Pal's is a regional GOAT. They also have a unique "Sauceburger" with a ketchup-and-relish based sauce that takes me back to my childhood. Highly recommend.
> Her brother, who works as a cashier, can’t afford meals out at all, she said. The cost of his diabetes medication has increased greatly, to about $200 a month, which she helps him cover.
This is an often unacknowledged part of the cost of fast food. It turns susceptible people into diabetics. As a diabetic there is little I can eat there, since I manage it with food not drugs. When I do I get a burger and throw out the bun, which isn't very thrifty.
If you just go with the flow and eat what this culture makes easiest, it's an unusual specimen who can be healthy and happy in late life. And it's not at all unusual to turn young people into patients.
It is unusual to see young people make the choices to not turn into patients.
It costs very little to eat mostly lentils/legumes/nuts/yogurt/vegetables, and drink mostly water without carbs dissolved in it, but no business is going to survive selling those things.
Weirdly, I do get ads for veggies, but it could be driven by my recent research spree on vegetarian recipes to have great food across the holidays for my mostly vegetarian family. I may have skewed “the algorithm “
I don't think animal products are all that expensive tbh. Chicken, milk, yogurt, eggs are all really cheap if you consider the protien content.
Completely unbeatable value especially factoring in time and convenience and heartiness is picking up a rotisserie chicken and a bag of frozen veggies.
Liver is also very affordable and extremely nutritious.
I can only speak for the UK but for quite a while now, McD's has become an uninviting experience, with miserable staff, menu screens that visibly tell you to hurry the f*k up and choose the product. Not to mention customers vying with delivery drivers for orders. I think the problem applies to all-income customers.
At least from my perspective, COVID broke everything. People are more awful, quality is more awful, and prices are way up. I dread even eating out anymore as I fully expect to overpay for bad food and service.
There's an argument to be made that inflation is ultimately the driver of all three complaints, but boy did that all happen seemingly overnight.
Absolutely. I feel bad for young people growing up in this broken world. They will never even know what was taken from them.
I realize that I’m probably going to get dogpiled for saying it, but I think that the response to COVID (ie lockdowns) did far more damage than the disease itself.
I don't understand why people still blame the lockdowns. When the lockdowns started, it was unknown how dangerous Covid actually was. It could have killed 20%, or reduced lifespan by 30%, or something. Nobody knew. It takes 20/20 hindsight to blame lockdowns for what was a generational catastrophe. It's like blaming shelter in place requirements instead of the bombing of the reich.
To be fair to the parent, despite what they think about the lockdown decision now, it says nothing about whether or not they thought it made any sense then.
It's perferctly possible to believe that the lockdown was a reasonable decision with what was known then, and still believe that the lockdown is to blame for certain unavoidable consequences down the line. Again, the parent might not believe this as well but their point can be taken separately fron your complaint.
Since several generations of Americans are not familiar with a drawn out sustained attack on acceptable cost-of-living parameters, the observation that "people are more awful" should be familiar to many people who lived and endured in places that have had decades-long deteriorating econonmies. If the economy or subjective economic perception had not tanked post-lockdown, the awfulness of people would be much less pronounced I believe.
Nobody knew, that is true. But not everyone was in agreement, it only seemed that way because dissenting voices were silenced. Do some research and you’ll find that there were plenty of people predicting bad outcomes from the lockdowns. I was not one of them, but they exist for sure.
From day one, I was hearing about suggestions of social distancing and NK1 masks would do 80% of the work for you. It took waaay to long for that information to disseminate.
My standing statement is: The idea of a pandemic was so well established that Hollywood made multiple bad movies about the idea.
The other key piece that gets magically brushed aside is that there was a pandemic during the Obama administration. Obviously not as severe, but nonetheless a warning.
Yet we were somehow unprepared just a few years later? And those same incompetent entities and experts were the source of our inflation understanding and response to COVID?
I think not. Very little passes the smell test. It didn’t them. It’s even less so - if you look & listen - now.
I seem to remember that Sweden applied the WHO recommendations as they were written and didn’t lock down because the damage of locking down is huge and everybody dog pilled on them about how it was stupid.
Turn out their excess mortality was quickly better than the other Nordic countries and their economy and mental health did better if I remember correctly.
People should complain more about the lockdowns. Most of them were extremely poorly implemented and stupidly managed.
Normal people were shown that they had no real bearing on the world, and were forced to live without being rushed for a year or in some places two. Without the need to constantly look over their shoulders for encroaching crises people started to examine the world around them. They had time to enjoy things without constantly battling with mental, emotional, or physical exhaustion that lead to procrastination just to recover a little bit. So many realized they were being deprived of not only recreation, but fulfilling their basic needs outside of food and sleep. So they shifted from fearing the systems that deprived them to loathing them and the people who administrated them, and resolved to deny contributing to those systems as much as possible. That's why there were so many sweeping changes starting in May of 2020, not in the way the systems of the world were run, but in the way the public at large engaged with them.
Much of what's been happening over the last five years can be compared to the behaviours of those suffering through trauma after long term abuse. Some continued the cycle against new targets, ignoring a collective truth. Others realized they were victims of the cycle and chose to work towards safeguards that would prevent it from continuing. Another group learned about the cycle and thought they would benefit from being new instigators for it.
It can be that social order is partly maintained by conformance and a bunch of people found out that there aren't consequences for choosing not to conform.
In the local facebook rants group, any time someone posts about someone doing something that is mildly antisocial (a reasonable thing to rant about), there's always several comments saying "So what, who cares".
Like sure, it isn't the end of the world to park like an asshole, but it would suck if everybody did it, so it's better if no one does it. And it's the same for dozens of other minor little things you might encounter in a given week.
It wasn't a few months, it was a few years of back-and-forth political and corporate shenanigans with a new narrative every few months that the $CURRENT_THING crowd happily ran along with.
January 2020: there is nothing to afraid of, the new disease is mostly harmless and affects only the elderly and immunocompromised. Closing down borders is xenophobic. March 2020: do not go outside unless critically necessary and if you violate the rules, we will severely punish you May 2020: it's fine to have large public gatherings for BLM protests.
February 2020: masks do nothing and actually are harmful unless you are trained to use a mask, do not buy any masks. April 2020: wear a mask if you go outside, or you kill everybody else. Your own fault that you don't have a mask.
Summer of 2020: look, it's actually so great that we are all working remotely now, the nature is healing, all the emissions are so much reduced, this is the new future! Summer of 2023: everybody back to the office, real estate is suffering. People who joined during COVID time? Your contract is now altered, pray we do not alter it any further.
The promises around vaccines, printing money and "loans for struggling businesses" are even more stories of their own. Beats me why after a few years of these kind of shenanigans people would generally get tired of other people.
I certainly got tired of the people who decided the answer was to become antisocial and not even try to mitigate the risks, and then shame anyone who did. Lost a bit of my faith in humanity. Well, more than a bit, I think.
> I think that the response to COVID (ie lockdowns) did far more damage than the disease itself.
Possibly true in some places. I think it very likely did in the UK.
> I feel bad for young people growing up in this broken world
The world has always been broken. Look at the 20th Century, two world wars, multiple smaller wars, Gulag, great leap forward, cold war, genocides.....
In many ways the world is better than its ever been.
What is true is that the golden age the west had from the end of the cold war until the early 21st century has come to a close, but that was an exceptional time for people in a small proportion of the world.
> I dread even eating out anymore as I fully expect to overpay for bad food and service.
I don't know if HN is the place to say this. But, it's just infinitely better these days to cook your own meals. With some modest initial investment and planning, you can minimize the average time and cost of doing it, while still having access to a reasonaly healthy and delicious menu, though slightly repetitive. But if you really want to indulge, setting aside a couple of hours will give you dishes that taste way beyond anything you can afford from outside.
Some people are natural born chefs with an intuitive understanding of tastebuds. But if you're like me in that you're clueless about it, there are still some exceptional recipes you can steal online. I treat cooking more like chemistry, insisting follow exact measurements and time. It still works out really well for me. You might even tweak the recipe over 4 or 5 repetitions to your at most satisfaction. Anybody who hasn't given it a try really should, at least once.
Yup. Something really simple and cheap, and definitely not worse in nutrition than McDonald's: Buy a pack of chicken legs, marinate them to your liking (for example: olive oil, salt, pepper, smoked or unsmoked paprika, onion powder, garlic powder, chicken or veggie bouillon cube), let them sit for an hour. Put it into the oven for 50min to an hour at 160 degrees Celsius. Cook rice on the side. After chicken legs are done take them out, and mix rice into the juices. Add some ketchup if you like. Put chicken legs back on top. Bake for max 4 minutes at 200 degrees. Enjoy.
Now, that will take you about 2 hours to make in absolute time, but the actual time to do this is very little, a few minutes.
Practically anything you can find online videos for are better than their counterparts from low end restaurants. I have a lot of favs, but most are regional dishes that are not very well known internationally. Pastas are an exception. Cakes too taste a whole lot different and much richer when you do it.
Probably varies where you are, but in the UK (especially outside London) there are lots of places you can have reasonably good food an service at a decent price. A lot of pubs with good food now, for example.
The app drives me crazy on the occasions I do have to use it.
Picking fries brings me to a one-item category where I can... pick fries again.
Latency during the order process is insane, and then they add animations and little popup alerts throughout that actively interfere with me getting my all-important order code while I'm sitting like an asshole in the drive-through.
Yeah, the McD app is ridiculous. For some items it gives me an add to order dialog and then an add to bag dialog (I might have the order of those two swapped). I'm not sure what the distinction is between adding to the order and adding to the bag.
It also has some ridiculous restrictions. Nearly every week I take advantage of their in-app deal for free medium fries on Friday if you spend at least $1 on other stuff. I make a sandwich at home, order a couple cookies plus the free fries in the app, then go pick them at the McD that is about half a mile from my home.
Occasionally though instead of making a sandwich I decide I'd like to use my McD reward points to get a free burger. But you can't get both a rewards points item and a deal item on the same order.
I end up doing a rewards points order for a free burger, picking that up at the drive through, parking, then doing a cookies plus free fries deal order, and going through the drive through again to get that.
What's the point of not allowing both a rewards item and a deal item on the same order? If the rule was you could only use one reward or deal per day, then it would make some sense.
Australian here and the sentiment is the same. Drive-through is tolerable but dine-in is not pleasant due to basic cleaning like sweeping, wiping of tables not being done.
From the UK too, and your experience is matched by mine. The last time I was in one (I mean "the last time" in both senses of the words) I waited over 20 minutes for my food; I do not know how long it would have actually taken because at that point I got bored, wrote it off as a loss and walked out. No sense in complaining to anyone because that would have consumed even more of my time.
McDonalds is not food and it is not even fast anymore.
I cannot blame their staff for any of this anyway; if I was being paid that little to be treated like garbage I wouldn't give a shit either.
That's already happening. Roadsides aren't being cleaned up because the local DOTs aren't being paid enough. That leaves fallen rocks, mud buildup from floods, tree branches, and overgrown bushes very close to the roadway. Grocery stores have empty shelves because they don't get enough stockers. If you go to the meats aisle it's a good chance you'll either find some pork that's started to turn yellow or some beef that's started to turn brown because nobody wants to dig through the freezer. They get told the meat's old, they find the visible one, and the put a price reduced sticker on it. Walk into a hospital and the grating at the entryway will be filled with mud, the baseboards along the walls in the hallways will be scuffed to hell, and the walls will have scrapes taken out of them because the maintenance staff aren't being paid enough to care. Go into a bank and you'll have one teller working both the drive through and the front desk, and they'll take their time getting to you because the drive-through counts towards their statistics since the interaction with the drop off point is tracked. They aren't paid enough to work back and forth in the down time when either is doing something the teller doesn't need to be involved in.
Apathy's just setting in across the board, and it's entirely warranted. One hour of work can't even afford you one hour of reward anymore when it comes to most non-specialized and non-salaried jobs.
My experience is that quality in McD is rapidly declining. We may agree was never a Michelin star restaurant. But I remember being more or leas enjoying the food. Now I just can’t. Maybe I’m getting older. But I would swear the quality is much worse now than say 5 or 10 years ago.
> My experience is that quality in McD is rapidly declining. We may agree was never a Michelin star restaurant
That's the thing with McDonalds.
You could go in to any store no matter where you was and know you got a consistent level of hygiene, cleanliness, good fast efficient service and while not gourmet food you knew the food you was going to get was a consistent standard. It was the reliable, dependable safe option in a list of unknown options. McDonalds was McDonalds know matter where you was.
Now it's no longer clean as they got rid of all the staff replacing them with screens. Stores are generally filthy with mess everywhere.
There is no consistent service as they got rid of all the staff and replaced them with screens that sometime work, sometimes don't, often out of paper for receipts/order numbers.
It's no longer fast as you need to mess about with broken screens, and repeatedly declining up sell options each step of the way vs giving a order at the counter and being done.
The quality now varies from store to store
It's no longer cheap. For the price of a McDonalds, in Australia I can go in to a Pub/Hotel and get a better meal if i get a special.
The last time I was in a McD (this year), it smelled faintly of feces, and yep it was a mess. It really did put me off going to any other McDonald's. I know that's one experience but prior ones had been trending in that direction.
The problem is they’re in an uncanny valley. They’re too expensive for low income customers and their food is too shitty to compete with other things you can get for the same price. Starbucks will give you food that’s similarly priced and much tastier and healthier. McD is disgusting.
For me it's the competition. So many competing chains and independent burger joints have sprung up and spoilt me. For 20%-30% more than mcd prices I can get something way way better.
My family and I ate at one this evening. My son wanted to try to the McRib. I'm not sure he loved it, but it looked fine. My wife and I both had the $5 McValue meal, and we got a free medium fry because it was Friday. We shared one of the drinks because I'm not supposed to be eating lots of sugar. Some McD's don't have a drink station in the public seating area anymore, but the one we go to does. All in all, it was not a bad meal for like $15. I don't see any degradation in their quality at all. I think that quality is highly dependent on which one you visit and how well it is managed.
I’ve had McDonalds twice in the past 12mo. Once locally just because I was for whatever reason craving it, once on a late night last minute road trip in the middle of nowhere midwestern USA.
Hasn’t seemed to have a discernible quality difference since back when I ate it regularly a decade ago.
Prices noticeably up, but I refuse to use the app and am willing to pay extra for the privilege.
Here in Greece, we have so much good quality street food that McDonald's is street trash by comparison. I don't consider it food, there are only about eight or nine restaurants in the entire country and I think most people go there because of the novelty.
Here in Sweden they changed their recipes a few years ago. I can’t stand the Big Mac now. Previously it at least felt kind of fresh although low quality. Now it has a weird freeze dried sensation to the vegetables :/
Austria resident checking in - since I moved here I noticed the quality of McD’s is way, way better than in the UK. And apart from the regular menu being a whole different experience, you’ve got great quality coffee and cakes. It’s a whole world of difference.
I'd say you've just grown up and experienced decent food now. McDonald's is marketed to children and caters for the child-like palate: sweet, salty and acidic, like tomato ketchup.
When I grew up in the UK in the 80s/90s we ate typical British food. Potatoes every day, boiled veg, baked beans, beige protein things. Back then it was possible to have "Chinese" or "Indian", but it's all total shit: overly sweet, not spicy, greasy as fuck bastardised rubbish. Nowadays I can actually find real Indian, French, Italian etc. that is actually delicious. It's difficult to imagine going back to beige stuff I grew up on.
I think this is under-appreciated. The technology of food has progressed immensely in the last decades! Even recipes from the 90s don't hold up as well, because home cooks have access to more knowledge, techniques, tools, ingredients, foodstuffs. And of course if you look at photos of food and typical dining from the 80s you can sort of spot a difference visually as well.
Here in Japan I have only had good experiences, but I can't say I love going to McDonalds. The breakfast offerings are decent and it's extremely fast service. During peak times seats will be around 95 percent full but the restaurant remains very clean. I think the cleanliness in part is due to the patrons being responsible.
I'd rather just skip a meal than resort to McDonald's, but I've noticed in so many places there are more deliveries going out than people eating in. This seems to go for any place that does delivery. It's even hard to read reviews for places as so many of them are rating the delivery when the food in question doesn't transport well.
On the kcal/£ basis, Tesco biscuits (for Americans: cookies) are more than an order of magnitude better, 487 kcal/100g, £0.22/100g, about £0.15 for as many kcal as that McMuffin: https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/290329100
On the basis of an actually balanced diet, boiling a pot of water and adding lentils, rice, and value frozen veg on a timer, are likewise. Which is of course why that's a staple diet in parts of the world much poorer than the UK.
For £5.09 you get the hash brown, so it's 500+ cals. It costs 25 mins of paid labour and it also saves N minutes of domestic labour if one were to have similar hot protein+cals at home. High-income people tend not to understand this part, they'll say you can eat beans and rice for nothing.
I have quite a lot of difficulty eating out once you start cooking at home, because think of what you are buying:
- one English muffin (is it called an English muffin in England?)
- one slice of cheese
- one egg
- one slice of ham
- one cup of coffee
- one hashbrown
£5.09 for that? Obviously when you buy from a restaurant you're paying for their labor, rent, electric, and much more so it makes sense - McDonald's franchisees tend to operate on single digit profit margins even at that cost. But mehhh, still. And then the food you end up buying is packed full of preservatives and other additives and artificial ingredients.
Dude you’re not even trying, why buy muffins and eggs when you could grow wheat, grind flour, raise chickens and get eggs for free, slaughter your own pigs and cure the bacon yourself… because labour costs nothing and convenience has no value amirite?
I find it bemusing that so people are simultaneously extremely agitated by high prices but also completely disinterested in doing anything except paying them. With this mindset it's not particularly hard to guess which direction they'll trend in over time, even if the world wasn't going nutters.
I mean these things are not difficult to make. They even freeze extremely well, and then you toss them in the microwave for a couple of minutes while you're getting ready and they're done. And the food you create is not only much cheaper, but also way healthier and also higher quality. When you go to a McDonalds you're getting the cheapest possible find they can source on a global level. The only reason they dropped pink slime [1] is because they were outed using it on television.
Incidentally that was a long time ago and while Wiki is quiet unclear it seems that the USDA chose to reclassify back as simply ground back in 2018. If it's been rebranded and remains legal, that's probably what people are now eating, again, at least in the US - as it's deemed unfit for human consumption in Canada and the EU.
It's pretty hilarious because your comment is exactly their goal.
McDonald's is laser focused on low income customers. They do not want to compete in the middle income space, as they don't visit as often and there's ton more(and better) competition.
Their CEO has been blunt about this recently, and trying to find ways to get low-income customers back. Dire straits ahead for them, they've priced themselves into a place they don't want to be nor will they be able to succeed in.
You eat at McD's or most fast food places these days, you need the app to get reasonable prices, usually at a 15-20% discount. The app really does enhance the experience, order exactly what you want without human error, roll up to the drive-thru, give them the code, and they begin making the order at that point.
They've been pushing $5 value meals recently because the dollar menu's just not fiscally feasible anymore and $10-12+ for the normal value meals isn't a value to most people.
> The app really does enhance the experience, order exactly what you want without human error, roll up to the drive-thru, give them the code, and they begin making the order at that point.
They're particularly good at getting orders right compared to some other restaurants, so the additional value here to me is negligible. It's actually negative value to me, since if I can do a transaction without having to sign up, that's what I prefer. The value is entirely in the other direction: McDonald's wants to monetize their customer's identity information.
It's really location dependent. The one near me missed opening time by more than 30 minutes one day last week. I don't have more data because I only would splurge for a fast food breakfast when I need it.
Don't overlook paper coupons. A while back I took a look at the advertising junk that appears in my physical mailbox instead of just throwing it in my recycle bin and found some really good fast food coupons.
Where I am both Subway and Burger King have been sending approximately monthly a sheet full of coupons with some quite good deals.
These articles deliberately skew reality to fit an anti-worker narrative. All the focus is on costs of labor and materials, with not one single sentence devoted to McDonald’s own financials - like the growth of their margins, the share buybacks performed, the executive compensation, or the franchising model itself.
When I was rallying for a higher minimum wage and was challenged on it driving up costs, I made it abundantly clear that would only be the outcome if the corporate leadership refused to budge on their compensation and shareholder reward schemes - which, surprising nobody, is exactly what they did, and this was the entirely expected outcome.
We’ve tried being nice about this and attempting to reach a compromise in long, gradual, sustainable changes to the economy so everyone can benefit from its improvements in efficiency and scale, but the grim reality is that said compromises are no longer on the table, and harms are inevitable. With no more room to squeeze workers, it should be of no surprise that a growing plurality are demanding immediate and substantial change instead of piecemeal reform - and Capital has every right to be terrified of an angry labor class.
Looking at McDonald's finances would have made the article better. And it mentioned their claims about labor costs. But it cited analysis which contradicted those claims.
No problem stands alone in a vacuum, and nothing at this point has “one easy fix”. These articles that try to paint higher wages or corporate consolidation as the sole reason for complex and nuanced issues aren’t just toxic to discourse around addressing these problems, they also collectively dumb down people into the debate equivalent of sports teams with no room for other positions.
The entire piece reads as a sympathy puff article to paint McDonalds in a “woe is us, our business dictates we raise prices to only serve the wealthy” posture, which is insincere at best, and almost certainly shit journalism.
So, basically in addition to campaign for higher minimum wages you were simultaneously campaigning for lower profit margins. I'm guessing you would not voluntarily take a pay cut, so I don't see why you expected employers to. It sounds like those people who challenged you that minimum wages would raise prices were correct. It seems disingenuous to pretend that "oh those greedy capitalists just wouldn't play nice". If you want to raise wages and limit profit margins, you should campaign for that instead of only half of it and not complain that people did not cooperate in giving you what you really wanted.
I do not think this is exactly true. People may stop eating junk outside. But having a healthy balanced diet is more expensive than buying junk and eating at home; and not only in money, but more importantly (maybe) in time. Cooking takes time and effort, which families with both working parents may struggle with. Please do not forget often those people have more exhausting and abusive jobs.
I know from first hand, how difficult can it be in that environment with limited money, time, and energy to go to the grocery store often, buy fresh things, and cook. It is much more convenient to buy things that go in the freezer, when they are in offer, and throw them into the oven when arriving home.
The problem is that people don't know how to cook. Something like pressure cookers (or crock pots where appropriate) are amazing for this sort of scenario. There are endless recipes you can find online that are toss a few ingredients in, wait, eat. Easy clean up, and delicious. I increasingly think cooking should be a part of basic education for everybody.
Stuff like rice, beans, and chicken breast are extremely cheap, and most of the way towards a balanced diet by themselves. And cookers are like magic - just toss a bunch of stuff in, some spices, and it will come out amazing. I like a bit of yogurt as my fat, but you can go way cheaper - just toss some lard in there, it'll taste great.
Costco has been 2.99/lb for chicken breast about as long as I can remember now here in Chicago. It’s only sometimes better priced than the local supermarket, but the quality is consistent and price stable.
If I have spare time on a weekend it can be picked up far cheaper in bulk from a food services supply store. 2 weeks ago when I last walked through the cooler section it was sitting at $1.29/lb in 40lb cases. Costs maybe 10 cents per food saver vacuum bag or so to freeze them in packs of 2-4 each.
A lot of folks are price takers and have forgotten how to comparison shop or buy on sale and stock up. These were skills lost over the past few generations - likely since stores thought they were competing on price far more than they actually are. Covid taught them the average consumer simply isn’t as price sensitive as the business classes teach you, and have engaged in aggressive price segmentation.
I don’t bother buying most shelf stable or freezable products these days unless it’s on a very large sale - which I’ve found tends to happen roughly quarterly for most things. Beef is the current exception, but we buy a half cow from a local farm and eat off that for a year or more.
Not everyone lives near a Costco. Not everyone is a fan of the environmental cost of their cheap chickens, or whatever. When I lived in San Francisco there was a Costco but it was more inconvenient to get to via Muni than most of the alternatives. Their parking garage is an absolute zoo.
If I have spare time on a weekend it can be picked up far cheaper in bulk
from a food services supply store.
Not everyone has the luxury of being able to store perishable items in bulk. Personally I struggle a bit to store a whole chicken in my fridge. Six and a half pounds (what you'd have to buy to get Costco's $3/lb price) is quite a lot. And if you want to cook that chicken first and then freeze it, you run a high risk of it just tasting weird.
I just checked around and for boneless, skinless chicken breasts:
Sprouts $7/lb.
Safeway $7/lb (more if you don't want the chlorine treated stuff).
Trader Joe's $7.50/lb (but they've gained a reputation for nasty, woody chicken).
Whole Foods out of stock.
Lucky's $8.50/lb.
Mollie Stone's $8.89/lb.
Berkeley Bowl $9.59/lb.
US Foods Chef Store $3.75/lb for *twelve pounds*.
At least out here there's a lot less variability than you're claiming, unless you're buying enough to fill your entire fridge/freezer.
About $5 bucks per skinless boneless chicken breast where I'm at in Canada. That's $20 in just the chicken for a meal if you happen to have a family of four.
I swear my growing boys have hollow legs. How do you eat more than I do?
Chicken well raised and fed, is usually good starting at around 30-40 EUR / kg. I supermarkets selling 1kg of chicken for 4-5 EUR / kg - I would not touch this.
The one who downvoted me obviously has a problem with high quality food.
Animals held and then sold for 4-5 EUR per kg is pure shit. Period. I would rather eat groceries instead.
Most people have no idea what high quality meet is because they buy their stuff always at large chains - remember: None of the sustainability-interested local farms sells to any of those supermarkt chains. You have to GO there to get your stuff.
Such animals you can also eat without having remorse.
The folks that this article is about are not the sort of folks who can afford €18/lb for protein. In the US, at least, cheap chicken can often be identified as it cooks up with a woody texture or suffers from a variety of visual defects. Out here I can't think of any farms selling chickens directly to consumers. More well regarded farms like Petaluma Poultry do, in fact, sell to the big chain grocery stores and that's closer to $5/lb for a whole "organic" chicken.
This [1] is amazing, and also prep freezes extremely well. There are so many great recipes online, just search - it's also referred to as an instant pot in many places.
Not knowing how to cook isn't the main problem. Really poor people don't have time to cook and don't have any disposable income to buy a luxury like a pressure cooker, so this is fantasy. Really poor people are on SNAP (which doesn't cover a lot of fast food) and food banks (which provide random/useless stuff like unhealthy ultra processed food, dented canned food like canned corn and tomatoes, and random produce that requires a lot of time to use).
I think this really mischaracterizes the modern poor, especially in developed countries. It's not uncommon to see poor families with things like recent model phones worth hundreds of dollars, designer clothing/shoes, and the like. In many ways these are the sort of traps that keep people in poverty. Or referencing this article itself, apparently they decided to go eat at McDonalds and managed to spend $20 on two coffees and one coke. I mean that'd break the budget of just about anybody outside of well into the upper edge of middle class.
And a pressure cooker is not a luxury, nor is it something that's outside anybody's price range. On Amazon it looks like they start around $20. And the whole point is that it takes basically 0 time, and saves a ton of money, and even time, relative to things like eating outside the house.
A good microwave oven is extremely cheap, about the same as the food for a few weeks.
I eat only food cooked by myself from raw ingredients, in a microwave oven. Previously I was cooking with traditional methods, but some years ago I have eventually discovered that I was misusing a microwave oven only for reheating, when it can be much better be used for cooking.
In most of the cases, I cook everything that I eat immediately before eating it, which rarely needs more than 20 minutes for cleaning/peeling/paring/slicing vegetables, cooking in the oven and washing dishes.
This is short enough. If I would go out to eat somewhere, I would loose much more time than that. The only thing that I do not cook immediately before eating is meat, as depending of its kind it may need up to 30 minutes of cooking in the oven, so I cook all the meat for a week during the weekend and I just reheat it and combine it with the garnish in the other days. When you cook for a large family, you can cook all the food for a week, for a few hours during a weekend day, and you can reheat the food in less than 5 minutes in all the other days.
You can even bake bread very quickly and with excellent results in a microwave oven. When I want bread, I bake it immediately before the meal. Cooking at home and using only raw ingredients results in a cost for food that is frequently even 10 times less than a similar dish would cost from a supermarket, while being more healthy due to the use of high quality ingredients without any dubious additives. Even for bread, home-made bread is about half of the price of supermarket bread. Eating in a restaurant is of course much more expensive than buying processed food from a supermarket, so the difference in cost is even higher.
Therefore I agree that most poor people spend too much on food that is also unhealthy, and that is because they do not know how to choose wisely what they eat and how to cook that quickly and inexpensively. I believe that these are essential survival skills that should be taught to everyone in elementary school, but, even if I had a much better education than most, that did not help me, so I have learned most of them only when old and after a lot of failed experiments.
Are you interpreting "poor" as "unemployed"? The OP was talking about people who are employed full time but at a low level job (at a shop, or as a janitor or something like that).
More expensive? Absolutely not. Never has been and is unlikely to ever be true.
More difficult? Time consuming? Requires practice? Yes. Usually overblown though on all fronts, considering the types of families that seem to find ways to make cheap meals compared to those that do not in my experience.
Fast food (and prepared/junk foods) are low friction and convenient. Cheap is not a metric they compete within.
Cooking your own food can generally be more expensive then anything mass produced because efficiency is usually better in centralized setups, but this depends on the meal. Including the time it takes, you will never beat eg. a bakery for more cost efficient bread.
Hmm.. I see your point. Grocery stores do have a lot more unhealthy foods than fast food I suppose. Lots of snacks and drinks. Even sugary breads, canned food,etc.. But because you're not eating out, it feels healthier.
So even crappier food. The people have to be blamed for this at some point. Lower income Indian and East Asian families cook fresh food every night that probably costs less than $0.50 a plate. Beans, lentils, rice, eggs, pork and chicken can take you very far.
That same pattern of the poor eating instant noodles is true in Asia as well.
The origin of a number of those products is US food aid. Governments in the 60s and 70s set up facilities to convert the wheat they were getting into a product people would eat.
Some people aren't taught how to cook (though I suppose they could jump on YouTube these days). And for those who are, at the very lowest incomes, they may not have a working range or oven. While a cheap microwave can be had for under $100, the cheaper plug-in stove tops don't last if used daily.
Also those people may not have time or energy to learn cooking by looking youtube. From an armchair, with good economic position and time and money for hobbies anyone can learn to cook by yt. But man I know some families where both parents (when there are 2!) come completely exhausted after 10 hs of hard work.
We changed the quality of food on our home. The amount of money and time invested was much more than we expected. Everthing from a decent equipped kitchen, with enough room, knives and other tools are needed… I lived once in 15 sq meter flat… I can tell you, is difficult to cook in a kitchenette.
>>> decent equipped kitchen, with enough room, knives and other tools are needed
But you don't need too much to cook a healthy food. One pan, one pot, one knife and a spatula. Yes, not everything could be cooked with such setup, but tons of healthy cheap food.
The per person time commitment and food options for cooking for one is difficult. I would contend it's harder to cook a balanced meal for one person than it is for a family of four.
Buying things with portions for single servings has a premium on the price. Buying things at family size portions means that you have to have that for four nights in a row otherwise you've got wasted food (that is more expensive than the single portions).
For example, I've got a wok and can do a reasonable stir fry. Going and getting chicken for it meant that I had to get a pack of four chicken breasts... and I need to cook it before they spoil in my refrigerator. The vegetables (broccoli, pepper, carrots) were a bit better for keeping but you tended not to have one or two carrots unless you shopped the more expensive organic section. You get a 1lb bundle of carrots... and a lot of times, I'd end up throwing out some at the end of the week.
I can get a 3500 calorie deep dish pizza from Little Caesars for $15 ... and that's a good two days of caloric intake right there (there are even less expensive ones - I'm a fan of Detroit style). Four meals for $4 per meal. I think it was $12 when I was unemployed for a while a couple years ago.
I still have difficulty with grocery shopping portions for single servings and getting enough variety. I currently have a meal delivery / ready meal subscription that sends boxed raw ingredients that are 2 minutes of prep for a toaster oven and is about $12 per meal (600 - 800 calories). It's less expensive than door dash, the local diner, or the sit down casual dining and is portioned for cooking for one (and a lot healthier than four meals of pizza).
... However, being able to pay that much per meal isn't something that people who are getting priced out of McDs are able to do.
No, this is just the definition of excuses. It’s very cheap and easy to cook and everyone in many parts of the world cook after 10 hour work days. It’s not the end of the world or really even optional if you want to be cost-effective and healthy. There’s only so much blame you can shift to society because this is staunchly within the realm of personal control.
Not knowing to cook is a personal failing. Like you mentioned cooking basic things is something you can pick up in one session of doomscrolling on TikTok these days.
Like if the single mum living of a minimum wage has time and energy while dressing the 2 kids to not forget such things.
Sorry I know such people that I profoundly admire. I feel is just unfair such a comment. I have enough time and little stress in my life, I can plan what I’m going to cook the next week. But I could never criticize that people for not being able to.
Critique isn't necessarily just mean spirited. It's rather difficult to know what you don't know, and so many people do awful things without knowing there are alternatives.
The example he gave of beans is perfect. They can be done almost completely passively, are healthy, and dirt cheap. Add some rice, a meat, and you have a delicious dirt cheap meal that takes probably less than 5 minutes of active effort, and also has minimal cleanup time as well.
Like this article had some quote about somebody in it spending $20 at McDonalds for some drinks and bemoaning there being nothing healthier. That's simply ridiculous. And if somebody told them that and explained why - they could very possibly dramatically increase the quality of this person's life.
All your comments are painting yourself as a victim and it’s really irking me. I also feels like you’re making a mountain out of a mole hill. This is not rocket science. It’s cooking stuff. It’s cheap and easy and you should be able to do it after 10 hour work shift.
I'm not saying the people aren't to blame, but no one is blameless in the cultural decay. If US natives learned to live like immigrants, many ills would be solved, dietary and otherwise.
But if people cook more (like its typical in european folks around Mediterranean), who will then do all the necessary TV watching and doom scrolling on social cancers to make them feel even more miserable and inadequate?
Btw that portion you mention won't be 0.5$, more like 2-3$ if if balanced and healthy enough. Tons of rice as is still very common in south east Asia ain't very healthy neither. But its sorta proven once folks start to cook for themselves more, they cook healthier than preprocessed junk food. And I don't mean some exquisite stuff, spending even 10-20 mins ever second evening can provide enough for whole family.
Instead of blaming people, perhaps it is better to look at the systemic factors that we can change to help people who are already playing life on hard mode.
Awkward writing in this article. "McDonald’s executives say the higher costs of restaurant essentials, such as beef and salaries, have pushed food prices up..."
Beef and... salaries? I think I found the name of my new fast food place.
I feel like this whole article is seeking to 'maximize engagement', which I'm using as a lofty euphemism for trolling its readers.
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Mariam Gergis, a registered nurse at UCLA who also works a second job as a home caregiver, said she’s better off than many others, and still she struggles. “I can barely afford McDonald’s,” she said. “But it’s a cheaper option.”
On Monday morning she sat in a booth at a McDonald’s in MacArthur Park with two others. The three beverages they ordered, two coffees and a soda, amounted to nearly $20, Gergis said, pointing to the receipt. “I’d rather have healthier foods, but when you’re on a budget, it’s difficult,” she said.
Her brother, who works as a cashier, can’t afford meals out at all, she said. The cost of his diabetes medication has increased greatly, to about $200 a month, which she helps him cover.
> The three beverages they ordered, two coffees and a soda, amounted to nearly $20
I don't live in CA, but this just seems insane? Even in "captive" locations like airports etc. where prices for stuff are higher than a typical brick-and-mortar location, I don't even understand how two coffees and a soda could approach $20. If they'd DoorDashed it, sure. But those numbers don't make sense.
You're probably imagining two black coffees, and all three drinks being of modest size like medium.
But if you turn those into "specialty" coffees and upsize them, and then add ~10% sales tax, it's very plausible that the price was closer to $20 than $10.
Between prices inflating and people's tastes being pretty unmoderated and indulgent for a long while now, the total cost of "everyday" expenses adds up quick.
Even the simple black drip coffee drinks that have basically no material or labor cost are priced at $2-4 in a lot of places now because people have become so dependent on the habit of treating themselves to one, and often a very large one, that they've become price insensitive and easily exploited by any coldly calculating business.
I visited London last year and was surprised & disappointed that the McDonalds across from the Trocadero did not have any such thing as simple black drip coffee (to which I could add half-and-half). The closest I could come was "flat white", which I never heard of before in the U.S.
> black drip coffee drinks that have basically no material or labor cost
Raw coffee prices have been rising for a while now[0], and I assume even in the US people are more attuned to decent coffee.
And I kinda hope producing countries get enough power to get better deals (thus increasing coffee prices further...) as they're usually getting shafted pretty hard.
> if you turn those into "specialty" coffees and upsize them, and then add ~10% sales tax
Right off the bat, it's McDonalds, there are no "specialty" coffees. And the sales tax is irrelevant, what matters is what comes out of the pocket.
$20 for McD-quality coffees and soda is insanely expensive. It puts it above places like Starbucks which makes no sense because there's a Starbucks literally 50m/150ft away from that very same McD.
Pictures of the menu at the closest McDonald’s to MacArthur Park show the coffees at ~$4 and sodas at ~$2-3 all large, which is a more realistic number but still only around half the quoted amount.
Of course there are "specialty" coffees at many McDonald's. Well over a decade ago, recognizing the margin and admitting the public interest in sweet, creamy, coffee drinks, they began a shift into direct competition with Starbucks, et al and offer a full menu of Americanized espresso and blended coffee drinks. Like at Starbucks, these easily run over $5 for the large sizes, and they're widely available.
Because of both brand loyalty, or because they also want other things from McDonald's that Starbucks don't carry, it's a extremely successful and profitable product segment for them, even when a Starbucks is "literally 50m/150ft away".
In 2005 McDonald's net profit margin was ~12%, today it's ~30+%. Obviously that doesn't account for the entire price increase and wouldn't make that much of a difference...but worth noting.
I mean, near me there are a couple of places that sell sometimes even better quality than McDonald’s for lower prices, so McDonald’s loses the competition in the financial convenience factor.
Throughout my 20s that was about the only factor that led me to McDs - a cheap, fast meal. The 2/$3 McChicken for a lazy dinner or a McMuffin for a hangover fix was always too cheap to pass up.
Nowadays McDonald’s feels like a Seinfeld bit: _Whats the deal with fast-food, it’s not fast, and it’s not food._
I’m pretty much guaranteed to spend so much on a biscuit and coffee that I could go to the local coffee shops in town and get a coffee and breakfast sandwich for the same money and oftentimes faster, somehow.
Every time I go to Mcdonald’s, I just think wow, I should have gone to Chipotle. Less expensive and healthier. Better in just about every way. Except no drive thru and you get less food if you order online with Chipotle
You're not going to get value at Chipotle anymore, also somewhat sadly. Order a burrito and you're going to get a big flour wrap with a tiny lump of rice and meat in the very center. These guys have cost-cut themselves to death, just like everywhere else.
The lack of vegan options — and Trump flexing his one-day McDonald’s internship — finally pushed me to boycott McDonald’s altogether. Also it became slow with all the delivery drivers queuing up as well.
Burger King might be raising prices too, but at least their deals are still decent, and every burger has a vegan option (which is supposedly even cheaper for them to produce).
My actual favorite “fast food” is IKEA — surprisingly good as a coworking spot, and their vegan Köttbullar are great.
And honestly, in Germany who needs McDonald’s when there’s a good Döner place around? It’s basically a 5-in-1 burger: real bread, salad, sauces, and your choice of meat/halloumi/seitan.
From what I see here, McDonald’s mostly survives in low-density areas or as car-dependant late-night junk food where alternatives don’t exist. But if people go out less, or can’t afford a car anymore, that model gets shaky fast. There are simply too many better options now.
It reminds me of the same shrinkflation/bloat cycle we see with American pickup trucks: beds get smaller while prices balloon, and then people act surprised that these wank-tanks fail in Europe where efficient vans just work better. “Free market” also means that bad products eventually lose.
Same story with phones: everything keeps getting bigger, heavier, and more bloated with features nobody asked for. Bring back the iPhone Mini — not everything needs to be Super-Size Me.
The problem for me is that I can't eat a lot of rice due to digestive issues with it--it just backs me up like glue even when I drink tons of water. I don't think rice is a very good type of food, honestly. Beans are fine, good fiber and protein. Rice, nah.
Yes. You can still get over 2000 calories at Taco Bell for $8 (this would be five of the Cheesy Bean and Rice burrito, my personal favorite). Even a Cheesy Double Beef burrito for the meat lovers can get you over 2000 calories for just over $11 for four. And their box meals will throw in a drink for a decent price. You can spend a lot more, but you don't have to.
This isn't meant as a Taco Bell commercial, just a comparison to todays McDonald's.
I don’t think that person is right. If you’re price sensitive and don’t just look at the default [combo] prices then Taco Bell is still elite and known for giving you cheap ways to get calories.
They always have a combo that’s cheap and rotates monthly. And like you said they have a few cheap value food like Bean and rice burrito which is also one of my staples.
Also you’re supposed to use the apps if you’re price sensitive. I work outside all day and couch surf without access to a kitchen. I never look at the actual menu of any place if there’s an app available. Apps also let you see prices between different locations.
However almost everyone I see go to any place in the real world is always buying stuff just looking at the default menu prices.
Agreed. Food now is made to order, rather than being ready and waiting (likely to reduce stock waste). Last time I went there was hardly a queue, wasn't rush-hour (was quite dead actually, few staff, fewer customers).
Food still took 15 minutes, fries were cold, the main meal was nice but was overall disappointing for the eye-watering cost compared to days gone by.
And a few guys collecting for delivery which has split their focus from in-resturant customers.
How many low income customers are going to sit there and figure out how to min-max the McDonald's App(tm) to get the best possible deal for their money?
They're not. They're priced out from the efforts and hoops required to get the deal.
And while there's deals in the app, not every deal is the best deal (leading to the min-max situation).
(I live somewhere super-rural where McD is one of the only lunch options. I've figured out that depending on promos, one of the 'cheapest' options is to take advantage of the "buy one get one for $1" double cheeseburger every day offer, then check the 'deals' section to see if there's a cheap fry offer (because fries are always expensive). Drink offers are never worth it when the sodas are always $1-$1.49 for a large soda, but sometimes there's a "free medium fries with purchase of drink" that definitely maximizes the value offer here. Combined, this 'meal' is often less than even the new Extra Value Meals they offer at below $6-7 depending on deal applied.)
You found the exact combo I build when the cravings hit.
Use the coupon for free fries any size with drink purchase; get the $1 bonusburger, and be out with more food for less money than the two cheeseburger combo.
The feeling for me is the market has bifurcated into: delivered expensive shit in a bag, or omakase sushi. The middle ground of cheap decent made to order food is largely gone or on the way out. There are diners in my area still but nearly everything is over 10 nearly 20.
The quality for delivery is astoundingly low for unbelievably high prices.
The cost increases are real: beef, wheat, labor. Some of it is from inflation during the covid period, some it is from the Russia-Ukraine invasion causing havoc in fuel and grain supplies globally.
There is currently a beef shortage in Europe (of sorts). The reason is that buying cow feed has gotten too expensive/unpredictable.
I think people generally underestimate the global impact of shutting down production in Europe's bread basket, Ukraine. There is a reason Russia wants this land. It's, as usual, a war for natural resources.
We should consume a lot less beef. Wages haven't caught up with inflation in a long while, I'd hope McDonalds paying more would trigger a nationwide increase in wages (I know, too optimistic).
13.2% real wage growth, not nominal wage growth. Real wage growth is what you get after inflation is subtracted out of nominal wage growth. 0% real wage growth would be keeping up with inflation.
Agreed. Sheep are a much more sustainable ruminant and we should all shift that way. I always heard it was spoiled cans of mutton fed to GIs that killed Americas taste for sheep. More importantly, we should stop eating food shipped in from far away. Not as easy as it sounds.
I bought some canned corned mutton (from Australia, I think) recently on a whim when I was at a caribbean foods store, and it was incredibly delicious. Not much in the way of gamy flavor (which I don't hate), and more tasty than corned beef.
I think this is the recipe I used: https://www.alicaspepperpot.com/guyanese-style-corned-mutton...
That stuff wasn't cheap but I'm gonna make two cans worth next time, since my guests absolutely devoured it.
I live in Oregon where I know we have tons of sheep (you can see them when you're driving on I-5); would be great to get stuff like this with local sheep!
Meat-based proteine is important in so many different ways.
Yes, it is possible avoid meat and still have a child develop well. It was also possible to install Linux on your PC in 1991/1992. Most people couldn't, but the really smart (or special) ones could.
I meant beef specifically, not meat in general. Our ancestors didn't eat bovine meat every single day like we do now. Plus cows take up lots of grazing ground, and I'm not happy about how they're treated worse over time because we keep eating more of them, and that requires more and more cruel ways of supplying that beef.
Chicken and sheep seem to be more sustainable. But either way, I think it is good for our health to rotate the types of meat we eat and lower the portions a bit? But it's easier said than done for sure.
I think just raising awareness is enough. Trends come and go. People are drinking a lot less milk these days than in the 80's or prior for example. But on the flip side, ozempic and similar weight loss drugs are probably promoting over-consumption now.
Where I live (Switzerland), cost of going to some proper burger joint vs mcdonalds costs roughly the same, or its very mildly cheaper for mcd. Plus unlike say France they don't serve beer here(canned heineken but at least its still technically beer).
The only reason to go there is their method of handling tons of customers (restaurant experience this ain't thats for sure), their opening hours and often location.
That's it, if you look for quality or pleasantness of experience or actual good food in statement above you don't have to bother. Worst burgers Swiss market can offer, we have different food and tasting standards here.
My experience in many countries is that for 10 to 30% more price you can eat a real hamburger made of real beef, with real pommes. But that 30% is for sure prohibitively high for many folks.
I’m trying to be illustrative through glibness here, but…
If consumers can’t afford the prices required to pay a restaurant’s labor living wages, then perhaps they’re not viable customers of that restaurant.
Minimum wages above the market-set rate are a form of price control. The distorting effects of price controls—in this case, contributing to shortages of low-margin restaurant meals—are economically inevitable.
Wage is not a determining factor for McDonald's pricing and has nothing to do with that.
They successfully converted from a neighborhood fast food shop into a new chain of automats with almost no staff once touchscreens got cheap enough and the necessary software could be suitably amortized. They ditched the employees, minimized community features like playplaces and tables, dropped the low margin dollar menu that many poorer people relied on, and focused on getting higher-margin products with better photography to busy professionals with brand attachment.
Trying to turn this into the tired debate about minimum wage just distracts from a discussion about what's actually happening to this brand.
It is quite the juggling act: you have employees demanding to be paid more, the cost of goods/inflation steadily rising, while customers wanting everything to be cheaper.
Something has to give somewhere, the challenging part would be to know where.
I'm not suggesting everyone would be a millionaire with a more egalitarian distribution of wealth. But, to suggest America's skyrocketing inequality has nothing to do with the poor being unable to afford a burger is a bold claim to make.
Because if the wealthy are not extracting their fortunes from American companies, what then?
I'm not sure if there's a more sophisticated way of doing this. But just looking at revenue vs net income for 2024 suggests McDonald's operates at about a ~33% margin.
Where did you get the $311B number? Because I get a net profit of $59.25B which is only 40k per employee. This assumes that the company doesn't need to keep any profit for future usage which may or may not be case depending on how big their war chest is. Not to say that 40k couldn't be life changing for many of the Amazon employee but the 311B number seems to be pulled out of thin air.
There’s an entire academic field studying ways in which it’s not that simple. Housing, employment, and transportation are somewhat famously areas where markets need help due to information and power disparities.
True, but to prevent those restaurants from hiring children, feeding us poison, and dodging all taxes the market must be regulated. And we're back to the same discussion we've been having for 150 years - how do we best regulate markets.
Yea whenever the idea of a company's profit is under a microscope, people often reflex to exec "greed" but it's typically because it's easier to blame a fictional disney villain, than it is to dig into the root of the problem.
It would however have second-order effects; having less wealthy people would drive down rents/etc. If the wealthy just keep getting wealthier you'll end up in a situation where the wealthy just trade between each other out because of higher margins and the working class has nowhere to buy things.
> Minimum wages above the market-set rate are a form of price control. The distorting effects of price controls—in this case, contributing to shortages of low-margin restaurant meals—are economically inevitable.
The article cited analysis which said California's $20 minimum wage increased fast food prices 2% approximately.
Is McDonald still a labor intensive shop? Last time I visited one I had the impression that it had become vastly more automatised: you order on a machine, and most customers just grab a bag from their car before they drive away.
I don’t think this is very related to what’s actually going on here.
It used to be that fast food was always cheap. But now, fast food is a broad market that’s aimed at a wide variety of demographics.
McDonald’s just so happens to be closer to the “premium” side of the market. They have a strong brand and don’t have to be the cheapest fast food restaurant on the block. People don’t buy McDonald’s because it’s cheap.
There are plenty of fast food restaurant chains that still mainly serve lower income demographics.
Rally’s/Checkers, Church’s Chicken, Popeyes, Sonic, and maybe you could even count Arby’s, or Taco Bell depending on what you’re ordering.
Some of the bigger brands like McDonald’s do have some deals to be found but you’ll need to be on their apps hunting for them.
I think the bigger issue is the 500 mil/quarter stock buybacks and the several million compensation packages for the executives than the burger flipper wanting enough money to make it worthwhile to leave their house.
And they've been complaining for decades at this point that corporate is failing them. Not enough new products, bad business and advertising strategies, store renos, the list goes on.
The burger flipper making a lot more money is doing a lot more for their franchisee's than the executives are as of late.
This is a trend that's probably going to continue and widen the rich-poor divide. Take airlines, there's only so many seats they can offer day to day, and with planes retiring from service and new planes slow to be delivered the inequality will only increase, and the market will shift to more affluential customers.
The likes of McDonald's will need to understand who their new customer base is quite carefully and market around that if they are to stay relevant. Sadly their products to me are garbage now; slow service, cold fries, awful oil. Obviously they've had to adapt but it's just expensive slop.
And in the UK they have had scandals around sexual harassment, which hasn't helped their image/branding.
> First they complained that restaurants like McD's were poisoning the lower classes with fast food, now they're complaining that they can't afford it?
Both things can be true, you know. Yes, its food is abysmally unhealthy, but it’s effectively the de facto national cafeteria of the continental United States by virtue of its widespread footprint and (previously) low prices.
In an ideal world, we should be challenging both, rather than throwing up our hands and pleading confusion because someone can’t hold two truths simultaneously.
"In an ideal world, we should be challenging both"
Not really. Calling food poison and then complaining that poor people can't afford it implies that you support poor people eating poison and or eating the food.
The first complaint implies that they shouldn't be eating it at all and result is that I just can't take the second complaint seriously.
It's just a way to shit on big corporations without having to take responsibility.
You’re grossly misunderstanding the broader arguments through misrepresenting the claims as tied together, rather than the standalone grievances they are. A single system can have multiple flaws that interact on each other without necessarily creating a single, larger issue.
McDonald’s food is unhealthy and should be improved. At the same time, they have become too expensive for the poorer working classes to afford. These are two different problems, with different solutions.
You’re basically arguing that because I cannot demonstrate “one easy fix” to a complex issue of nuance that I’m essentially advocating for poisoning people, and it demonstrates your complete inability to grasp simultaneous truths or discuss complex issues effectively without misrepresenting opposition to score points.
Who is "they"? Someone, somewhere, will always complain about anything, no matter how good it is. The world is filled with critics because (my hot take) it's easier to tear things down than build them up.
Well in the past you could get unhealthy but cheap, convenient food. The cheap+convenient combo no longer really exists for families that for some reason will not cook.
OTOH, no company or item exists in a vacuum. If McDonald’s suppliers have increased prices, and their employees expect higher wages due to inflation, then McDonald’s must increase prices or eat the cost (unsustainable in the long-term). Does this only contribute to inflation? Yes. But so does every worker who wants higher wages - unfortunately everybody in the chain has such little influence on the wider economy that they must simply prioritise themselves.
This is an overly simplistic view, of course, not least because it presumes good faith, but that is really my point: the economy has too many moving parts to simply say “you’re to blame for inflation because you increased your prices”.
.. no, corporations raise prices in response to the falling value of the dollar which has been occurring predictably since 2020 when the money supply was increased 20% (remember the "printer goes brr" memes and the "stimulus checks")?
Make more money supply -> money is worth less -> prices go up
simple stuff
I guess the next step is: blame corporations, nationalize them, see it causes economic problems (we're here), and then repeat (Trump promises $2k checks to everyone, this is coming soon)
No, inflation is a monetary and political phenomenon. Companies cannot set prices arbitrarily, in particular not the fast food industry which faces what is probably the strongest competition on the planet. The entire restaurant industry does not collude on the prices of burgers.
In this particular case it's wage-push inflation. The lowest quintile of workers has seen very strong wage gains among other reasons because of tight labour markets and minimum wage legislation, which on the consumer side prices a lot of people out of the service economy.
That's a nice excuse from the executives, but it doesn't align with reality. McDonald's profits have been rising every year. [1] If those dastardly minimum wage workers and their fat paychecks were putting even the slightest bit of pressure on struggling McDonald's, the expectation would be some sort of reduction in profit. But it's the total opposite. Profits are outpacing whatever losses they're (not) experiencing from whatever supposed wage increases they have.
You’re repeating generic right wing-ish talking points. Yet profit margins have increased. If your reasoning was correct, profit margins wouldn’t be increasing as they are.
Then why are profit margins bigger? Supply and demand as the reason for profit percentage increasing margin makes no sense. I’d be interested in how you’d debate that.
McDonald's a decade ago had a sub-20% operating margin, now their executives are targeting a >40% operating margin in 2025.
If you genuinely think that the simplest, most naive Supply and Demand model is dictating how corporations behave in modern (i.e. late stage) capitalism, and you're unironically accusing others of "having a sea lioning war", you should probably go shove it up your ass.
They cost just a little more than national chains, for a much more satisfying meal (still fast food tho).
Things I miss most about Austin (2nd-gen that left, a decade ago): H-E-B Grocery and P'Terry Hamburgers.
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