Many people believe it’s an astounding $18 after a post on X of McDonald’s menu prices at a rest stop in Connecticut went viral and made national headlines. (Narrator voice: It’s not.)

Now, almost a year after the post, a top McDonald’s executive wants to set the record straight. In a recent letter, Joe Erlinger, president of McDonald’s USA, said $18 for a Big Mac combo was the “exception” and not the norm across all 13,700 restaurants in the country.

The average price of a Big Mac in the US was $4.39 in 2019,” Erlinger said in his recent letter. “Despite a global pandemic and historic rises in supply chain costs, wages and other inflationary pressures in the years that followed, the average cost is now $5.29. That’s an increase of 21% (not 100%),” he added.

  • PenguinMage@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Until these assholes stop taking in record profits each year & their ceos get more money than some countries generate they can fuck off on saying wages are a problem. The working poor deserve every penny they can get.

    • joekar1990@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Agree. None of these CEOs have any groundbreaking ideas either. It’s all the same strategies for short term profits rather than longer sustainable growth.

    • ArbiterXero@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      That’s just it, as a business owner, some years may be good, and some years may be bad.

      So some years your profit should be less.

      That doesn’t mean you’re going under. Less profit is still profit. That means everyone (including yourself) has been paid and you have money left over.

      But because CEOs are paid mostly in stock, the profits have to rise every year, for no necessary reason besides “I like money”

      And eventually that’ll break, and it’ll happen all at once.

    • harrys_balzac@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 months ago

      Yes. There should probably be some sort of disclaimer about how much Rotten Rons paid for this incredibly in-depth reporting.

  • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    consumers were willing to pay more as their paychecks rose and they were sitting on loads of savings accumulated during the pandemic.

    Wait, who got more money dumping into their savings?

  • Chainweasel@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    I would admit I used to get McDonald’s quite a bit for lunch because it was pretty cheap. But, where I live a Big Mac meal is on average about $16 right now and I can get a burrito bowl from Chipotle with a drink for $13.
    I’m not saying Chipotle is high quality food but I don’t think anyone’s going to argue it’s not better quality than McDonald’s, so why on earth would I pay more for McDonald’s?
    They overreached on their price gouging and now they’re just trying to backpedal because they’re losing money.

  • inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Went on a trip recently and we always stop by a McDonald’s for breakfast and holy crap, a freaking hash brown was almost three bucks.

    I get having to pay workers more but that’s just some bullshit price gouging there because there’s no way in hell what workers are still there are getting paid that much better in order to justify a the dollar hash brown.

    • skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de
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      5 months ago

      They also have less workers per store now as they employ tablets for ordering, I believe, and some cooking processes have been simplified or removed.

  • Stopthatgirl7@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    They gauged a little too much and boasted about record profits a little too loudly, and now have to deal with backlash. Too bad, so sad. 🙄

    • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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      5 months ago

      Ya can get away with a lot of shit but mess with peoples food and you will end up lashed to a cross. Ya dont fuck with the hierarchy of needs.

        • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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          5 months ago

          My point is people get pissed when you mess with available food options, its the principle of the matter. Since food is so important any amount of fucking with food will anger folks due to instinctual reinforcement.

            • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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              5 months ago

              You are focusing way too much on the fact that its McDonald’s. The point im making is largely seperate from the quality of said food, and is moreso focused on the fact that people dont generally like being cut off from different sources of food. We all catalog that shit either actively or passively, but if youre hungry and nothing else is available ya aint gonna care about quality.

              Also I have eaten the fucking egg MRE, McDonald’s is certainly closer to food than that abomination.

              • Perfide@reddthat.com
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                5 months ago

                Also I have eaten the fucking egg MRE, McDonald’s is certainly closer to food than that abomination.

                Fucking this. I once went on a week long “survivalist” camping trip. Your options for dinner were catching something yourself, or an MRE. Between the 5 of us that went, we caught exactly one rabbit the whole week.

                We got a mountain of McDoubles(this was back when they were $1) on the way home and it was heavenly in comparison to that shite.

                • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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                  5 months ago

                  Oh you dont know the half of it. The egg MRE is one of the ones taken out of military rotation cause of how bad it is, for context Steve1989MRE gagged while eating one this is a man who ate Boar war proto ration and civil war hard tack.

                  I would rather eat a live rat than the egg MRE, no wonder the surplus place I got it from had a fucken warning on it and the dude at the counter made sure I wanted it three times.

        • maynarkh@feddit.nl
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          5 months ago

          Some people have it as their only choice due to living in a food desert. Imagine how fucked up is that.

      • ramble81@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        But a $15 minimum wage will cause prices to skyrocket! …. Prices have skyrocketed, wages remain stagnant.

        • Mostly_Gristle@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          It’s not that we can’t afford to pay you $15 an hour, or even $30 an hour, but if we did that then we couldn’t give that money to the shareholders. You see, they’ve purchased a certificate which entitles them to the wealth created by your labor. We assure you we can imagine it must be somewhat uncomfortable to live in constant grinding poverty, but you can understand how our hands are tied here. They have a certificate. What are we supposed to do, ask a rich person to be a teeny tiny bit less rich? That’s just crazy talk.

          • ArbiterXero@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            We promised those shareholders that we’d pay you as little as we can…… you wouldn’t want to make us liars, would you?

      • The Snark Urge@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        I can make a hamburger and fries in like ten minutes active cooking time for £3, and it’ll have proper beef and be perfect.

        What is even happening at Burger King?

        • BruceTwarzen@lemm.ee
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          5 months ago

          That’s crazy, i can’t comprehend. Americans told me that junk food is cheaper than actual food, so obviously i believe that.

  • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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    5 months ago

    For me, the most egregious example was huggies diapers increasing prices while production costs went down.