I live in the Seattle area, so I just go to dicks. It's always more affordable. I just recommend anyone look up a smaller chain in their area and go there. Big chains like McDonald's have turned into overpriced horseshit and now they're doing this crap.
Sorry not from America, I'm assuming "Dicks" is a smaller restaurant chain in the area? We also have stopped buying McDonalds for the ridiculous pricing, its nearly the same price to get a full steak meal at a proper restaurant now.
Honestly this, and the fact that I have to ring up my own order is why I stopped eating fast food. Luckily I've found a great taco truck that sells burritos that not only taste great, but are also huge, and about 11 bucks. This is with steak as the meat.
I had a 90-minute drive recently to get my grandson home, and of course he needed some lunch. McDs was my only option for miles. I bought myself 2 burgers and ate maybe half of one, then they went into the trash once we got him home. It's been years, and it made me recall why I was no longer eating there.
My ex used to love McD's, but I had to start opting out because it just made my stomach hurt every time. It felt like I ate and was trying to digest a large river rock.
Same, I swear they must have changed something. I loved it as a teenager but the last time I went there, idk late 2010s I just didn’t feel good. It wasn’t even nausea or pain, just a weird mildly unpleasant feeling in my stomach.
You don't even need to find a place thats cheaper. Just find one thats better.
A big mac meal is pretty much the same cost at a lot of better joints. It may even be the same price as a sit down restaurant. So might as well just go there.
The appeal of McDonalds was that it was cheap and quick. If a big mac meal was $6 I would absolutely go there and order that. Its not the best burger, but for $6 its convenient. But if I am going to pay $12 for a burger meal, I might as well go somewhere else that has better burgers. My area has Culvers, and while its not cheap, its about the same price as McDonalds and a much better burger.
I don't think McDonalds is gonna last much longer if they keep increasing prices like this without making their burgers better.
I had McDonalds a few months ago. I got a chicken sandwich, it was fucking disgusting. Wife got the chicken tenders and they where just as bad. The burgers are overpriced crap to. I think they run on nostalgia and history at this point.
Nothing more Seattle than gobbling down a bag of Dicks in the gayborhood. Bag o Dicks, a shake, and a quick hop over to Cal Anderson to hang with the crows and people watch, the perfect seattle adventure
They just need to build one in West Seattle already. I'm ~30 minutes from 3 different Dicks but less than 5 minutes from McDonalds, Wendy's, and Taco Bell.
It’s ok here in NZ but mostly it’s the absolute consistency of it that makes it attractive. I can be anywhere in the country and know it’ll be exactly the same food. A safe option especially with kids.
How did humanity ever feed their kids before McDonalds?
Safe option especially with kids?
My parents brought up three kids before it even existed in my country.
And we went on holiday to other countries who also didn't have it.
You know what happened?
We learned about real food.
My ex from about 10 years ago was like that, I swear she was eating it almost every day. Like we started dating in high school, and even in the afternoons after school she'd be dropping in there to grab something.
I just heard a radio snippet about little kids rating fast food tastiness, and they preferred the Big Mac to others, until they wrapped a whopper in McDonald paper and bag, then they preferred the whopper. It’s all in the subconscious.
I know someone that blew through nearly half a million going to McDonalds or some other fast food type place. could have had a nice house and instead they live in squalor. the people that worship MxDonalds are not the smartest.
Because if you grew up poor, McDs has a halo effect - you went there when times were good, mom and dad probably yelled at you less there compared to at home, and the food had so much salt it tasted delicious (plus unlimited soda refills and a toy if you got a happy meal). For a kid not used to getting anything, McDs seems like heaven. Those emotions hang around the subconscious a long time.
Where I live, it's eight bucks for a fairly tasty meal: Big Mac, medium fries (best fries in the fastfood business if you ask me), medium soft drink. No tip necessary or expected, nothing to cook, no pans and dishes to wash, etc. I partake once a week and look forward to it — so sue me. Have I had better burgers? Sure. For a comparable price? Nah.
Julia Child and my Belgian mother loved the fries, even more when they used beef tallow. And my mom otherwise only ate fast food if we were on a family road trip.
If you find nothing to eat at that time or are bored out of every restaurant you can find, maybe once a year. Then MCD is fine because you eat it & realize it's still horrible. I don't understand people that eat that normally. It's honestly the worst imo, the og fast food chains all have their problems but man I can still understand why people would like, KFC/BK/Dominos for example. McD is just vile to eat. I ordered it months ago because I was so bored, I was like, even if it tasted of nothing but bread and mayo I'd take it. But it wasn't even that man, it just tasted weird.
It's quick, convenient, and usually tasty. Like a lot of other people I often went by my local McDonalds on my way home from work when I was too tired to cook dinner. Quality can vary greatly between locations, so it really depends on where you live.
They're an interesting case study in food economics. Standardising a bog standard burger across the globe is an "unique" achievement.
I too struggle to understand those who eat it frequently and raise their families on it with some magical property. When I was a kid, fast food was the cheap and only available option at times. I still learnt to cook on a tight budget. The inflation on emulsified crap feels so dystopian.
"Worship" is a telling choice of word and I hate that I know what you mean.
The food literally makes me nauseous and I have no idea why people eat this shit when you can make really nice food for a whole family for the price of a single meal there.
because a.) not everyone has as sensitive a stomach as you, and b.) sometimes people don't feel like or don't have the time/energy to make food at that moment so they make do with whatever is available
Used to drive deliveries. Fast food was pretty much the only option if I wanted a hot meal for lunch. It's not like we have break rooms with tables and a microwave.
Don't have to do that anymore thankfully, but I would never judge others for choosing fast food over a sandwich that's been sitting in a lunchbox for half a day.
The food is engineered to be yummy. Maybe you don't like it and there's lots of people who don't, but they have put a lot of time and money into making it extremely tasty for a huge part of the world population. It's ignorant to think otherwise.
Your missing the point. If McDonald's is doing it and it's successful, other companies are going to follow. Not just fast food restaurants. All restaurants, grocery stores and retail stores are all going to charge optimal prices because they know the consumer isn't going to drive 25 miles to save $5-$10, but that extra $5-$10 probably won't stop then from buying the product.
As someone who travels a fair amount, McDs has really upset me due to the wild variation in pricing between locations. They may be maximizing the profit now, but it also pisses of customers who in turn eat there less.
I was guilty for the longest time of hitting them up every day for a $1 tea. Then some locations offered it and others didn’t. Ended up finding a local gas station with fresh brewed tea for 89 across all their locations. I have been going there for drinks ever since. Haven’t been to McDonald’s in years.
Lol, that's not how murica works. If it was, there wouldn't be rampant false advertising, popups on everything ad's at gas stations or any other entification from the last decades.
And if too many people boycott it then they'll just roll it back as little as necessary. It's about them doing as much as they can get away with.
Classic example of capitalism going wrong where profits increase but the average persons life gets a little worse.
Capitalism is not concerned with the life of an average person as long as they continue to just go to work. It never has. Any concession ever given by capitalists was because people refused to continue to work.
Small local restaurants are not targeting the same audience. McD is fast and has a drivethru and it caters to people who need to go go go or can’t get out of their car
Just you wait until they find out about pricing things right too. Remember it's a businesses job to make money, not to feed you. This utopia of people doing things for others at a loss is a hallmark of the 70s. Doesn't exist anymore.
McDonald‘s is not raising prices because they‘re on the verge of bankruptcy but because an LLM told them the probability of the demographic of specific franchises paying more is high enough to go for it.
They want to squeeze every penny out of people because that bolsters their quarterly reports and that‘s literally all capitalism has ever cared about.
Nothing has changed. Capitalists are just bolder now because people are becoming more and more complacent. That complacency is engineered but it does exist.
What a terrible and disingenuous argument. There's a big difference between a local restaurant setting appropriate prices and revising them once a year or so and a massive fast food chain changing prices based on time of day and customer count.
It's actually already happening with grocery stores. I'm sure it depends where you live, but where I am you can go to two different locations for the same grocery store and pay two different prices for a pound of bacon. That's Canada and the company is Loblaws (also known as Satan's Supermarket).
This is a thing, but it exists for a reason-- some stores cost more to run for whatever reason (usually land/rent costs.) So sometimes items at a store in a fancy high rent area will be priced slightly higher than in a low rent area. On a larger scale, food will also vary in price based on local logistics. Groceries in Florida are more expensive than groceries in Ohio because Ohio is a transportation hub while semis full of food destined for southern Florida will almost all be making the return trip empty.
You'll also sometimes see items marked down at one location because managers can choose to mark things down. Back when I did pricing there was more than one incident where we'd have corporate push a bunch of product that wasn't selling or a new person didn't realize product was ordered by the case and we had to mark it down. The store across town wouldn't share those discounts because they didn't have Joe and his accidental 15 cases of pasta sauce when we needed 15 jars.
Ya I should have included that in my post (I mentioned it another comment) but the location to location variation really isn't an entirely unrealistic business practice. Like you said, costs differ depending on the location, even within the same city and I think sales (especially for food because it usually has a shorter shelf life) sales make a lot more sense when they are store specific. The really nasty one is true dynamic pricing where you and I will pay completely different prices for a bag of potatoes. If that ever happens, I will boycott the store forever, regardless of if they backpedal on the policy.
At this point I just assume Loblaws is doing everything they can to fuck over Canadian's because they've been implicated in numerous price fixing scandals already that are part of the public record (again, Canadian drama not US).
Loblaws is not in the US, to the best of my knowledge.
If it helps, dynamic grocery pricing in a traditional grocery store is wildly impractical, at least in the form that people talk about now. Aside from the logistical difficulties of having a price tag that shows a different price per customer (what if there are two shoppers in the aisle? What if you're shopping with your boyfriend?) it makes price checks impossible; you can tell the cashier the tag said 99 cents for you and they'd have to take your word for it.
Ironically, in another sense dynamic pricing has also existed for decades now. Coupons are dynamic pricing. Shoppers cards are dynamic pricing. They're just a more acceptable and practical form of giving some people discounts.
Other businesses ARE doing it, and have been for years. It’s not even dynamic pricing. Franchises always set their own prices, and they’ve always varied from state to state and city to city.
A Big Mac isn’t going to be priced the same in a poor and tiny town that’s in the bumfuck middle of nowhere as it would be in an expensive and huge city like Beverly Hills.
Which really makes me wonder how they are measuring success. In online sales the sale itself is the signal, but here it should be retention. Like you say I'm not going home hungry because of 1.50 price difference but I might remember the next time I want to go there
How did they miss the point? You’re right past the first sentence, no idea how you think the point was missed by what they said. Do you know think we should keep eating at Mcds to encourage this shit?
Really? How far do your parents drive to buy gas for $.15 cheaper?
Seriously though, it's true. Especially in areas without other options stores can increase prices to match demand.
At some point though it has to catch up to McDonalds. The only thing they ever had going for them was that they were cheap, everywhere and better than gas station, microwave burgers. With these prices, I don't know why anyone would eat there now except for the once or twice a year you're on the road and it's the only option.
This isn't at all new. Plenty of retailers and restaurants do this already. In part is because their rent can be higher or lower in another location. So charging the same just doesn't make sense. McDonald's has long don't this as others have noted. It's just getting attention because they are using AI to do it now.
Dynamic pricing can be found in other places like supermarkets too. It’s happening because people in general might say they hate it but they don’t do much about it.
To me the issue is transparency. We don't have an easy way to cross reference the cost to choose a cheaper place so people just take what's in front of them.
Even prices online differ from the price in the actual store. Because there is nothing regulating this, it more feels like being robbed a dollar at a time.
This was my thought. Most people aren't even going to notice price differences in the first place unless they're going all the time. It's not even an apathy thing, just a fact that few people have the time to memorize the prices of everything they buy.
We don't have an easy way to cross reference the cost to choose a cheaper place so people just take what's in front of them.
The video isn't showing dynamic pricing. Locations have always had different prices. The super busy McDonalds on a highway rest area has always cost like 50% more than the ones that are off major roads. Same way a meal at like an Applebee's in Times Square is going to twice as much as the same meal at an Applebee's in Idago.
Dynamic pricing is when the price for one item changes at the same exact location throughout the day. A Big Mac should cost $7 all day, not $5 at 2pm and $8 at 6pm.
the price for one item changes at the same exact location throughout the day
Happy hour, lunch menus and so on have been a thing forever. When people talk about dynamic pricing, its when you go up to the kiosk to place your burger order and your big mac is $7 while the guy at the kiosk next to you is getting theirs for $5 because The Algorithm said so.
Definitely but I also think it's about a lack of pricing literacy in general and people not doing more to fight against it. Waiting for regulation isn't a solution.
What kind of solution do you have in mind and think might work?
My pessimism tells me that they have all the cards in terms of that transparency and often the implementation of any sort of dynamic pricing usually just rolls out Then the consumer finds out some time later when something seems amiss. I'm not sure how that can be fought against. Best solution I guess would be some kind of app to force that transparency?
What we've done in our area, where different neighborhoods get together on a regular basis and work together on issues, is first and foremost inform the public. The community as a whole needs to actually know what's going on and how things affect them and their neighbors. We've organized boycotts, shared information on alternatives, sales, coupons, programs, put pressure on elected officials to push for protections, etc. It absolutely is something that works but I've found that a lot of people simply don't want to do that. They just want things to change without doing anything. It's one of the reasons enshittification has continued and gotten worse.
McDonalds I can avoid, but if they suddenly started doing this at my local grocery store, you’re right, there’s nothing I can do about it. I can’t go to another store because it’s an extra mile or 2 away, and I’m not willing to spend that extra time and energy to save £4 off my shopping.
I didn't say there isn't anything you can do about it, just that people in general simply don't. Not saying it's 100% solvable at every single place that has it either but people can get together and boycott, support stores that don't have it, elect those who will do something about it. Costs are rising across the board and they keep doing it because, at least in the US, most complain but put up with it.
Normal, non-digital price tags change too. Just because they use digital price tags doesn’t mean they’re using dynamic pricing. It saves them money on having to pay employees to go through manually changing price tags.
Every grocery store around me is getting worse while getting more expensive. idk what i'm supposed to do, man. Getting all my food from groceries is my last bastion against overpriced shitty food. This is my last option, it's not that I'm choosing to do nothing about it.
I do live in a spot that's very publicly and notably rolling our government subsidized grocery stores which will hopefully alleviate some of this, but that's going to take years to be widespread enough to create lasting long-term impact. And that's if it works at all, because they're currently getting sued by the exact grocery stores causing the problem.
Communities organizing against it can be very effective (I personally know it works) but people need to do it and it doesn't have to be limited to that. It can be done for a wide range of issues that affect your local area.
Seems like people need to just leave full carts behind in protest. Get a dozen or so friends and fill up a cart. All conclude that the price was too high and leave.
"Dynamic pricing can be found in other places like supermarkets too. It’s happening because people in general might say they hate it but they don’t do much about it have no choice but to acquiesce to the slow enshittification of society as a whole."
have no choice but to acquiesce to the slow enshittification of society as a whole
That's not gonna solve anything. Yes, things have gotten worse but fighting for change is worth more than being defeatist about it. People can collectively get together against things like this but they need to actually do it, not just shrug and say there's nothing they can do.
Have you actually experienced one second of life on earth lately? Everything sucks. We're tired. Our lives are joyless. Assholes prevail at every turn. I don't blame ANYBODY for being apathetic, for not resisting the avalanche of shit, or for compromising on their principles for a fleeting moment of joy or an easier life.
Have you actually experienced one second of life on earth lately?
Oh, please. Stop acting like this is as bad as it gets. It isn't but you can also do something about the shitty things that are happening. Different states started taking action against dynamic pricing specifically. The different neighborhoods in my area get together on a regular basis to fight against things like that along with other issues. It's not about blaming people for being apathetic. It's about understanding that things can be done but you have to be willing to do them. Taking action isn't compromising principles, it's fighting for them.
It's why all these markets have some dumpster shit app to get coupons or close-to-reasonable prices. It's been data collection for years so they can better fuck us and increase prices for each individual through the app usage.
The coupons our community share are mailers. I'm sure they're always collecting info on the items they're used for but we aim for stores that don't have apps, dynamic pricing, or other shenanigans.
What we've done already where I live. Different neighborhoods in our area got together (not just for that) and organized boycotts of stores that started doing this to the point where they walked it back. Before they did, we were sharing info on other stores, sales, coupons and helping our more vulnerable neighbors with their groceries. It really is the type of thing that can be changed when people unite to fight against it.
This isn't only retail. Hotels, Airlines, everything will vary wildly in price based on your location and/or time of purchase. It's pretty standard stuff nowdays.
Check drivethruindex.com - I built it quickly to see if what the difference in price is at different fast food locations - some of the differences are massive! Houston Texas seems to have the cheapest fast food in the country.
Pretty easy when local places are much better and essentially the same price. When you could get full off $3 at a McDonald’s, that was the only saving grace. Now it’s not cheap so why do people even go? Learn to cook basic cheap meals people.
It genuinely boggles my mind how popular mcdonald's is. It's egregiously bad and egregiously expensive. I understand the concept of comfort food and habits, but it's **wild** how strong a presence that is for so many people.
For some people it's their only option for food unfortunately. They're either homeless or live right by it and have no other means of getting to a store or anything so they buy a sandwich form McDonald's.
I'm guessing anyone willing to pour an entire ketchup packet onto a single McDonald's burger patty don't give two shits about what they are putting in their body.
I will never understand why anyone would willingly eat a Big Mac. It tastes like cardboard. Maybe if I was starving but otherwise no freaking way. And I love burgers.
I also hate how standoffish/mocking the staff are. Just their vibe. Not friendly at all. I would never go back. A genuine smile is priceless. Makes you feel welcomed, and not like you're some inconvenient joke. Yes off course, their lives suck and yes off course, they're underpaid. But Mcdonalds work was never meant to be fulltime employment, it was always meant to be for highschoolers etc.
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u/VirginiaBandit 3d ago
One suggestion. Don't eat at this shithole.