Kevin Roberts remembers when he could get a bacon cheeseburger, fries and a drink from Five Guys for $10. But that was years ago. When the Virginia high school teacher recently visited the fast-food chain, the food alone without a beverage cost double that amount.
Roberts, 38, now only gets fast food “as a rare treat,” he told CBS MoneyWatch. “Nothing has made me cook at home more than fast-food prices.”
Roberts is hardly alone. Many consumers are expressing frustration at the surge in fast-food prices, which are starting to scare off budget-conscious customers.
A January poll by consulting firm Revenue Management Solutions found that about 25% of people who make under $50,000 were cutting back on fast food, pointing to cost as a concern.
I went through the burger king drive through a few weeks ago and got just a crispy chicken sangwich and the girl said €7.45 and I couldn’t fucking believe it. I kept the receipt to show my wife. I also made sure we got a loaf of bread and some lunch meat to make sandwiches for the last few weeks. Honestly fuck those people
tHe MaRkEt WiLl ReGuLaTe ItSelF! Okay sure, for the most profit without regard for the consumer. Corporations need a heavy hand.
Once the cost was almost as much as a sit-down Restaurant. I just switched to them. Haven’t been to a fast food place in 2 to 3 years
If fast food prices get unaffordable, maybe people will eat healthier in the future. I cannot see a downside to this, at least not long term.
healthy food isnt much cheaper. at least in my experience
“Isn’t much cheaper” is still way cheaper than fast food. Just changing your diet to something with less sugar, less fat, less saturated fat, less salt and a more balanced amount of carbohydrates and proteins is going to do wonders in bare months. Even if you keep your calorie intake a constant (which, with healthy food, it means you’re gonna eat a fuck ton more).
Healthy food is cheaper not for the price itself, but for the net long term benefit. Less chances of diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, while improved vitality, energy and fitness levels.
Should healthy food be cheaper? Yes, it definitely should. Should the estate subsidize or cut taxes on raw food and basic items? Hell yeah it should. Nonetheless, while we still fight and ask for that, eating healthy at home is still cheaper than buying in unhealthy fast food chains.
What kind of food? Store bought TV meals or raw ingredients for home cooking?
Unfortunately, the cost of healthier foods has gone up at the same pace. Instead people end up eating less or giving up other necessities like downsizing their housing or moving in with parents.
Raw ingredients are still affordable. If you can cook, you are easily able to live on a healthy diet for small money.
Source: I learned to cook because we were poor.
Not really. An ever shrinking head of iceberg lettuce is about $2.50. A pound of the lowest grade ground beef is about $8. Bag of store brand buns is $2. A beefsteak tomato is $1.50. Pack of store brand American Cheeses is $4.50. Add in the other condiments that are harder to break down the price of, electricity/gas cost for cooking, water for cleaning, etc., and the cost for the cheapest, crappiest version of 4 quarter lb burgers is not much different than the $8 times 4 that McDonald’s is charging and I guarantee the quality is lower (lower ratio of meat:fat in the burger, buns with more sugar and preservatives and less fresh, etc.) And this is just the consumables, not the having a kitchen to do this in, the pans, utensils, etc. Unhoused people don’t have those things.
It used to be that because McDonald’s, etc., got their stuff in bulk and used lower quality ingredients and low paid employees, they offered these products for very low profit because of high volume. Now the cost including labor, supplies, etc., is less than half of what they charge. So their profit margins are huge if they have the same number of customers. But their customer base is going to dwindle, and so the profit margins will shrink, but that’s not a concern to corporations that only focus on today’s stock prices and don’t care about tomorrow.
If your replica the the mistakes of fast food, you won’t get far. Have you tried other food options that are not burgers? Because burgers are a perfect example of expensive, but not really good food.
I was just giving an example. Sure if you avoid fresh produce, eggs, milk, or meats you might be able to make some cheap meals. But those things right now are very expensive. Beans are still pretty affordable for the nutrition.
Eggs and milk are still OK, pricewise, even if the prices have gone up. When it comes to meat, chicken is cheaper than beef, so there is no need to rely on beans if you don’t like it.
The point is that a burger is basically a very bad food item that happens to be expensive, too. Not the best thing to eat in the first place, and from a fast food place even more so.
Eggs are around $6/dozen for the cheapest right now but have been as high as $14/dozen in the last year due to the shortages from processing company consolidation. And milk right now is $6/gallon. Plus with borderline cholesterol I avoid cow’s milk. If a dozen eggs costs an hour’s labor, that’s not very affordable. Especially when rent costs more than most people make in a month. My partner lives with 3 roommates and only makes around $20/hr. Food has to be quite cheap.
Nothing has made me cook at home more than fast food prices.
I mean… the reason isn’t good, but the outcome is. Maybe this’ll actually make a dent in the obesity epidemic, which fast food exacerbates immensely.
Note that “cook at home” is likely to mean “toss box of pre-cooked factory food featuring mechanically separated ‘meat’ and enough junk to keep it shelf stable for months into microwave or air fryer to reheat”, which is unlikely to be any better, and in fact may likely be even worse (going harder core on some of the processing to last months in a customer pantry).
Yeah, that’s a really good point. It’s kinda horrifying what poor people are forced to consume in this country. The crap we sell at the bottom tiers of food supply is actively deleterious to your health. It’s awful.
Honestly, not just poor people. People with money also happily slurp up much of the unhealthy food.
If you have been eating fast food for anything other than a treat, something is wrong anyways.
It’s never really been cheap, and it certainly has never been good for you.
Weird that everyone is suddenly talking about it now.
And 5 guys? Lol it’s always been way over priced.
It was most certainly cheap. Remember the dollar menu? You could get a McDonald’s cheeseburger and fries and drink for about $3 plus tax.
Post said 5 guys has been over priced, not all fast food and not McDs. And that’s right, 5 guys I always found to be… “ok” but dreaded when the work guy would select 5 guys as “the lunch place” on his turn. Always about to spend a lot of money for a burger when I don’t even feel like a burger that day.
Five guys is a terrible example, they’ve always been crazy, but even five years ago BK, McDonald’s, Wendy’s had dollar menus with burgers and other substantial food items that poor people could access.
Those prices are suddenly firmly gone, and it happened earlier then and far outpaced even the rampant inflation in the US.
I agree that people shouldn’t be eating that s***** fast food anyway, but a lot of low-income people saw those dollar menus and cheap fast food as lifelines, and within a few years the cheapest items have arbitrarily quadrupled Quinton toppled in price.
There is zero practical reason aside from profit that french fries cost more than they did 5 years ago. Potatoes are just about the easiest thing to grow and there have been no diseases or mitigating circumstances in the past 5 years that explain why someone living on a couple dollars a day can no longer buy a hash brown for a dollar.
You are framing this as an access issue rather than one of predation.
Fast food chains don’t make a cheap menu to help poor people experience their food, they do it to milk every bit of money from a populace.
Don’t expect social justice from corporate entities.
I specifically said this is a profit driven problem.
You’re swimming through self-righteous aggression to vehementally agree with me.
That’s a bit harsh. No aggression intended, or apparent.
Are you OK?
I’m good, I dislike half-baked assumptions and lazy springboarding:
“You are framing this as an access issue rather than one of predation”
I specifically say that the problem is profit-driven; in no way is my comment framed as an access issue.
“Fast food chains don’t make a cheap menu to help poor people experience their food, they do it to milk every bit of money from a populace.”
Nobody said that fast food chains are trying to help people; I noted that the problem of increased fast food prices can only be attributed to corporate greed.
“Don’t expect social justice from corporate entities.”
No comment here expects or advocates for social justice from corporate entities. It is a fact that many fast food companies very recently used to have substantial dollar menus and no longer have dollar menus.
Your comment is immaterial as a reply and reads as populist posturing at the expense and disregard of the comment you’re responding to.
If you agree? Fine. If you disagree? Fine.
Don’t agree with what I’m saying by pretending I said something I didn’t to drum up false controversy.
Im in Canada and i was telling my daughter that when I was her age, I could walk into McDonald’s with $5 and get a big Mac meal and a nickel in change. Now it’s like $17+ for the same thing. Probably lower quality too.
Yeah, and my parents would tell you it hasn’t been worth going to since it got to by more than a $1 for a whole bag of burgers (ten to be exact).
We have this local market with an excellent hot food and submarine bar in my work neighbourhood, and it’s the only place I ever go. Not only is it super inexpensive, the people who own it won the lottery some years ago and just don’t charge you tax. The price says 6 dollars, it’s 6 dollars. You buy a few things, she rounds down the price to 10 bucks at the register. The place is always packed with those in the know, and they must make a ton of money even doing it this way. Explore your local hole in the wall places and support local and eat better if you are able. It’s worth the effort and time rather than giving McDonald’s more money.
We also have a local dumpling place where I get a huge box of veggie dumplings for 8 bucks. It’s just a little nothing of a storefront. It’s fantastic.
This is HORRIBLE! If we DON’T give these places TAXPAYER BAILOUTS then we will be FORCED to eat at the cheaper LOCAL PLACES!
-Small Business Loving Republicans
My behavior has changed completely. Stay in and make stuff from scratch with my friends instead of going out
A big Mac is like 11 bucks right now. The fuk.
Businesses will charge as much as they can get away with.
If they CAN charge, they WILL charge, and as long as you keep buying, they’ll keep gouging.
I hate to say it but maybe we could all afford to eat a little less often. We have an obesity epidemic. This “bliss point” hyper palatable processed garbage is killing us. If we stopped buying it, and learned to just fucking live with being hungry every so often, we wouldn’t be dying of heart failure as much.
When I’m feeling wildly self-destructive, and my impulse control drops to zero, and I happen to be hungry, I might grab something from McDonalds, and I’m always shocked at how many other people are there. A lot of you are trapped so deep in corporate propaganda I don’t think there’s hope of escape for you.
Like, one guy lists how to make a burger with groceries because he can’t imagine anything else. And other folks are like: this is how poor people eat. Some else is like: Rice-a-Roni and hot dogs are the cheapest thing i could find; as if you don’t know what price per pound is. When I was so poor I couldn’t afford enough calories to maintain weight, I ate plain rice that I boiled and threw cheapest cheese on top; apples and frozen broccoli too. Only time I had a good BMI, ironically.
Some big plurality of our population is hypnotized & drugged to be thinking fast food is ok. What is wrong with so many people? Don’t let it end like this, please. Assume you are a brainwashed pig on a work treadmill of death. How are you going to get off of it? Like that’s the start of your real-life puzzle adventure video game. Now go! You have just pressed “Start”.
The CEO and now chairman of McDonald’s was paid $19.2 million last year in salary, bonuses and stock, according to federal securities filings.
He was paid a base salary of $1.4 million
Being friendly and just going on his base salary and not all the other piles of money tossed his way, in plebe terms, he makes $673/hour.
Overdramatic headlines to try to make this more exotic and mysterious than the reality - YOU GREEDY FUCKS HAVE INTENTIONALLY TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF EVERYONE SINCE THE PANDEMIC STARTED. It was never acceptable and you finally pushed fast enough to even upset the wealthy and those who spend outside their means.
You are all broken humans. You chase endless growth without purpose, you are a disease.
In 2024, pointing out that costs have been down for a couple years now and increased pricing is just greed makes you a dirty communist, even to liberals.
They can fly their little pride flag but it turns out there’s only one class they’ll REALLY go to bat for and its the owner class.
News headlines gonna be like “millenials are bankrupting an American institution, the fast food industry”
They need to make up their mind whether they want us on this or the avocado toast
Avocado toast is probably cheaper at this point
Actually I still can get avocados for a dollar a piece and you only use half for some toast plus a single slice of bread and an egg and a some hot sauce…
I think avocado toast literally is the cheaper option.
But it’s really just older people seeing constant access to specialty foods that were rarer and thinking if we are burning the planet down to have produce whenever we want it then it must be better than it was back when you couldn’t.
Mmm, I may need to have that for dinner tonight!
Tbf I think the avocado toast outrage was over people paying inflated prices at a restaurant for something so easy and cheap to make at home, not the dish itself or any of its ingredients ever being a luxury.
