Fast-food chains battle for low-income diners with summer value meals ***Better headline: Fast food restaurants scratch head when customers don’t want to pay higher prices for shitty food.
Fast-food chains battle for low-income diners with summer value meals
im a fast food junkie. i love the shit. covid completely changed the landscape and subsequently my habits. my blacklist is getting longer and longer. quality across the board has plummeted while prices increased.
before covid i only had one entry; wafflehouse
You blacklisted Waffle House?!?
i totally did not want to hate waffle house. i eat garbage all the time. i fight the dog for food. i did not see it coming..
after a few decades of wanting to try it i finally go to waffle house. first of all, no pancakes?! they are fucking strict on that waffle thing. and then what i did order was just barely edible food. just awful.
i grew up haunting dennys, which is now quite expensive for no reason.
It's been an actual decade since I've seen this face in the wild unironically.
Waffle House, Denny's, IHOP, aren't even fast food... They're just bad food. I still don't understand why people eat at these places. It's not like it's ever the only option, or the cheapest option.
Also I love this picture.
Your list is obviously wrong if Waffle House is on there
Trust me it is not...
I ate there at the request of a family friend in the last few years....
Ew. Oh God ew.. the greasiest saltiest overcooked hash brown crisp ever topped with flavourless meat and cheese that chewed like gristle.
I don't know how it's not on there for more people. Not when Diners literally exist.
Y'all have not been to a Waffle House in this decade...
Did you lose weight or compensate at all for that?
Me, hungry with $10 in my pocket
Open McDonald's app
See ad for $5 meals
Click it
All meals are $6 or more
Close app
Make a sandwich
They literally making you work to get a coupon and then prolly collect too much data from the app.
Eshitifoed dystopia... There was a time where working man could just go in get a cheap sandwich, get it fast and consistent.
It ain't fast and it sure as fuck ain't consistent well besides being const shite.
The value proposition straight up is not there anymore. The coupons suck now too.
Not only did the prices go up but the portions shrank. The whopper is hardly a whopper anymore, its a regular sized patty in a wide bun.
This is the main reason i dont really eat it anymore.
Shrinkflation is real.
In any event, it only works if folks go often enough to not notice small shrinks. If you'd go twice a year or something you'd be amazed at how and why these fuckers get away with it. Vote with your wallets, people!
burrito i used to get from a local chain used to be busting and i would get annoyed sometimes because it would become unwrapped. Now, it looks like half the old burrito and it looks like they wrapped the burrito twice with how much tortilla is left
Kinda to your point have you seen that preserved mcDs big mac from the 70s?
That things still looks better than what i can buy at a mcDs today
I'm not supposed to eat beef much anymore, and with McDonalds shrinking their food so much it's hardly even tempting.
But THIS???? I might be a weak man if McDonalds offered THIS Big Mac at a reasonable price.
That has more meat in one of those patties than the current Big Mac has in the whole burger. The patties are so thin now that they're going to be transparent soon. Some lady made a video recently where here pickles were thicker than the beef patties on Big Mac.
Good. Fuck ‘em.
Small, privately owned delis and pizzerias need your money more than shareholders, and the food is better too.
After getting ripped off by McDonald's and then seeing how much they raised prices above inflation compared to the rest of the industrly, I'll never eat there again. Rip me off, fuck you, your food is shit anyways.
They are also using this as an excuse to get customers on their data hoovering apps to get access to any of the best deals.
It's the same with supermarkets, and every single website.
It's insane, people are like "who cares if they know I buy milk" not realising that actually all the data you're providing is combined in aggregate and they likely have a very complete profile of everything about you.
Nah that would imply they have good deals. The dollar menus are still basically done even on the apps and it feels like because they decided they are doing cheaper combos the deals needed to go. Haven't seen good deals on the apps since they were clawing back customers.
Someone with a spreadsheet is finding the exact profit margins they want and the answer is more than they are currently getting.
It was $15 even the other day for a burger and fries. I won't be back.
I could buy a large bag of dumplings for slightly more than $15 and get four meals out of it.
It's been good, pushed me to shop more local.
used to be national chain fast food was cheap, buy a meal for ~$3-6, and local chains / restaurants where more expensive, $7-15.
Now I can go to a sit down local chain for $7-20 or get a fast food for 15-20
Yeah 5$ for a drop of Coca-Cola and a memory of a hamburger between two playing cards that takes an hour to get to you
I used to eat fast food every day after work. If I had a side hustle, I would eat fast food after my side hustle. But I stopped when I would go through the drive thru, pay $15, then sit for 10 minutes in the parking lot for old, cold, shitty food. Fast food isn't fast. Fast food isn't cheap. And fast food doesn't taste good. It's been over 3 years since I voluntarily ate fast food and I'm never going back.
Wtf? $6 is now a value for a shitty McDonalds hamburger?
fast food companies can go fuck themselves. i used to get fast food at least a few times a week. since the things i ordered went from ~$11 to ~$18 i now get fast food maybe once every few months. it's almost august and i think i've gotten it 3 times this year when there was no other option, and each time was a disappointment. even though i always expect shitty garbage from it
Same, some arbitrary point between $8-$14 felt like robbery and I decided I didn't need fast food anymore. Or at least very infrequently. 4-5 times a year instead of that much monthly.
For me it was when meal combos hit double digits. I understand prices in western economies will always increase due to inflation, but just seeing two digits reminded me that fast food is overpriced for what it is and it isn't even fast anymore.
For nearly the same price I can get take home from a regular restaurant that will end up being three meals that will taste better and pick it up faster than going through a drive through.
Go to McDonald's about every 4 years because of some external circumstance
"Yup, still garbage"
Have one in 5 minute walking distance ever since I moved here 5 years ago. Never bought anything there. They'd need to pay me to eat their offerings.
But in fairness shoutouts to the McDonald's in Madrid airport terminal 4 outside of security. The only place in there not trying to rip you off. Had my share of salads there
Anybody old enough to remember Burger King's $1 Whopper?
My four heart stents remember.
There was a 2 for $2 Big Mac deal in the 90s on Sundays... That was cool.
I remember when Arby's had a 5 for $5 deal. So much roast beef.
They have 4 for $10 now
I remember, but can't stand Arby's so 5 for $5 was still too expensive.
People learned how to cook again during the Pandemic ... found out it wasn't hard, and some even found it enjoyable. Tacking on a period of inflation right after that, and fast food is no longer anywhere near the economic staple it was in the Before Times.
Here McDonald's "lowered their prices" by automatically making it small fries and a small drink.
Note that McD’s no longer shows their pricing on their website. You have to add the item to the cart and log into a delivery service to see. Asinine.
Right? "Local spots have better quality, better prices and better interactions" ™
Fast food used to be cheaper because of economies of scale. Can McDonald's really be paying more for the ingredients and labor to make a big mac meal than a steakhouse pays for a 6 oz steak with two sides?
Probably not more for wages or ingredients, but more for CEOs and need to appease stock holders so their behavior will be different than a small shop, no matter what the scale
Fast food chains can suck a rotting dick and die. Nothing of value will be lost.
I used to get a bic mac large menu for me and my friend for roughly €10, now it's around €12 for one if i'm not mistaken (haven't been to the place for quite some years now).
The food was never worth the money, we went there for the friendship and low barrier of entry. We could just do what we wanted and enjoy ourselves for as long as we wanted. Watch some video's, have a laugh, maybe get a cheap icecream or milkshake after a while.
Where any regular coffee place would start trying to get you to order more or let you know they needed to "free up the table" for other guests.
Maccers never gave a shit and it felt good to be there, so that's what we did...we hung out as it was affordable, especially when the weather was bad.
I don't understand this in context what's going on here?
Actual successful fast food:
Pretzels
This makes me glad that I have celiac’s disease; as in I can’t eat fast food even if I wanted to.
I would consider myself a fast food connoisseur, despite having what I would call above average cooking skills.
The likes of McDonald's and KFC have never been in the same leagues as proper burgers/chicken. No one is comparing a Big Mac to a normal burger from home or a restaurant, so many of the comparisons here are unfair at best, and detached from reality at worst. You have McD because you want McD, not because you want a burger.
The fundamental problem is that fast food needs to be both fast and cheap. It's neither, because companies skimped on staff post-pandemic, and prices are just too high. Now, that cheap treat that you enjoy has to be worth both the price and the wait - and these restaurants are finding that it's just not justifiable any more.
They lost the battle the second you made it about low-income diners. These restaurants were about spectacle for the kids, and about value at speed for the families. When you market your food as "poor people food" people aren't going to want it, especially if someone with a good income still balks at the price tag.
I don't really know how many of them are going to survive, outside of revisiting what make them great places for kids and families. That's harder to do today than it was, but they really need to revisit who their customer actually is - because if your value proposition is "you'll be less surprised at how expensive the food the poors eat" then you're going to see fewer customers. Ultimately, that's probably what some execs want, because that real estate is probably worth a ton...
They kept pushing the prices, became more expensive than restaurants in my area. I ate at a diner. 13 per person. Eat at McDonald's, 11 per person for the cheap stuff. The patty from the diner was as big as their fucking $3.5 Mcdouble. Then they overwork their employees and pay them like shit so you're lucky if they even give 2 shits about you or your food. There's just no point in going to fast food anymore. It ain't fast, it being food is questionable, and it's not even cheap.
Won't somebody think of the red line?
I used to frequent McDonald's out of sheer laziness. When combos started running $8-$14, I started packing my lunches.
Same! I've lost a good bit of weight from that and soda being so expensive now. It sucks I was forced into it but at least I'm eating better!