Americans are choking on surging fast-food prices. "I can't justify the expense," one customer says
Americans are choking on surging fast-food prices. "I can't justify the expense," one customer says
The price of a McDonald's Quarter Pounder with Cheese meal has more than doubled since 2014, data show.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
tHe MaRkEt WiLl ReGuLaTe ItSelF! Okay sure, for the most profit without regard for the consumer. Corporations need a heavy hand.
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.
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?
i haven't gotten fast food regularly in years (only once this year, trip to taco bell, feelin a bit proud tbh), but i have been lucky enough to WFH for a lot of that. when you're starving and want something you just want it, even if it's overpriced garbage. i dread the day of having to work an office job again.
what really pisses me off is the psychological manipulation: these companies think they can just rewire our brains with their dogshit marketing. ohh $3 is actually fair for 1 hashbrown. there was never a ""dollar menu"". they don't even list the damn prices on their website like a normal restaurant. it's so fucking shady and dishonest, the whole damn thing, the gray prison architecture, taking away the soda fountains from customers (and making the kitchen people worry about drinks as well). it's so so fucking sick. WE'RE the ones suffering, they're the ones looking at graphs and DESIGNING our suffering. they don't have to pinch pennies, they don't have to pinch shit. fuck mcdonal i CANNOT wait to see them fall.
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.)
Good, stop eating that crap. Learning to cook was the best thing I ever did.
The CEO and now chairman of McDonald’s was paid $19.2 million last year in salary, bonuses and stock, according to federal securities filings.
He was paid a base salary of $1.4 million
Being friendly and just going on his base salary and not all the other piles of money tossed his way, in plebe terms, he makes $673/hour.
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.
Yeah, I love my local pizza place and I'm on good terms with the owner, but the prices have gone up enough that I've set a hard limit of only going there once a month, and there are some menu items that I explicitly just will not buy because they're so overpriced.
Cost frankly does define my dietary habits. The number one reason that I don't decide to grab the odd piece of vegan chicken to put in a bagel is because it costs 50% more than regular chicken.
I think they all tried to become semi-fancy to compete with restaurants, instead of focusing on being cheap, cheap, cheap.
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?
That's even more reason to stay away from that junk rubbish.
I went through the burger king drive through a few weeks ago and got just a crispy chicken sangwich and the girl said €7.45 and I couldn't fucking believe it. I kept the receipt to show my wife. I also made sure we got a loaf of bread and some lunch meat to make sandwiches for the last few weeks. Honestly fuck those people
I personally cannot justify eating this shit.
Makes it easier to not eat that trash.
In theory this will mean a more healthy population, as people start cooking food at home, instead of eating fast food.
Sucks for people on the move though.
It's currently $13 for a regular hamburger at 5 Guys down in Miami.
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
Re: the comments here I'm not for a moment buying the "too busy to cook, must eat fast food" argument or similar arguments portraying fast food as, why, almost necessary in this busy day and age! If you don't want to cook (I don't want to if I can avoid it, but do it anyway occasionally and usually make several days worth of dish X at a time to minimize my cooking time), you can easily go to you nearby Winco/Walmart/Aldi/etc and load up on some interesting frozen dishes for way, way less $ than the prices I'm seeing mentioned here. And I'm not talking about some kind of 1960s "TV dinner" things either - bogus stereotype of the concept. Even Trader Joe's (where you shouldn't shop b/c anti-union) is comparatively cheap and has super interesting frozen stuff. No time to cook tonight? Well just pop your frozen dish out of the freezer and into the microwave and five minutes later you've got an actual "meal" of sorts in front of you, and likely one with 1/10th the calories of that "meal" you got from McFatsos at 5x the price.
Ah, but it won't be DEEP FRIED goodness and lots and lots and lots of volume and lots and lots of pure concentrated sugar in that totally mandatory fast food dessert. No, you'll probably be getting a relatively (to McFatsos) small-ish portion and it probably won't have started its life being deep-fried and it might just have some interesting veggies ... and no dessert unless you explicitly microwave something else.
This Will Not Stand! Must have fat and more fat and more deep fry and more sugar .... that's a "meal" ... and must have it because, er, oh yeah, "no time". Yeah, that's it, no time.
Americans are simply addicted to garbage food (fat/sugar) and in tremendous quantities and if they don't get it, well now, the world is going to hell clearly.
Partial source: worked in fast food in HS (McD's clone) for a few years and did pretty much every task there was to be done in the "kitchen". The "kitchen" being, in that case, a grill for cooking greasy burgers and prepping greasy bacon and a deep fat fryer for frying up those potatoes in bulk and also the "tots" (same grease as the fries) and also the frozen "pie" concoctions (same grease as the fries).
Eating this crap if you have a grocery store anywhere nearby and a microwave is completely unnecessary but people do it anyway because it tastes soooo good! .... because of grease and sugar.
OK if you're on the road all the time, a trucker or on an extended road trip, you have to figure out something cheap/healthy, but pretty much every motel room I've ever rented has come with a fridge and a microwave and I've had no problems figuring out a workable solution with the hardware available.
Say "no" to garbage "food" addiction and you'll save a fortune.
"The whole conceit was that you were getting some OK-level of food ..."
Don't be conceited. And cook your own food at home. You're welcome.
The health conscious me, it sounds like a good thing if for very wrong reasons.
A big Mac is like 11 bucks right now. The fuk.
If I eat fast food I always check their apps first for any deals. Arby’s had some decent deals a month ago (free sandwich with $3 purchase) but nothing since then and no chance I’m spending $12 for an Arby’s meal.
McDonald’s App is a little more consistent although they’ve got rid of a lot of the good deals.
Without the apps I wouldn’t eat at these places. It’s cheap food at nearly sit down prices.
Don't eat that shit. Problem solved.
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”.
Let's cook at home
We have this local market with an excellent hot food and submarine bar in my work neighbourhood, and it's the only place I ever go. Not only is it super inexpensive, the people who own it won the lottery some years ago and just don't charge you tax. The price says 6 dollars, it's 6 dollars. You buy a few things, she rounds down the price to 10 bucks at the register. The place is always packed with those in the know, and they must make a ton of money even doing it this way. Explore your local hole in the wall places and support local and eat better if you are able. It's worth the effort and time rather than giving McDonald's more money.
We also have a local dumpling place where I get a huge box of veggie dumplings for 8 bucks. It's just a little nothing of a storefront. It's fantastic.
Why do they choose like the highest price chains for these nonsensical articles.
Wendy's biggie bag is the only good deal in chained fast food right now. Otherwise you've gotta find a local joint with good prices.
There’s always food stamps and grocery store ingredients. Make your own “Big Mac” at home?
I'm disappointed that instead of cheering for healthier diets, people deciding to turn to healthier lifestyles, eating less, eating healthier .etc
People are upset for price rises on things that give you only seconds of enjoyment and packs you poundage.
Small price to pay for helping allies worldwide. Maybe eat the bullets.