of money for a burger when I don’t even feel like a burger that day.
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?
Once the cost was almost as much as a sit-down Restaurant. I just switched to them. Haven’t been to a fast food place in 2 to 3 years
Don’t eat that shit. Problem solved.
The devil’s bargain that the American Middle Class struck in the 70s was that women would enter the labor force and all the domestic work would be handled by a professional service sector. Rather than cooking at home, we all eat out at cheap kitchens. Rather maintaining a home, we just rent. Rather than spend a day cleaning, we have dishwashers and rumbas and cheap immigrants to do maid work. Rather than spending time outdoors, we get a gym membership. Rather than providing child care ourselves, we outsource to daycare centers. Etc, etc.
That deal has been breaking down since at least the Housing Crisis of '08, but its really kicked into high gear after COVID. What was supposed to be cheap industrialized outsourcing has climbed in cost by leaps and bounds.
You can argue that the original deal sucked. Establishing a permanent underclass to do the grunt labor of civilization had all sorts of awful knock on effects, not the least of which was the food getting saltier and sugarier and generally more awful for our physical health.
But the alternative is what? Tell half the population to get back in the kitchen? Boycott Big Agriculture? Just eat smaller portions?
When I’m feeling wildly self-destructive, and my impulse control drops to zero, and I happen to be hungry, I might grab something from McDonalds, and I’m always shocked at how many other people are there. A lot of you are trapped so deep in corporate propaganda I don’t think there’s hope of escape for you.
Like, one guy lists how to make a burger with groceries because he can’t imagine anything else. And other folks are like: this is how poor people eat. Some else is like: Rice-a-Roni and hot dogs are the cheapest thing i could find; as if you don’t know what price per pound is. When I was so poor I couldn’t afford enough calories to maintain weight, I ate plain rice that I boiled and threw cheapest cheese on top; apples and frozen broccoli too. Only time I had a good BMI, ironically.
Some big plurality of our population is hypnotized & drugged to be thinking fast food is ok. What is wrong with so many people? Don’t let it end like this, please. Assume you are a brainwashed pig on a work treadmill of death. How are you going to get off of it? Like that’s the start of your real-life puzzle adventure video game. Now go! You have just pressed “Start”.
It’s actually serious enough that fast food companies are planning to reduce prices. It’s unheard of.
I suspect this reckoning is coming for other industries too.
In some companies when the post-pandemic shortages hit for real and hard, they rose prices until they actually could source enough stuff to actually serve customers. Then a very vocal group of “told you so” folks saying the fact they made same money with higher prices and fewer customers and thus less expense was what they should have been doing all along. So even as shortages eased, suddenly a lot of companies switched to “low volume, high margin” strategies, e.g. screw most customers, we can gouge a few and make the same money while taking care of fewer people.
Now you can see erosion in the “high margin” businesses, because that temporary success and the extent it continued was built on:
- Having no choice during the shortages
- Habits or some sort of lock in causing people to keep spending even after alternatives start opening up, but those wear out, and I think a lot of businesses are starting to feel this.
A big Mac is like 11 bucks right now. The fuk.
This is HORRIBLE! If we DON’T give these places TAXPAYER BAILOUTS then we will be FORCED to eat at the cheaper LOCAL PLACES!
-Small Business Loving Republicans
Well Subway, just about the only place you can get healthy fast food, only raised their prices 39%, in comparison with Popeyes and Jimmy Johns, whose prices rose 82% and 62%, respectively.
Fast food being a “rare treat” is something I see as a good thing. For me, McDonalds has managed to price themselves out of their niche. Tastier, healthier, and more fulfilling meals are now cheaper
Businesses will charge as much as they can get away with.
If they CAN charge, they WILL charge, and as long as you keep buying, they’ll keep gouging.
I hate to say it but maybe we could all afford to eat a little less often. We have an obesity epidemic. This “bliss point” hyper palatable processed garbage is killing us. If we stopped buying it, and learned to just fucking live with being hungry every so often, we wouldn’t be dying of heart failure as much.
