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.
If you can eat at a nicer place for the same amount of money, why would you eat at McDonald’s?
Convenience and familiarity, mostly. If you go to a McDonalds you know exactly what you’ll get and you’ll be able to get it pretty quick.
Name one burger joint that doesn’t have exactly what mcds has and more…this comment is laughable.
People eat at McDonald’s because of marketing.
If you go to a McDonalds you know exactly what you’ll get
A poorly put together “meal” that very likely has been sitting under a heater for a length of time unless you went there when it was busy. And if it was busy, the chance for mistake is high and it’s going to be sloppily put together. What so you can save a few minutes? Most places do take-away… so you call them, place an order, pick it up. No sitting 10-20 minutes in drive-thru. And you got more food, better food, for the exact same price and you probably got it faster on take-out. And dining in… you wait a few minutes… how do you not have a few minutes?
And who actually cares about familiarity? That’s either saying, you go to that one place way to much and your food choices are predictable and boring. Or you’re highly susceptible to advertising. And really, those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.
Obvious food quality and health issues aside, I know some are still boycotting McDonald’s for providing free meals to the IDF. They also exploit forced prison labor to drive profits.
Speed, for one. If I’m traveling across the country and I just want to eat and get back on the road, or even if I just need some breakfast before work, it’s a lot faster.
My go to for this stuff now is truck stops. They’ll usually have a fast food restaurant in them but also healthier options for snacks and meals
If you’re in a hurry mostly.
Death of fast food is a treat we can all look forward to. Keep raising those prices geniuses!
It’s not just fast food unfortunately. Sit down restaurants, even mom and pop ones are through the roof in pricing as well. Even groceries to cook at home are crazy these days with the pricing
Used to be that people went to fast food because it was good, fast, and cheap.
These guys running the show have managed to reverse all three of those points. Now fast food is shit, slow, and expensive. It’s honestly amazing that people put up with it as long as they did.
The size of the patties are ridiculous.
They’re smaller than the pickles now.
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?
Hash browns used to be $.90 ea or 2 for $1.
Hashbrowns from McD is $2.19 here lol. I stopped buying them long time ago.
The apps are fucking awesome though.
I literally get free burgers with no purchase required regularly at the moment thanks to a fast food app.
All big companies are keeping tabs on socials, incl. Lemmy. You think you’re special for using Lemmy? 🤪
There’s not enough of us for any movement here to make their stock price move.
They don’t care. It would be a bad use of their resources.
They will eventually, but they don’t.
Keep convincing yourself that you’re special.
Are you really that dumb to think your comment isn’t scanned by companies?
😂
Smart comeback!
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Well, I just spent a good 5 minutes in Lemmy and encounter nothing but white trash. I am certainly gonna go outside again, but not of your command, wanna-be-master. I’m not your fucking slave.
No one likes you.
Of course, because people here hate Asians, as I have been trying to point out. Luckily your racist friends like you. Now go dig a hole please, and drop your mom in it first. You motherfucking racist barbarian baboon brain.
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.
News headlines gonna be like “millenials are bankrupting an American institution, the fast food industry”
They need to make up their mind whether they want us on this or the avocado toast
Avocado toast is probably cheaper at this point
The ridiculous part of this is that fast food is already subsidized by cheap corn, soy and dairy so their customers are getting screwed at both ends. I’m guessing we’ll see record fast food profits soon if we haven’t already.
I wish we’d end corn subsidies… They put it in everything. Just move those subsidies to hemp so people can have real sugar. Hemp would be there much better crop to subsidize since it does everything.
Ah, but you see - the proles might find a way to get high using hemp and that would hurt productivity. Better to drown them in corn syrup and obese corn fed factory farmed animals, then we can sell them diabetes medications and end of life care too.
Also obesity and other such diseases kill people at around the point they’re reaching retirement age, meaning that the typical prole can create wealth for others during the full or almost full period of wealth creation and then likely die just before or just after retiring, saving on post-retirement and old-age costs.
For the owner class in Capitalism, the perfect life expectation for proles is the one that exactly matches the retirement age.
Ironically The War of Independence, The French and Indian War, and The War of 1812 were all fought, in part, over hemp production or taxes.
Not only does it do everything, it captures carbon better than any other plant. It’s so effective at it, that one harvest of one acre of hemp removes almost 10 times the carbon that one acre of trees would capture. Thing is that hemp does that in 3 months allowing 4 harvests per year, while trees take 150 years on average to grow. It also stores 85% of that carbon in the roots of the plant, the “waste” part as far as we are concerned, so we could produce biofuel, paper, clothing, food, and housing from the stuff without harming the effectiveness of the carbon capture. All we would need to do is collect the roots, compress them into a density that will not float, and dump them into the Marianas Trench. That way that carbon will be trapped down there for a few hundred million years.
We won’t end corn subsidies because Iowa gets first pick in presidential elections.
The corn subsidies are here for a purpose. To ensure that we maintain a surplus so that we can avoid mass food shortages if a natural disaster such as the dust bowl of the 1930s wipes out several years of harvests. Hemp can’t be used as a food source.
Hemp is a complete protein. Corn is not. Remember the gruel that Scrooge was eating? That’s hempseed. Hemp can be used for food, clothing, shelter, paper, biofuel, and a fuckton of other uses.
I’m not meaning to disparage the other uses of hemp.
I’m not an expert in the uses of hemp for food but we already have the cultural palate and infrastructure for cornmeal and cornflour products, not so much for hempseed right now. If we had that back in the depression, maybe we would have subsidized hemp instead. Maybe attitudes could change in the future and we could shift to subsidizing hemp in the future. I know of a couple big hemp farms that have popped up near me, it’s possible. But it’s not feasible right now.
That’s the exact same argument that my parents, and a ton of other Democrats, hit me with about Bernie in 2016. I love how any progress at all is never feasible right now.
Don’t forget the beef subsidies, too!
Per a 2015 Berkeley study, witjouy the beef and dairy subsidies, a Big Mac would cost $13 and a pound of beef would cost $30. Obviously both would be more now since inflation has raised prices by about 1/3 across the board and food prices have definitely grown faster than the average.
Right, and beef is in turn subsidized by corn and soy subsidies as cheap feed - plus whatever industrial surplus feed they can find, like Skittles, which are subsided again via corn.
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.
The only good thing about this is now farm fresh food is about the same as grocery store prices. So now i can better justify shopping local :)
Yup, and all the politicians playing make-believe and making a big show of scratching their heads like they just don’t understand what’s causing inflation has just emboldened them. We’re still living with the price gouging from the pandemic.
I’m surprised they’re not still trying to claim it’s from the stimulus checks lol.
We’d all do better to let this help us kick the fast food habit
good. Maybe people will stop eating shit
You’re kidding yourself if you believe this. When costs are high and incomes are low people tend to eat more processed crap, they just buy it from supermarkets instead of fast food chains.
Source? Look at how well Aldi is doing right now in the US. People are being more conservative with their finances. It should be more expensive to buy processed fast food.
Literally the first Google result amongst hundreds.
https://thrivemarket.com/blog/natural-food-prices
Processed, crappy food will always be more expensive than natural, whole foods like vegetables.
Fast food is more expensive
That’s not what my comment says. I’ve said that processed food will always be cheaper, so you’re just replacing shit for shit.
not always
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?
to me restaurants are now for special occasions, I can cook well enough that restaurants just feel disappointing.
I may not be proud of it, but I haven’t cut back.
My lunch ritual is go through a drive thru and eat in my car while playing on my phone. Between apps and coupons, I can usually eat for $5-7, sometimes I order something at full price because it sounds particularly good that day.
I know there are so many other better options, but my neurodivergency doesn’t like it when I change up a ritual that’s been going on for so many years.
Without context of that poll, that doesn’t mean much. Someone who eat fast food or have it often might not have to cut back on eating it.
a lot of people are addicts when it comes to fast food, take out, and delivery.
it’s the convenience they are addicted to.
I was flabbergasted yesterday when I got 2 happy meals for the kids, a mcrispy and a filet of fish, and the teller said $30. My wife and I just stared. Wtf happened. We went there for a quick easy cheap meal while road tripping. Next time we’re packing sandwiches.
are you still staring? did you end the road trip? you really just left the story hanging there.
We stared as long as socially acceptable before accepting and paying.
And itll be spun into blaming the cost on pay increases of the workers
Literally in the article…
Yeah they dont waste time
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This food is gross to begin with. I’m always shocked by how many people eat McDonald’s. Have some self-respect folks. Don’t eat that shit. You’re worth more than that.
It was fine when it was an occasional treat that parents would take their kids to. It was terrible when people began to rely on it for daily consumption.
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.)
Should be noted how much of that is food and how much of that is rent. I’ve noticed spots that own their own location haven’t had to crank their prices up quite so high. But areas in high rent neighborhoods just see restaurants collapsing like dominoes, as they’re priced out and replaced with… often nothing.
A good point. The BBQ place owns their own building, I believe, but in general that is a good point.
The experience has been getting worse and the pricing getting higher and bizarre.
One of the places we would hit up a few years ago was about 8-9 dollars a person, you’d come in, sit down, have a server come out to take order/bring out food/everything.
We went there recently and it was about $18 a person, and you went up to the counter, placed your order, then you came and picked up your food, and went up to the counter for refills. At the end you walk up to the cash register, they ring you up and then suggest a 25% tip.
I wouldn’t mind a bit more self service, but at that point it’s just ridiculous amounts of money to charge people afraid of using a stove for a little while.
If only we had a stove at work … all we have are like 8 microwaves…
Im in Canada and i was telling my daughter that when I was her age, I could walk into McDonald’s with $5 and get a big Mac meal and a nickel in change. Now it’s like $17+ for the same thing. Probably lower quality too.
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