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I don’t see anyone mentioning the proportions of the bars. For example, on the 1st item, $1 vs $2.99 is not even double the size…
At first, I was assaulted by the percentage representation. Then I cooled down and thought, it’s not the percentage, but those bars are the absolute height of the price! Me smart, until I took a look again and now my hate is burning so, so hard for this graph. It is designed to enrage.
They’re not. The $3 bar is not 3x the height of the $1 bar next to it. The $2.99 bar on the right is higher than the $2.99 bar on the left. Someone just free drew the bars and it’s extremely noticeable and annoying.
I think they scaled them in proportion to their group.
Remove one entire group (e.g. 2014) and I think you will see it.
Not sure what you mean. The McChicken bars are not showing a 200% increase regardless of how you slice it.
It’s still not consistent… The $11 2024 10-piece nugget is less than double the $5 4-piece nugget of the same year. The 2014 mcdouble and 2014 oreo mcflurry are way too close to eachother 😢
They borked their graph to make room for the picture of the girl for some reason
Hah! That’s a very good point. Why make a bar chart if it’s not even showcasing the correct values, which in this case actually helps the message?
Don’t eat fast food, make your own.
If you’re already at home it’s faster too.
Mildly infuriating is +122% being the largest bar graph and +199% is the smallest.
Except for the left side, the bars are proportionate to price in dollars. The percent increase that amounts to is marked above the bars, and that number should match up to the visual difference between the 2014 price and the 2024 price, compared to the 2014 price alone.
The 3 yellow bars on the left are nonsense and seem to have been drawn like that just to fit that picture of the girl in.
Prices have gone up while portions, service, and even quality (as low as it already was) have gone down. When does “the free market” start improving things for customers instead of just shareholders?
According to economic theory, “when price exceeds value.”
Apparently quite a few people have a high tolerance for what they value.
“Perceived value”
Without that element, there would be no explanation for Marketing other than pure Brand Awareness promotion working (and McDonalds is definitely beyond needing more Brand Awareness, at least in the Developed World)
Even then, it doesn’t explain a lot of how Marketing does its work (namelly the stuff they took from Psychology and use to do things like create associations between brand and specific feelings on people’s subconscious - you know, the way cars are “freedom” and perfumes are “sex”).
And don’t get me started on other techniques that prey of human cognitive weaknesses (for example, FOMO would not work with the fabled Homo Economicus that underpins so much of Free Market Theory)
Anyways, a ton of present day enshittification (and that includes this kind of price inflation) relies on people having a well entrenched positive perception of a brand after years of having a relationship with it (i.e. chosing it as customers) and there being quite a lot of momentum behind it. It also relies a lot on using a “slow boiling” effect to keep people from spotting the full picture of the changes.
Did the quality really go down? I don’t go to McDonald’s very often but I think the quality has improved a lot from what I remember it being in the 2000s/2010s. It’s still mostly unhealthy slop, but sometimes that’s exactly what you need.
Granted, I’m in Germany; I can’t speak for any other country’s locations
Maybe it’s location based, but I had a mcflurry about a year ago and was given a pathetically small amount of the topping poorly mixed in a terrible filler ice cream. Perhaps the ice cream in the mcflurry was always terrible, but I hadn’t noticed it before when I would get a lot more of the topping. Also, their coffee was better for a time but it has reverted to burnt mud.
Germany has regulations for food that are much more demanding than those of the US, so there isn’t much that fast food restaurants can do to cut costs in Germany aside from the order touchscreens and such.
Excerpt about additives:
Believe it or not, big name food brands often adjust their ingredients in European countries compared to their products released in the United States. Certain ingredients that are illegal in Europe are still allowed, and commonly used, in the United States. The following eight common ingredients are approved in the U.S. but banned by the European Union or select European states.
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rBGH (rBST)
- Common foods: Milk and yogurt
- Purpose: Injected into cows to boost milk production
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Ractopamine
- Common foods: Pork, beef, and turkey
- Purpose: Increases lean muscle near the end of an animal’s life
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Potassium bromate (bromated flour)
- Common foods: Hamburger and hot dog buns, and packaged baked goods
- Purpose: Makes bread fluffier and whiter
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Brominated vegetable oil (BVO)
- Common beverages: Sports drinks and sodas
- Purpose: Keeps flavor from floating to the surface
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Olestra
- Common foods: Fat-free chips
- Purpose: Substitutes fat
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Azodicarbonamide
- Common foods: Frozen dinners, pasta mix, and packaged baked goods
- Purpose: Bleaches flour rapidly
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Coloring agents (Red #40, Yellow #6, Yellow #5, and Blue #1)
- Common foods/beverages: Cake mix, candy, soda, and sports beverages
- Purpose: Changes food color
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BHA and BHT
- Common foods/beverages: Gum, cereal, vegetable oil, butter, and beer
- Purpose: Makes food last longer
And these additive ingredients expand past the EU into the United Kingdom. For example, the American version of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese is entirely different from Kraft’s “Cheesey Pasta” sold in Great Britain. Take a look at the differences below.
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Majority of McDonalds locations are franchised so quality varies widely.
Quality of food is determined by McDonald’s as they control the supply chain. Quality of prep vary by location
Somehow I don’t think you’re getting a McAloo Tikki Burger, or a Spicy Paneer Wrap outside of India McDonald’s.
Their menu definitely changes depending on the country.
More reason to stop eating fast food.
I was becoming more and more infuriated as I read through this, then I realized where this was posted. Carry on.
What I as a German take from this is fucking hell was McD in the US cheap before. O.o
I mean it inflated a lot here too, but wow.
That’s really the main reason why any of us ate there. I haven’t gone there for about 5 years now.
Sooooo, stop eating there? It’s expensive enough bowing to the grocery cartels, who can afford to eat out?
Yet another reason to stop eating there
You mean providing a photo opportunity for a billionaire to roleplay being a poor to help him get elected wasn’t enough to get progressive to boycott them? I think that’s much more actively politically involved than Hobby Lobby or Chic Fil A.
I can blame McDonald’s for a lot of things, but not this. They didn’t really get a choice.
They could make it policy not to publicly endorse political candidates in their stores.
Beat meat to it.
Also nice username.
God I wish that plane went down
Did the UK Lib Dems make this bar chart?
I don’t understand the insinuation you’re going for. Care to explain?
I’m not the person you’re replying to, but I think their point is that the bars don’t scale linearly. The red bar (2014 price) for the McChicken is supposed to represent $1 and the yellow bar (2024 price) ~$3, but the yellow bar is not 3 times the length of the red bar. This means the relative differences between the bar lengths doesn’t match the percent increase number printed above then. This is most egregious comparing relative differences between the McChicken and the Quarter Pounder with Cheese meal: why does a 122% increase look so much worse than the 199% increase?
I suspect the cause of problem is that the small bars were stretched a bit to fit printing the dollar value within then, but if it throws off the visual accuracy of the bars, what’s the point of using bars at all?
The Liberal Democrats in the UK are infamous for their dodgy bar charts in election leaflets, where the percentages don’t match up with the bars at all.
Similar to this:
It’s a running joke in the UK.
They did bring back the 5 dollar meal though, at least in my region. Which immediately makes them a viable option.
But the five dollar meal is weird in comparison to everything else they offer.
For example, a small fries by itself is $2.50 half the cost of the whole 5 dollar meal.
To me this indicates that they’re just arbitrarily increasing prices for the sake of them being more expensive.
The problem of course with raising prices at McDonald’s is that people eat there because they’re supposed to be cheap and fast. Not because of their “gourmet” food.
Im not sure how infuriating this is at least for me. I always knew I ate to much fast food but it was just to cheap and convenient and hard to kick. Now I pretty much don’t buy it. In the last few years I have only had it a few times and it was under the most stressful of situations (wife in the hospital and running around and late at night and just needed something to fill the stomach). Fast food becoming to expensive to not think about budget wise is one of the few good things to come out of the recent inflation. Especially since I don’t use smartphones or apps there of.
Running out of thin kids to show in the commercials so they zoom away from the fat belly.
What’s worse is what it does to your arteries. They become clogged and brittle which then leads to strokes and heart attacks.
Combine that with Soda that destroys your kidneys and spikes your sugar and you are in for a terrible time. The heart and kidneys are closely tied so if you have problems it won’t be pretty.
Where are these prices from? A quarter pounder meal is under $10 where I am.
To compare, inflation from 2014 to 2025 has been about 33%
Is that little girl in the picture to blame?
That bitch stealin Wendy’s do though. Bout to see them throw down.
