Fast food restaurants have lost the plot and violated their balance of fast/cheap/Meh. Now it’s fastish/over priced/meh and below
There’s a McDonald’s near me. I’ll never spend less than $20 there on a full meal, or I leave hungry. Unless I get just an Al a carte McGriddle or something.
There’s a cash only breakfast place across the street. A huge chicken friend steak with gravy and potatoes, corn, hash browns, pancakes… mmm…. $10.
I feel like Jimmy johns and chick fil a are the only truly fast restaurants anymore. For JJ you do have to go inside, but they often make your sandwich and complete payment in less than a minute, maybe 5 minutes max.
Meanwhile I’ve been to other drive throughs where even with very few people in line, it somehow takes 10/15 mins to get your meal. Plus, it’s often incorrectly made and expensive
Nobody is demanding a fancy meal from McDonald’s.
The fast food industry went all in on a bet about 20-30 years ago, and now they’re starting to cash in.
They wanted to get people dependant on eating their crap every single day. They view not just each other as competition, but the concept of you cooking for yourself as direct competition for their crap. They want you sitting in their drive through 3 meals a day. They don’t want you to even consider using your own kitchen.
Their food is designed to trigger an addictive response. The food is cheap too produce, and really not very appealing to even look at. And yet, drive by any random McDonald’s at 1030 am and it will be 4 cars deep in the drive through.
Now that an entire generation and their kids are hooked, they can raise the prices until people can just barely afford it.
There’s a McDonald’s near me. I’ll never spend less than $20 there on a full meal
Which means you should never spend more than $0 there. They’ll just keep raising the prices for as long as you’ll pay them.
Track_Shovel
TexMexBazooka
samus12345
medgremlin