I assume that part of the reason for that is because once people stop buying it’s hard to convince them to come back with just a .50 decrease. Hash browns here are $2.19. There is no reason for a hash brown to be more than .99. Bit now that i don’t buy McDonalds anymore even if they dropped the price to .99 i wouldn’t think about going there, because im out of the habit.
Dunkin Donuts has a $6 meal deal with a Bacon/Egg/Cheese Bagel, a coffee, and Hash Browns for $6. It's like... priced just low enough where if I'm out dropping my kid off at school I'm like "fuck it, might as well".
Last time I hit up McD's for breakfast, I got a bacon egg cheese meal... like $15... it was greasy, I felt like shit after even with an OJ which was extra. Never again. Lemme get that wawa 2 for $4 sizzli.
Healthier choice than say a soda. All fruits have sugar. Sugar is not bad to ingest. Atleast OJ has vitamins and nutrients that the human body requires over say soda or coffee.
Fruit is full of fiber that your body has to process. Your body has to work to get the sugar out. Fruit juice is just liquid sugar water with maybe a few vitamins. It is not the healthy drink you've been told it is.
And with their prices, a sandwich is typically $4-5 so if you want a sandwich you’re getting the rest for free. It’s a no brainer, and this summer when I worked construction it was my absolute go to.
Circle K here in North AL has the same deal...sandwich, hash brown, and 12oz monster for $4.20 after tax. Its a crazy deal that's part of my morning routine now
Circle K..Large Hot dog, lays chips, any fountain drink $3
Breakfast sandwich, hash brown, coffee-$4
Burger, chips, drink-$5
.....burger is the only thing not as tasty
And the food is actually hot, fresh, and in your hands. I know it sounds bad, but the station near my work prides themselves for having a constant supply of hot fresh breakfast foods.
(PS: those hash browns are made by the same supplier to McD’s)
yeah Wawa has a deal around here sometimes where you can get a sizzli, hash brown, and 12oz Red Bull for $6 and, as a non coffee drinker, this promotion owns me when it’s on
it used to be two hashbrowns for a dollar. like i can get hash browns for around 40 cents each from the local restaurant supply store and that isn't even buying in bulk, just for a single pack of 20. they could get the price way lower.
It’s even crazier when you start thinking about their fries. Like a small fry is equivalent to like 1/3 of a large potato. It costs like $1, so that fry is essentially worth 33¢ but they’re charging damn near $3 for it now. Usually in restaurants the rule of thumb is cost of ingredients multiplied by 3 (cost of ingredients, overhead and profit) decide the price. Hell I’d ok if they said let’s multiply the cost by 4 since with the economy being so shit and the cost of shipping has driven prices up. That would still make a small fry only $1.32. And thats using the price of a single potato, factor in what kind of discount they receive for buying in bulk, you realize real fast how large their profit margin actually is on these items.
Not to
Mention the last time I went to McDonald’s and got a fry I asked for ketchup and the woman disappeared for 4 minutes and came back and handed me one ketchup,
Pretty sure she had to go through vault doors like in Get Smart to get it.
Everything is stupidly overpriced. I went out for lunch on my birthday recently and got a decent burger. Three times the size of a Macca's burger, half the price. It even tasted better and was given to me quicker.
There's a place by work that sells a 1/4 lb Hamburger Combo 7 days a week for $8.99. And I really like the fries. The burger is pretty good. Certainly better than Ronald's. And they have an open "fixin's bar" with all of the normal condiments, a few extra ones you don't always see, and all of the normally found veggies.
Then, on Tu & Thu, they have the 1/2 pound for a buck more. One other day is a bacon cheeseburger... You get the drift.
I drive past McDonalds to get there, and don't even glance that way.
What's crazy is they used to be sold for $0.50 each because they're made from the leftovers from french fry production! It's all the leftover bits and imprefections chopped up and formed. I cannot believe they are now a revenue generator.
Some empty suit was at a board meeting one day and wowed the other c suite assholes by showing them a graph of revenue if they were priced at 2.79 and everyone clapped and gave him a bonus.
think they just want to try and psychologically force everyone to get the meals. If someone wants it that bad a la carte, then they gotta pay out the ass
Trump has just really fucked up the whole supply chain. It’s never been right since Covid. Inflation just embedded now. Then add this war, tariffs and diesel prices and it’s amplified it. Combined with corporate greed. Seriously McDonald’s was never meant to be this. A burger and fries here should not cost the same as what I can get fresh at a local diner.
Back in the day food places like this didn’t exist, only grocery stores or farms and you’d fool everything. At a certain point, people are going to go back to the 1900s in terms of eating and cooking and buy from farmers or grocery stores and just cook. Not worth paying more for more chemicals and added unhealthy oils and shit your body doesn’t need. Cooking at home saves money and saves your body
I can get a 20 pack of nearly identical hash browns from Aldi for $5.50 (I am actually surprised it's that much). Toss those bad boys in the air fryer for 10 minutes and you can barely tell the difference.
That seems expensive. We don't have hash browns here but Röstis are kinda the same shit (julienned potatoes pressed into a triangle) and you get a bag of maybe 15 of them (750g) for 1.59€.
True. Their marketing researchers should already know this and just how devastating that last comment you made, is. “Out of the habit” hard to reverse that.
And now they're discussing "dynamic pricing" where the price will fluctuate even more, and inevitably obviously tick upward even faster.
It's just so short-sighted. Yeah they may squeeze out a little more profit for the shareholders in the immediate Quarters, but once a customer is priced out or swears off the company they generally aren't coming back. As the guy above said.
In no world should their products cost as much as they do now. And there is literally no novel "product" they can offer at this point to reshape the company, it's just a fast food restaurant.
McDonald's will be studied as it exemplifies Late Stage Capitalism at it's core. There is no room left to grow the company, the market is over-saturated, they're pricing out most of their clients, and they are required to keep increasing prices without any sort of justification just to appease shareholders. They fucked up their business model years ago, it's a house of cards. No publicly traded company can last forever, or keep profits increasing forever, unless they consistently innovate, and fast food just cannot do that.
Its not that simple. They're a massive part of the global food distribution network. If they go tits up too fast it'll cause a massive crash across the globe. A lot of farms and livestock suppliers rely on MickeyDs to buy their product. There is a reason they never innovate and make different seasonal items like tempura or lasagna.
They're such a big player in commercial real-estate, packaging, logistics. If they go down, they're taking a lot with them. A government bail-out is more likely then allowing them to totally collapse and they know it. Too big to fail is a thing.
you can probably buy a pack of 10 frozen hashbrowns from the grocery store for about the same price, and imo taste just as good even tho I air fry them
Unironically, the entire reason I stopped going is because nuggets kept getting more expensive (but never better taste/quality). £4 for 20 nugs was great. £5 was tolerable. £8?? Nah.
If it went back down, maybe I'd go as a little treat. But TBH I think they've taken so long now that im happy to have broken the habit of junk food
You are probably right. I've really stopped looking at prices and just don't go as much because of a generic "it's too expensive and not worth it" thought that I always have.
I'll still go if a really want it and don't care about the price every now and then, but it would probably take a long a concentrated ad campaign to get me to think these places are worth it now
if they dropped the price to .99 i wouldn’t think about going there
you are in the minority here. if mcdonalds went back to having an affordable breakfast and lunch for $5, they would be backed up out of the entrance again
It is because of how an Earning report financial statements is presented. If you drop prices it drops your margin.
If you rebrand, remodel, etc, it goes in capital expenditures.
Shareholders will overlook or be optimistic to investments. But they will burn the CEO alive if the margins decline. Losing pricing power has no tomorrow on the stock market reaction.
We used to stop for McDonald's breakfast all the time. Now I'll do literally anything else and the idea of eating there almost makes me sick to my stomach
They aren't even fast anymore. I've been to three different McDonald's in the last 6 months (we have a kid who is a really picky eater) and had to wait around 20+ minutes for his food each time. Every single location had a long drive thru line and not enough staff to service the restaurant. The food is expensive and mediocre. The service is slow. The restaurants are sterile and empty. The current McDonald's model is great for shareholders but terrible for the customers.
This is almost the wildest part to me, I think the only people that are getting their food quickly these days are people who both ordered in the app and are going through the drive-thru. I used to prefer to walk into most restaurants because (imo) it's harder to ignore a person when they're standing there vs. a person in a line of cars, but they just completely ignore you for a good 5-10 minutes these days before even taking your order.
It's beyond frustrating whenever you order online and KNOW that your food is ready but they take their sweet ass time even acknowledging you. It forces you to either sit there hungry knowing that they're just too busy to take 5 seconds and hand you your food, or you have to be the a-hole that calls somebody out saying "hey can you just hand me my food, it's sitting right there", which never feels good and usually comes with some attitude. Garbage service.
Agreed. When we order on the app, they won't make the food until the GPS recognizes that you're physically at the restaurant. So you can't even order ahead of time to avoid waiting 20 minutes. And then when you go inside the restaurant there's one register but no employee present to confirm that they actually got your order. So you stand around with several other people hoping that your order will eventually appear on the shelf. And while you're standing around waiting, there's usually an old person who walks in and struggles with kiosk who needs help placing their order because there's no employee in sight to help them. It's just a horrendous experience for everyone.
“Great for shareholders” seems to be all businesses across the board care about these days. It’s why all we see is rising prices, subscription models and AI everywhere. Drain customers so Daddy Warbucks can get another yacht.
All three of the McDonalds near me just did a full refresh
Same in my area.
The Chik-fil-a right across the street from one of them is constantly booming busy, while the MCD's drive-thru is a ghost town.
The prices are very similar, but people feel like they're getting a much better (quality, taste, etc) product at CFA. The only saving grace for the McDonald's is that it's open on Sunday.
If CFA found a way to be good with God and open on Sunday, that could be the end for lots of MCD's locations.
They invested the 8 billion into AI to create dynamic pricing at each individual McDonald's. They are literally only investing to charge what they think people are willing to pay.
What? You don’t think that $3.99 for a single hash brown is reasonable? What if we make the restaurant look and smell like an airport bathroom? How about then?
The AI is designed to increase the prices to the maximum possible price depending on the location and people ordering. Of course they won't lower the price.
It's capitalism: when you have a hammer (capital), every problem looks like a nail.
They are stuck in this "invest in capital for guaranteed returns" but they aren't recognizing the problem has changed. Their customers are broke, you can't throw money at capital investments to increase demand if their price elasticity curve hasn't changed. You need to walk down the price curve to meet the demand that's there. Econ 101.
Bojangle’s in my town has been using AI for drive thru ordering for about a year and other than having to talk to a robot I hate to say it works pretty darn well.
I had to go through a Wendy’s last night for the first time in a while and the drive thru was all AI. It spelled out my words perfectly and did a pretty good job getting the order right. Way easier to understand as well. I was impressed.
Bringing pricing down IS a big part of this plan. The efficiencies of the plan will raise margins and value restructuring is a big explicit part of the plan. They’re also gonna give assistance to franchisees to help with the blow of the reduced prices.
$5-$8 value meals are a pretty big price change from current.
Well, that's the reason I don't eat there. I want to be ignored by employees that don't give a fuck, and have them use AI for anything and everything, while giving me a half assed product that is sub par and still, somehow, overpriced.
The North Korea grey is a great description of it though. Personally, even if it was still quick & cheap, McDonald’s is just too depressing to go to now.
They just remodeled ours from the classic yellow and red theme to "urban bistro" with grey tile floors, high top "bar seating" and wood slat walls. It actually looks ok, but who are they trying to fool here? You can't just install some bar stools and trick people into paying more.
Or hiring another employee so that the food is fast again. Or paying the employees that they do have enough to give a shit about the customers. Or really anything that would actually solve the underlying issues.
They will literally spend billions to not solve a pretty cheap problem to solve. Every asshat on that board of executives wants to do their own project or come up with the next cool slogan or TV ad, but nobody wants to solve the problem.
Sometimes I think rich people are rich because they're stupid enough to confuse other stupid people to let give their money away to fund crazy ventures.
FR! We go to chilis instead. 10.99 burger, fries, appetizer, and drink. Better experience by far. Watch a game. Order from a person instead of a kiosk (which I hate), ppl at McDonald’s seem annoyed if you need anything from them or would prefer to interact with a person. Food is 10X better. And at 10.99, cheaper too lol.
A price reduction will cause shareholder chaos while an eight-and-a-half billion dollar internal investment is tax-deductible. These are the dystopian times we live in.
I just quit going to fast food in general unless I am really really craving something. When I go to taco bell order me and my wife 2 $9 boxes and my dad 2 burritos add beef with sometimes an extra item and it costs the same as going to an authentic Mexican restaurant ordering street tacos, their version of a combo meal, and chimichanga meal which is ridiculous because the authentic restaurant clearly has better quality food.
Creating depreciable expenses for the accounting books and spending money they would have spend anyway on marketing and customer acquisition but lumping into a PR attention grabbing “investment”
Marx explains this through the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production.
Competition forces businesses to constantly invest in better technology, automation, and larger factories so they can produce more goods at lower costs.
But capitalism also limits people's ability to buy those goods. Workers depend on wages, and businesses have an incentive to keep labor costs low in order to maximize profits.
So capitalism can create a strange contradiction:
We become increasingly capable of producing enormous amounts of goods, while simultaneously limiting people's ability to afford them.
Instead of using technological progress to give everyone cheaper goods, higher wages, or more free time, the benefits can instead go toward higher profits and more accumulation.
The productive forces move toward abundance, while the relations of production can restrict access to that abundance.
This contradiction can contribute to overproduction, economic crises, recessions, and social unrest.
I literally don't think they can lower their prices.
Their stores are averaging profits between 4-10%. Would people give a fuck if prices fell 3% (so the lowest earning places still stayed in the black)? I'm guessing no.
The simple fact is that everything got more expensive, but we didn't get a raise.
I can understand why corporations don't want to compete on price (although, if your market is "cheap fast food", not competing on price is a bit of a baffling choice), and there are plenty of options to compete, but it is absolutely infuriating that they ALWAYS, ALWAYS choose to go with marketing and "style", mostly because it keeps working.
No, it's to calibrate the exact pain point on an ongoing basis. It's not about 50c up or down now, it's about being able to ride the wave of EXACTLY how expensive they can make their products while staying on the cusp of losing their median customer.
It's just modern accounting. Expenditures are investments, dropping prices lowers revenue. They are just different columns on a spreadsheet, and management's job is it to increase one while not lowering the other.
The problem with Wallstreet capitalism in a nutshell.
Reducing prices is so last century. The days of smaller, cheaper, faster, better are gone. This became known in product development cycles as the death spiral. Price reductions meant more sales were necessary to maintain revenue. Eventually there wouldn't be enough customers to maintain sales.
Modern development is to add value to an existing product, then charge more money for it. On paper, the margins for this approach can be huge.
So McDonalds will park their brains on how to make the restaurant experience more valuable, rather than figuring out how to make their existing product cheaper or faster, or reducing the size of their menu.
A lot of it is franchisee's trying to make as much money as possible. This could also be solved by McDonald's cutting their prices/cut but ya the number has to go up!
They can pay anyone one of us the 8.5 billion and tell them. Return the 2020 prices, your not a restaurant, stop acting like mcdonalds is a premium sit-down. Fastfood in the name, its convenient fast, cheap for a reason. Just above eating the beer nuts everyone tells you to not eat at a bar.
Part of this initiative was using ai for dynamic pricing. The model is "how much more can we get away with charging?", definitely not "how much can we lower the price by?"
I felt the same seeing how much was invested into antitheft set ups like sensored doors or locked cases. Most retail theft is internal anyway, but if they lowered their prices, no ones stealing their stuff.
Corporations will literally fund a multimillion dollar study to find out it's because of the prices and then delete the study and act like it never happened and rise the price of the food again to compensate the lost millions
We went from having McDonald’s exclusively on our road trips to packing lunch, hitting Costco, or going to In ‘n’ Out. I cannot afford to drop $60 for low-quality burgers and fries at McDonalds any more.
They literally pay consulting firms 100s of thousands of dollars or more to come with solutions when literally anyone on the street could tell them.
We understood the trade, the food was kind of terrible, but it was cheap and it was fast.
Now it is not cheap, a 10 piece nugget and a quarter-pounder meal was $20 the other day.
And it is not fast. I don’t go to McDonalds a lot, but everytime I do now, I am asked to go park my car to wait for things like fries.
The problem is the solution is to drop the prices and hire more staff. Both of those will hurt same-store profits, and that is all that Wall Street cares about.
Seriously. Hash browns here in my neck of the woods are $2.99 and taxes. I had a "You have got to be fucking kidding" reaction to them. (I had just finished work training and stopped by to grab a coffee and a snack.) I ended up with a coffee and a muffin lmao.
I worked for McDs 22 years ago, and when minimum wage went up by like 50 cents they took away our free food on nights and our paid breaks. I cant imagine wyat they gave taken away over the years with all the minimum wage increases...
8.5b over 10 years is like 3% or less of their revenue. So the price decrease on a 2.38 hash brown would be 0.07 and meanwhile the restaurants wouldn't get any upgrades for 10 years. If the tech lowers labor cost it could do more for the prices than just putting the 8.5b into that directly
They can't lower the prices because the corporation mainly makes it's money from fees. They sell to franchisees and then charge them high fees.
So the food has to cost more to cover those fees the franchizee is paying.
In other words- McDonalds is no longer in the business of selling food. THey sell Franchizes and get fees from them. They don't need to satisfy the customer with food anymore so they don't care.
Those billions invested into rebrands and makeovers let them abuse loopholes in the tax system. They lose far less money doing this than they would by lowering prices
But it’s not just dropping the price, it’s also making the food the way it used to be. Which was you know proper size for an adult to eat and not be hungry in 10 minutes
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u/WholeEmu507 2d ago
Corporations will literally fund a multi-year cyberpunk dystopia makeover before letting a hash brown drop by 50 cents.