Money & Inheritance·
MCDONALD'S PRICE RIOT
A diner revisits McDonald's to find steeper prices, dwindling app deals, and longer waits, tracing a shift that makes the fast-food experience feel less like quick, cheap comfort.
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McDonald's had gotten so expensive, the poster had stopped going, then came back anyway, and found the same problem waiting for them.
After a long stretch of avoiding the chain, the poster went to McDonald's yesterday and was hit with a familiar shock: the prices still looked steep, and the app offered almost nothing to soften the blow. "It still is the same!" they wrote. "the app doesn't have any deals at all," and the few deals that did appear were sitting around $10.
The numbers were the part that stuck. A Big Mac meal came in at $10.50, and an Upsize ran to $11.90. For a place built on the idea of quick, cheap food, that felt wildly out of step with what the poster could get elsewhere.
They pointed to a Chinese restaurant in their area selling a set meal for $5. A nearby diner had a one-person meal for less than $6. Against those prices, McDonald's looked less like a bargain stop and more like the expensive option.
The complaint wasn't only about cost. The poster said the quality was poor, and that the whole experience had become frustrating enough to keep them away in the first place. In February, they said, they waited 45 minutes. That was the last time they had gone before this recent visit.
This trip didn't change their mind. "the exact same," they said of the scene inside.
They also blamed delivery app orders for the slowdown, saying stores prioritize DoorDash and UberEats over the people standing there in person. The wait, the prices, and the service all seemed to point the same way: McDonald's no longer felt like fast food in either sense.
"It's seriously such a joke that McDonald's has become so expensive," the poster wrote. "It's not fast food anymore !"
By the end, the math and the wait times had led them to the same conclusion. "It's just not worth spending anymore at fast food it's no longer fast and cheap."