The real dystopia is that people are talking about fast food at all. It’s garbage food. Realisticly it’s always been the worst and often most expensive choice.
That’s what I don’t get. Do people actually eat this garbage still? It’s literally toxic trash that costs twice as much as a home cooked meal and tastes like shit. Why???
Because I’m at work/on the road and don’t have a stocked kitchen available?
You can get a hot rotisserie chicken and a freshly made garden salad at most grocery stores and it’ll be cheaper than a McDonald’s combo meal. Way healthier too!
It’s garbage food.
It’s quick, convenient, and explicitly designed to rub all the right parts of your palette. Besides, the worst part of the fast food menu is the soda and fries. The rest of the meal is marginal.
Realisticly it’s always been the worst and often most expensive choice.
Its consistently worse than home cooking. But not everyone has the luxury of a functional kitchen or a stocked fridge or the time to prepare the meal. And as to “most expensive”… hardly. I remember getting Chipotle on campus, when a burrito was $8 and came in at around 1000 calories. Very hard to name another restaurant that offered that kind of value, speed, and convenience.
A lot of what fast food restaurants are banking on today is this over-reliance on their convenience making them an inelastic good. No more home economics classes, teaching young people how to cook. Lots of gig work means people are always on the road. Lots of people living alone. Lots of shitty apartments where major appliances simply don’t work.
You’re stuck, dude. Now give me $15 for a sandwich.
Its consistently worse than home cooking. But not everyone has the luxury of a functional kitchen or a stocked fridge or the time to prepare the meal.
You’re not wrong here. It’s not good food, but it’s easy and touches the makes-me-crave-it neurons, it’s often available in food deserts (where it’s legitimately difficult to really stock a kitchen) and sometimes it’s only cheap in the context of whether or not you have that home infra and time to use it or not.
I just use my privilege (I have a pretty functional kitchen and the ability to stock it mightily) to not fund a business model that looks to me like it’s hostile to labor (yeah you, McDonalds and most of the rest), tends to give money to politics I can’t abide (looking at you, chick-fil-a), and I really prefer to patronize businesses whose employees don’t have the energy of beaten animals. I get that it’s my privilege to do that, but being someone with that to work with, using it appropriately seems the right thing to do.
I’m pretty sure the McDonald’s one is false, which makes me think all of the others are too. This is a bad faith argument. I’m assuming this is going around TikTok and that’s why so many braindead people keep repeating it
Not saying it’s right, but the spacing makes the drastic changes in 19-21 less obvious by spreading them across a wider area. Same with 21-24, just less so.
A consistently spaced graph would probably be more drastic looking.
I have found the article here: https://financebuzz.com/fast-food-prices-vs-inflation
At work so I can’t read it atm, but I’m interested to hear your conclusion later
I found this article yesterday, from none other than Fox (who I would think would lean into this narrative): https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/mcdonalds-pushes-back-hefty-price-hikes-including-18-big-mac-meal
According to the McDonald’s CEO, the $18 Big Mac (which is where this number comes from) was 1 location, and the average price of a Big Mac is up 21% since 2019 (less than inflation). So I think all of these numbers in your article are cherry picked or just made up
I’m definitely weary of posts like this with no data backup. Also what is “actual inflation”? Wouldn’t that be like average inflation across all goods? Doesn’t inflation affect certain markets differently?
10 years, double the prices? ain’t that far off.
at our mcd, at least that much for many, if not most, things on their menu. everything i (used to) buy there, anyway. and way more than that for the former ‘dollar menu’ items. beverages the least affected, although it’s now probably double, too (the large cup shrunk on top of the ~ 90% increase since then).
If anything this tells me that that inflation number is bullshit.
What’s bullshit are the cherry-picked numbers on the chart and the jumpy x-axis.
Edit: Article here quotes McDonalds as stating the Big Mac is up 21% since 2019. Sources elsewhere say the sandwich price is actually down since both 2014 and 2019, so who knows. If anything, I would expect Subway to have a higher point on the graph than it does.
Damn food trucks took our jobs.
Fun fact! This chart is just strait up wrong. McDonalds prices are up around 20% compared to wages that are up 28%.