McDonald's is a premium product now (2024)
greyenlightenment.com29 points by paulpauper 2 hours ago
29 points by paulpauper 2 hours ago
I stopped going to McDonald's (which I previously visited about once per month) mainly because they got very expensive, and the price does not match the quality of the food (and they also are not that fast anymore). If I am going to spend that much, I could spend a little more a go to a much nicer mom-and-pop place.
A secondary reason is that they are American. Although I am American, I am currently a resident of another country that is targeted by American tariffs, so I am trying to buy local as much a possible.
I stopped going because the McDonald's closest to me stopped serving water. The only way for employees to fill a cup with water is to use the sink, and that's not an option offered to customers. There's no way to buy or be served a water, not even a bottle of it.
There's a McDonald's near my home that I can order from if I'm craving garbage food quickly and don't feel well enough to leave the house, but they only get my order correct about 20% of the time. Another 20% of the time they make the wrong thing (e.g. the wrong kind of breakfast sandwich), and the remaining 60% of the time they forget to put half the order in (e.g. we ordered three of the Minecraft happy meal cube things a while back, plus an extra chicken sandwich, and we only got two of the cubes and no sandwich, plus we were missing two of the drinks for the meals).
The tariff issue is another reason not to patronize them, but at the same time if everyone in Canada stopped eating at McDonald's then McDonald's corporation would take a hit and thousands of Canadians would be immediately unemployed and thousands of Canadian suppliers of ingredients (beef, eggs, chicken, vegetables, etc) would lose a ton of business, so while I'd rather order from A&W for dozens of reasons I'm not outright boycotting American chains the way I am with American products.
In Canada they have a CAD$5 McValue meal deal, so USD$3.67 for a McDouble, small fries & small drink. Do they not have similar deals in your jurisdiction?
For what it is worth, I live in Calgary and the McDonalds near me does not have deals like that. There is apparently a huge range in prices across McDonalds in a city, so there may be geographic limitations.
I don't go either, and the price is part of the reason. (I would go for the ice cream in summer, or for their cheap drinks promos).
> There is apparently a huge range in prices across McDonalds in a city, so there may be geographic limitations.
Aren't the vast majority of McDonalds actually franchises vs corporate own where everything would be much more consistent?
US McValue meals (my local location, ymmv): $6 for a McDouble, small Fries, 4 nuggets and small drink. $5 for a McChicken, small fries, 4 nuggets and small drink. $2.50 for a McDouble itself.
A typical burger + fries + drink at McDonalds where I am in the US is now about $20. You can get something much better quality (& larger size) at FiveGuys for same price, and even some nice quality restaurants have lunch specials that cost the same.
McD was never good, but when it was $10 it was still an OK occasional convenient lunch option. At $20 there is zero reason to go there.
That’s bonkers. I’m on the east coast (not nyc) and a quarter pounder medium meal is $10.49. Meanwhile Five Guys is $20.29 for a regular meal.
In the USA midwest, it is around $12-13 USD for a sandwich and fries, no drink.
How do you communicate your guilt based purchases to the local citizenry ?
[flagged]
it must be exhausting defending your leader after they backtrack their major decisions biweekly
Actually, it's not. Speaking from experience. I'm a sample size of one, but that's still one better than your extrapolation from zero.
One of the local supermarket chains here in Denmark (Salling Group) even puts a star on the price tag for products of European origin.
For larger purchases, I'm doing research on the product anyway.
I still sometimes buy American at times; sometimes there's no avoiding it for certain items. But on the whole avoiding American goods isn't that hard, and doesn't require much effort.
Given that the US is the only country in recent memory whose politics have shifted from "pretty normal for a western nation" to "unpredictable rogue state", it's not as though the list of "countries to avoid" changes that often.
Countries like Russia, Iran, and China have been very consistent in their philosophies and actions; countries like France, the UK, and Japan have also been pretty consistent. The only real change lately is the US.
On a similar note:
There was a period post-Brexit when I hadn't moved away from Ireland yet during which I also did my best to avoid UK produced goods too.
Now that was a lot harder though due to the UK still being in the single market at the time, and on top of that just how integrated supply chains between the north and the rest of Ireland are.
I'm cautiously optimistic that the UK is moving back toward sanity though.
Last time I went to McDonald's, someone stole my food and I didn't get a refund.
I ordered a McChicken + fries at the kiosk. Waited for 15 minutes at the counter before I asked where my food was.
The manager took my receipt, said the order was already picked up, and asked me what credit card I used.
The manager said I told her the wrong credit card number. I asked for the receipt back so I could do a chargeback and the manager threatened to call security on me.
So no, McDonald's isn't a premium experience. It was full of homeless fentanyl users last time I went. Maybe one of them stole my food, or maybe it was the employee that stole my receipt.
Either way, I've never had this problem at Five Guys. I am willing to pay $25 for a combo to avoid an experience like that.
surely you can see how this is a rare specific situation you encountered and not some actual systemic mcdonald’s problem (there are LOTS of reasons to complain about mcdonald’s but this seems like a strange one)
I kind of lost the point of the article when the author veered into the entirely separate topic of McDonalds being unhealthy. It's like two totally separate articles in one.
Article 1. McDonalds (along with other traditionally cheap-food places) is now very expensive and not for poor people.
Article 2. McDonalds serves (and people are out there eating) unhealthy food.
Article 1 is news if you haven't been in a McDonalds in the last 5 years. Article 2 is obvious and is not really a new phenomenon.
I read it more as a segue into the main point about conflicting narratives in the American public regarding food.
Despite our excuses that we have to eat unhealthy fast food because it's cheap, we still eat it it once it's expensive. We all talk about how there is an obesity crisis yet we constantly promote and glorify unhealthy food on social media.
>Or maybe no one is fully logically consistent in their views. In the end, people will continue to consume this food even knowing full-well it’s unhealthy and overpriced. And for that, McDonald’s should not be too concerned.
"We" do not all have the same opinions. You are lambasting an imaginary segment of the population.
Yeah fair enough. I'm not sure I really agree with the piece either tbh. More likely these different narratives are coming from different groups of people.
I'm not even convinced of the main premise that McDonald's is now much more expensive relative to other things. I think it just feels that way because we had a few years of high inflation.
For me point 2 amplifies point 1. You could justify a higher price if the quality is better (and by quality, I mean both the health and type of ingredients used: not the type of product).
So not only they go more expensive but the quality stays low and actually got even lower).
Article 1 was true under 1990s prices. But you can get two double cheeseburgers for about four bucks and there aren't many who are so poor they can't afford that.
What? Is it true or not? You just said two opposite sentences.
Edit: Wait, are you trying to say their prices have decreased relative to inflation since the 90's??
They’re just about dead even. Maybe slightly higher. Not unreasonably higher.
Inflation is a pain in the rear.
First, the parent implies it decreased, not stayed the same.
Second, are you sure? Everything I can find indicates that the Big Mac slightly increased (and further, the "Big Mac index" is a meme, which may dampen increases for image reasons), and everything else on the menu, on average, increased even more than the Big Mac. Is my data bad?
Americans, particularly on social media, seem to have a love-hate relationship with food. These reviews are not uncommonly juxtaposed with fitness content and people in the comments warning of the obesity problem. So these same people praising and consuming this calorie-rich food are at the same time warning of obesity in America and trying to get in better shape. There is a sort of cognitive dissonance in both voicing concerns about obesity or food inflation, yet consuming the very food that is causing it, or watching a video that glorifies this food.
It feels like a reach presenting this without evidence that it is the same people. Especially without any nuance around health-conscious people still doing unhealthy things on occasion.
Once you see the goomba, you can't unsee it...
…goomba? Wtf are you even talking about?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy
It has nothing to do with goombas, except the first person to illustrate the fallacy chose to draw goombas.
Back in the early 2000s, I would frequently order a "McDouble" (double cheeseburger) for $1 from their value menu. I can't get exact prices from their website (looks like you need the app), but they list the McDouble in their "under $3 McValue Menu" [1]. Given that inflation has nearly halved the purchasing power of a dollar since then, this doesn't seem too bad.
They also list a $5 meal deal that includes a McDouble, fries, 4 chicken nuggets, and a drink. That still seems like a really good price to me.
They do, however, have an asterisk that says "prices and participation may vary" - so not sure if it's widely available or not.
[1] https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/full-menu/extra-value-mea...
A few years ago my wife and I stopped at a McD drive thru and ordered two meals. The total was over $20. I was aghast and I questioned the cashier if there was some mistake. It's only gotten worse.
On a local subreddit recently someone was asking where to get a decent lunch that "doesn't break the bank" and turns out that their target spend was $10. My answer was "Pack a peanut butter sandwich and an apple at home and take it to work with you." Which is my usual lunch.
I am just astonished that people spend $10-15 or more, every day, on lunch. And often will pay more to have it delivered.
You ordered two complete meals (a drink, a side, and an entree), you probably got it in 30 seconds, and the total was less than the cost of comparable meals at virtually any restaurant. And you were aghast? ....You are aware inflation makes things cost more over time, right? 2% per year means things cost 10% more after just 5 years
If you're on a GLP-1s and crave junk food (quite uncommon), almost all fast food places have a small combo that's around $5 that'll satisfy. At least Wendy's, Taco Bell, McDonald's, and others do.
I stopped after I realised I was paying a premium price for stale cold chips and luke warm burgers.
It got so bad they ran a promo that if your chips weren't hot and fresh they'd give you a new batch for free.
Guess it cost them too much because they killed that promo pretty quickly.
How do you get cold fries? Is the bulb out in the heat lamps?
Also, it's been known for decades that you ask for fries with no salt so they have to make a new batch as they salt them immediately after cooking.
Order fries with no salt, and they will fry a whole new basket to fill your order. You have to wait, but you get fresh hot fries every time.
I don't go to McDonald's at all because not even the fries are gluten free. They used to be glorious beef tallow fried, and now they're seasoned with a wheat based flavoring.
Basically the only fast food left to me is Taco Bell, which as you may know earned its place by surviving the franchise wars.
> They used to be glorious beef tallow fried
They switched to vegetable oil 20+ years ago.
A Big Mac meal in the states (fried and drink) cost 2.99 USD in 1990.
It now costs around 8.50 USD.
The inflation adjusted value of 2.99 USD in 1990 is about 7.88 USD.
Did the price go up? Sure. Are you likely getting slightly more in 2026 than you were in 1990? No idea, but it seems plausible to me.
Inflation is the answer.
I wouldn't feel bad in the least if all the $60 a pop lunchfluencers disappear for being grossly irresponsible role models, having to resort to pitiously ungrammable cheap-ass meals for themselves in the end.
Published July 31, 2024
It’s being dated is actually quite fatal to his thesis, as not only did McDonalds significantly underperform the market over the past few years but mid 2024 was also the exact time their attempt to pivot to higher income brackets stumbled and they were forced to introduce stuff like the $5 meal deal to stop hemorrhaging customers.
Yeah my overall spending at McDonald's declined significantly after the 2022 bout with inflation, and it's not just that prices went up (it was inflation, they mostly all went up), but that they leaned into trying to appeal to people who would already have been spending lots of money.
It would have been one thing just to make the food taste better, but they went the opposite and made it take forever to prepare and serve. But for me the whole point to McDonald's was to get in, eat something consistently decent, get out quickly. So they actually made things worse, because I already had plenty of other spots to get "nice" food if that's what I was in the mood for.
I'm not going to say bring back the heat lamps per se but there was a lot of value to people like me in having a restaurant that delivered on the original promise of "fast" food...
But in the last 4 weeks they’ve significantly cut back on the number of deals they offer in-app and increased the price of items in their point scheme. It used to be “you can get a good deal in the app” but no longer.
I was driving around the other day with my wife and I said "Hey, you should see how i can order from the McDonalds app and the food is ready when you show up" and in the end she was appalled with what a Fillet-o-Fish costs for how much food you get.
This reminds me of Demolition man when he wakes up in the future and Taco Bell is fine dining.
And yet it's still far too cheap.
>In the past fifty years, as factory farming spread from poultry to beef, dairy, and pork producers, the average cost of a new house increased nearly 1,500 percent; new cars climbed more than 1,400 percent; but the price of milk is up only 350 percent, and eggs and chicken meat haven’t even doubled. Taking inflation into account, animal protein costs less today than at any time in history. (That is, unless one also takes into account the externalized costs — farm subsidies, environmental impact, human disease, and so on — which make the price historically high.)
- from Eating Animals (2009) by Jonathan Safran Foer
For those saying McDonald's is expensive, you need the app. Every day they have discounts/deals in their app, and the points you gain gets you free food. They often have discounted combo meals, like their $5 meals (a drink, fries, and entree). You can get 8 McDoubles for $20 if you just want something cheap, flavorful and fast (which is the whole point of fast food, it's not supposed to be an everyday meal replacement). I'd also love to see a comparison to all the other fast food chains, both averages and local prices. So far it seems like tunnel vision.
There is nothing premium about McDonalds. We need to stop upmarketing cheap crap and accept the fact that middle class Americans are not middle class anymore. You are poor. This is hard to swallow but, we live in a country with a declining standard of living. https://www.yesigiveafig.com/p/part-1-my-life-is-a-lie