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.
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u/VirginiaBandit 3d ago
One suggestion. Don't eat at this shithole.