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.
If you can eat at a nicer place for the same amount of money, why would you eat at McDonald’s?
Speed, for one. If I’m traveling across the country and I just want to eat and get back on the road, or even if I just need some breakfast before work, it’s a lot faster.
My go to for this stuff now is truck stops. They’ll usually have a fast food restaurant in them but also healthier options for snacks and meals
I would rather spend that money on a local burger joint. Give me a single named joint with a generic paper bag with grease stains on the outside.
Anything where you can get a burger bun that doesn’t taste like it full of sugar is worth it over anything else.
The bread quality in america is the lowest of the low.
Unfortunately, so many local burger joints have a “flagship” burger featuring a Sysco patty, cheese, lettuce, tomato, and onion for $17, sides extra.
I know a Sysco burger when I see one. Normal burgers aren’t chode cylinders; Sysco burgers have goddamn right angles. They taste like they’re about 40% gristle. It’s basically just the “technically beef” parts of dollar store dog food pressed into the vague shape of a burger patty. The paper that separates the frozen turd patties is better, both in terms of flavor and nutrition. Fuck Sysco burgers. If Sysco reads this and doesn’t like what I have to say, they can go fuck themselves until their asshole is as fucked up as a Sysco burger eater’s asshole 93 minutes after their shitty lunch.
I am honored to have inspired content like this!
I feel very lucky to have no idea what you’re talking about, and that scares me
Sysco supplies a lot of restaurants with food, all kinds of places. But they have also optimized and helped with Enshitification by having restaurants mold their menu on the offerings of Sysco.
What ends up happening is every Mexican, Burger, and pretty much everything else that buys from Sysco tastes exactly the same. Mexican food is especially obvious.
I’m not sure this is an enshitification thing. That should have a degree of hostility with users. This is plain ol’ low-quality product (made easy)
I chose to label it that way since all these places that had to make their own food are just making the same, tasteless meals.
I go to a mom and pop Mexican place and it’s the same shitty salsa, chips, and menu options. Same with burgers and so many others. I just need to learn to cook better quick meals.
Bowling alley food. It’s food, but really it’s just there so they can claim they serve food.
Sysco has variety in their products. I just checked and they apparently have 128 different beef patty SKUs: https://shop.sysco.com/app/catalog?q=beef+patty&BUSINESS_CENTER_ID=syy_cust_tax_meatseafood&ITEM_GROUP_ID=syy_cust_tax_meat
Though I’m sure a lot of them are just variations on leanness and package size. Point is, unless you’re going to a specialty place, any restaurant is going to be buying Sysco patties (or at best, Sysco ground beef packs and hand-formed into patties) but the nicer restaurants are going to be using the better choices, and the shitty places are going to be using the cheapest ground beef formed into a cylinder and frozen.
Addicted to the absurdly high amount of sugars and preservatives most likely.
Convenience and familiarity, mostly. If you go to a McDonalds you know exactly what you’ll get and you’ll be able to get it pretty quick.
If you go to a McDonalds you know exactly what you’ll get
A poorly put together “meal” that very likely has been sitting under a heater for a length of time unless you went there when it was busy. And if it was busy, the chance for mistake is high and it’s going to be sloppily put together. What so you can save a few minutes? Most places do take-away… so you call them, place an order, pick it up. No sitting 10-20 minutes in drive-thru. And you got more food, better food, for the exact same price and you probably got it faster on take-out. And dining in… you wait a few minutes… how do you not have a few minutes?
And who actually cares about familiarity? That’s either saying, you go to that one place way to much and your food choices are predictable and boring. Or you’re highly susceptible to advertising. And really, those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.
What is with all this judgment in this thread jfc I don’t even eat fast food anymore (once maybe twice a year if that?) and it is wild how y’all are acting towards people.
At least their username is accurate.
Name one burger joint that doesn’t have exactly what mcds has and more…this comment is laughable.
People eat at McDonald’s because of marketing.
I’ve eaten a lot of burgers and fries in my life and can’t think of a single place that replicates a McDonalds burger and fry. Having the same menu item (as in a “double cheeseburger”) doesn’t mean anything as they all taste and look different from one another.
I hate McDonalds, but on roadtrips they are usually a godsend. A lot of them still have a play place which lets my kids be monkeys for a bit, and the Happy Meals give them a shitty toy to occupy their time for the evening.
It sucls, I don’t eat there, but McD’s has its place.
I think all fast food is equal tier basically, but they absolutely taste different from each other. I get it like twice a year at most and even I know that man.
Yeah I can get a better burger/fry combo from a local restaurant that uses high quality ingredients and cares about having my business. There’s no reason to pay the same for low quality junk from a fast food chain.
Seriously. For the same price as McD’s I can go to In-n-Out. That’s just comparing fast food places. For the price they’re charging for a Quarter Pounder I may as well go to a sit-down restaurant.
That nicer place is probably at home. Not that there’s anything wrong with it. But I think so fast food chains raised prices? At least here in Europe it’s not like McDonald’s is somehow standing out as more expensive. Worse, yes. But that was always the case
You’re failing to realize that the issue here is that it went from basically the cheapest food you could buy to more expensive than cooking at home is the issue here.
Millions of people grew up eating this crap cuz it was cheap. Now that it’s as expensive as other better options people are starting to realize it isn’t cheap anymore.
It’s still cheaper to feed a family of 4 with McDonald’s than cooking for 4 unless they all want instant ramen. You just might not get what you want off the menu.
Obvious food quality and health issues aside, I know some are still boycotting McDonald’s for providing free meals to the IDF. They also exploit forced prison labor to drive profits.
If you’re in a hurry mostly.
All of the megacorps are raising prices because they know consumers cannot do anything about it.
Meanwhile, wages can’t keep pace with inflation because, “tHaT wOuLd MaKe ThE pRoBlEm WoRsE” Yes it would, but only allowing huge corporations to do that shit makes the class disparity worse and not allowing individuals to match is boiling a frog in water.
“The whole conceit was that you were getting some OK-level of food …”
Don’t be conceited. And cook your own food at home. You’re welcome.
Wendy’s biggie bag is the only good deal in chained fast food right now. Otherwise you’ve gotta find a local joint with good prices.
Let’s all just start making our own food at home and having friends and family over.
Friends?
Family? 😬
Grocery store profits have entered the chat
Let’s all just stop eating. Who needs food. Water and sunlight.
Nestlé has entered the chat
Wow that username. That will get you up in the morning.
The thought of it is getting me up in the evening.
Economists don’t rrally think we need food.
https://theintercept.com/2023/10/29/william-nordhaus-climate-economics/
Ignorance of systems has its way of plowing forward, juggernaut-like. Nordhaus has opined that agriculture is “the part of the economy that is sensitive to climate change,” but because it accounts for just 3 percent of national output, climate disruption of food production cannot produce a “very large effect on the U.S. economy.” It is unfortunate for his calculations that agriculture is the foundation on which the other 97 percent of GDP depends. Without food — strange that one needs to reiterate this — there is no economy, no society, no civilization. Yet Nordhaus treats agriculture as indifferently fungible.
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
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.
I’m not because I stopped going, fuck these assholes and their insane prices for shitty food and terrible service.
Fast food restaurants like McDonalds have eliminated all the reasons people went to fast food places.
And yet people still seem to go there. Things won’t get better as long as people put up with it.
Fast food being a “rare treat” is something I see as a good thing. For me, McDonalds has managed to price themselves out of their niche. Tastier, healthier, and more fulfilling meals are now cheaper
My behavior has changed completely. Stay in and make stuff from scratch with my friends instead of going out
On the flipside it’s forcing people to make healthier choices.
Cheaper doesn’t necessarily mean healthier. I know when I was young, most nights I would make a box of rice a roni and chop up a hot dog to add in. It was about the cheapest meal I could make, but it definitely wasn’t healthy.
I literally had cake for breakfast most days cause you could get discount nearly expired ones from the hidden end cap in Walmarts and that was cheap and gave me some energy for the day and then nothing but hotdogs and hashbrowns.
Yeah, cheap doesn’t mean healthy. We should at least start with making sure people can get all the calories they need each day this country certainly produces enough of them and throws away so much.
I’m tired of malnutrition and starvation being looked at like a good diet for the poor.
Good, stop eating that crap. Learning to cook was the best thing I ever did.
My solution to making home cooking taste better than fast food was buying a fat sack of MSG and using it in everything. Truly it’s the king of flavor.
Uncle Roger that you?
I mean, that’s basically what restaurants do…
My friends and I were hanging out at my mates’ place (he used to work as a line cook), he made us all pasta and it tasted amazing.
Turns out the secret was to add a scary amount of butter, and then add some more.
Salt, butter and MSG is the secret behind half the restaurant industry.
Sugar too.
The calories don’t count if somebody else adds them behind closed doors.
Pretty much. But publicly MSG still has that “ooo scary and harmful” stigma to it. It’s no more harmful than salt or sugar, but some weird racism against Chinese immigrants in the 40s created that stigma.
“I ate 2 lbs of chow mein, a bucket of orange chicken, and 14 egg roll. the fucking MSG makes made me feel like shit!”
It was invented by Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda who studied the chemical basis of kelp. Long story short He ate soup with brown kelp flakes and wondered why the kelp tasted so good, studied it and found msg. He then discovered a way to mass produce it from wheat and soy.
Man was a food genius
home cooking takes time and energy.
Explaining a dystopia to an american: imagine no burgers
🎵 Imagine there’s no burgers It’s easy if you try Imagine paying $8 For the apple pie 🎶
I’d rather be dead.
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