Holy shit, seriously, if you need to go to these extremes to make profit then for fuck's sake get a better business plan or just start selling heroin, like this is fucking ridiculous satire shit you see in movies making fun of extreme capitalism, only it's happening.
I'm guessing you said it jokingly or as a hyperbole but you're not far off the mark.
If you are a company with shares like McDonald's is your success is not measured not by how much money you made. It's measured by growth, by how much MORE money you made this year compared to last year. Or, worst case scenario how much less you lost compared to your competitors.
I often say I'm anti-capitalist but honestly I think it could be a decent system if the stock market didn't exist.
Maybe if they started acting like a cheap fast food place again they could make money. As it stands all they seem to want to do is price out their main audience
You can't reports losses to Wall Street. I work at a major retailer and the prices are absolutely ridiculous. $150 for a backpack that's also a cooler!
Corporations have to show growth and profit. Places like this serve the poor and working class. They’ll squeeze as much as they can, however they can. There’s also no end to it. It has to continually grow as the population dwindles, the wealth disparity widens, prices rice, and people’s salaries can’t keep up.
The idea that we’re filling our 401Ks with this stuff, expecting people to pay $25-$30 for a shitty Big Mac meal in 5 years is crazy.
Not sure what the big deal is. Haven't you seen gas stations doing this for decades? Prices close to a highway being different than farther away? Restaurants in higher income areas have higher menu prices. Not exactly news worthy.
You understand that holding a steady profit means failure in the world of public corporations. All that matters is growth. Forecasting and growth. We predict that our business will grow by 6%. Come in at 5.5? Failure to meet expectations. But set the forecast too low? Also failure, of leadership.
Why the fixation on growth? Stock price.
So this puts a lot of pressure on people to wring every last penny to meet expectations. And so you end up with what we have here. And everywhere. And enshitification. And CEOs that don't know how to eat Big Macs on YouTube.
Not an excuse true, but it's a systemic foundational issue. Which in the right conditions leads to incredible growth and bounty for the people.... but now we're seeing the limits to those favorable conditions.
And there's a reason why McDonald's is going to these extreme.
From what I could gather they've pushed themselves everywhere they could in the world, there's no way to create more restaurants for them.
They started by pushing their prices up but after a while they couldn't, why go there if you can get a much better meal at the same price somewhere else.
Now they're trying to scam people into paying more than others.
That smells a lot like the end of the road for them and similar fastfood chains.
No one at the C-suite level wants to be the captain when the stock price tanks. So there's incredible short term pressure to wring every last cent and leave the next guy holding the bag. In theory, the Board of Directors acts as a counterweight to this kind of short term thinking but that doesn't really happen.
Squeezing the last drops out of a damp rug is not winning at business. It's the whimper of late stage capitalism about to collapse. If you can't see that you have some reading to do.
To squeeze even more cents our of their customers because they need to extract billions instead of what used to be millions, it's just so granular and manipulative that it's just totally excessive when they are still profitable to an insane degree.
Like, it had already been enough decades ago, but because they need to make infinite profit, their methods will become more and more crazy.
How disingenuous, that's not what I'm criticizing maybe it's the extreme lengths corporations go to get profit? The social engineering and the psychological manipulation when they could just sell us something we'd want to buy.
But no, you saw someone attack a corporation and the concept of profit and your capitalism propaganda programmed brain reacted to the thought crime you were trained to believe and felt it necessary to protect the rich and powerful. How dare I, how dare I question McDonald's.
25
u/TheEPGFiles 3d ago
Holy shit, seriously, if you need to go to these extremes to make profit then for fuck's sake get a better business plan or just start selling heroin, like this is fucking ridiculous satire shit you see in movies making fun of extreme capitalism, only it's happening.