They still have that in the app. $1 any size soda or tea.
Yeah but you can only use it as a deal. I’m not going to choose the deal that saves me $.49 if I’m getting more than a pop.
I am very surprised at the amount of discount for mobile ordering. They have been pushing at the drive thru but I have resisted. I’ll have to try it now.
As others have said growing up it was an infrequent luxury. I only remember going to one restaurant as a kid before my mid teens. And I was the spoiled youngest. They had more disposable income then. My siblings didn’t even get that.
I’m not sure why I would get an app to make eating McDonalds easier. Wendy’s is still 6 bucks.
Could be certain areas. I don’t think there’s a big difference in my area between in store and on the app but I admit I haven’t done a lot of comparison shopping either.
I went more often than that, but I wouldn’t say it was common. But like many teens I worked at McDonald’s so I did eat a lot of it then.
Also as a teen I went to Olive Garden with my Aunt and her cool single friends, and that was like the height of luxury to me. Prior to becoming an adult, Olive Garden was as fancy as it got.
I think people eat out more now than they used to. I don’t think it was merely a function of income then. I think it’s more a function of income now because that shit’s expensive.
I can get a chicken bowl at Chipotle for 8.50 and it lasts almost 24 hours. A deal.
Yes. I can get two meals out of Chipotle at least.
Fast food has gotten really expensive in California, now that they’ve raised minimum wage for fast-food workers to $20 (regular minimum wage for everybody else is $16 or $17).
The other night, we went to Burger King, got one Whopper value meal, one individual Whopper, a small chocolate shake, and a Hershey’s sundae pie - the total was $35.00. That’s crazy for a fast-food meal, and it wasn’t even that good (except for the pie - spouse reports the shake was way over-chocolated, and the Whopper isn’t as good as it used to be).
I didn’t know about the online app - we’ll be using those from now on. We don’t do fast food that often anymore, and probably even less now.
Yeah. Besides just general thrift considerations, it was seen as more or less a dereliction of a woman’s domestic duties if a family was eating meals in restaurants a lot of the time.
Another inflation check inspired by the question of anyone buying the original burger anymore.
I did, the last time I had a burger-thing there. Regretted it, stomach-wise but I suspect that was just that franchise.
Anyway. The burger cost 25 cents in 1968. That’s $2.24 in today’s money. This site gives just one number at $2.19. That’s a cheaper price. If it is generally available for somewhere around $2.50 that’s still a reasonable deal.
I just don’t see where this “luxury” thing is coming from.
$2.19 for a McDonald’s cheeseburger would be a good price. I think before the pandemic it was around $1.99 near me. It’s now $3.29 at the McDonalds across the street.
Somewhere in another thread, in a discussion about sushi, I mentioned a wonderful sushi bar where we had a sashimi dinner some years ago. “Sashimi” in this case doesn’t mean “raw fish without rice”, it actually refers to a terrific and varied multi-course dinner that also included many sushi courses as well. At the time it was a little over $500 for two. I thought about going back as it’s been awhile, but today, with a decent saki and tip it would be at least $1000 for two. Restaurants are becoming unaffordable, even everyday regular chain restaurants. At a decent steakhouse around here you could usually get away with a dinner for two with a small carafe of house wine for around $120. I haven’t been there since the pandemic, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that, too, has now doubled.
It depends on your circumstances. If you’re a single parent working two or three jobs, the time to go grocery shopping and then cook meals from scratch may simply not exist, especially if you live in a food desert. Stopping for a couple five-dollar cheese pizzas or a pile of 70-cent hamburgers may be a better cost-benefit tradeoff than cooking.
It’s Vimes’ Boots. Sometimes you need a certain level of prosperity to be able to afford to save money.
I haven’t been to McDonald’s in a long time, maybe a couple of years? I hit their drive thru a couple weeks ago, because I didn’t bring lunch from home. I was shocked that a quarter pounder meal was about $12. Definitely not worth it.
I’ve gotten to the point where I can cook better meals at home than what I can get at a lot of restaurants, so I don’t eat out a lot. I don’t mind paying for good food, and enjoying the experience of dining out, but I’m not gonna go out of my way to get McDonald’s again.
Just for the record, I want to split the question into the two parts we’re all implicitly discussing.
Is McDonalds becoming a luxury meal? - the title of the thread. Literal answer, no, of course not. It’s low quality, although there have been back and forth in their efforts to increase quality over the last decade, COVID and inflation have pushed back towards cost savings, with fewer choices and lower quality IMHO.
Is a meal at McDonalds (especially for a family) a luxury? This is the question most of us are answering. Yes, it is. Should it be? Well, that’s where the discussion comes in. Personally… when I was a youngling in 80s, going to BK or McD was a treat, and often based around me wanting things like a Star Wars glass set, but even my father would enjoy the fries and a break from cooking. And it was distinct in terms of frequency from what I would call a sit-down dinner out with the family. But at current price points, the increase in a casual dining restaurant is smaller than the increases at fast-food joints (leaving out coupons and apps).
To the point where given the choice, I’d rather pay $18-20 for an entree with water to drink 99% of the time time as a sit down place than $12 for a combo with a drink at a fast food place. And I don’t see the prior generation pop culture or toy tie-ins (or play areas, or anything else) that would have increased the child appeal to offset this.
Still, $6 per person is a noticeable cost on a tight budget for many families. If you need fast food, a pickup pizza (to say nothing of a reasonable quality frozen one) is a much better value for money.
So yeah, I think McDonalds is rapidly pricing itself out of the family food (possibly deliberately) and moving more towards preying on the young person with not enough time to cook / eat during the day or wanting to bother at night. Which is, absolutely a luxury of spending money to save time. Just not one I would ever make.
Same here. Besides, I keep my finances in Quicken and just calculated that I spent $2.32/day over the last year on groceries.
Ooohh, that would be something interesting for me to track! I couldn’t even tell you what I spend for groceries, because I do most of my shopping at Aldi, so I get all my food stuffs at great prices, but can still drop a nice chunk of change there on Aisle of Shame merchandise.
I will say this, though. I changed jobs a few years ago, and going out for lunch is a hassle now. Nothing in walking distance, and I’m not spending half my lunch hour driving to get food. We do have food trucks, though. But after a while, the novelty wore off, and I’m not spending $15 for a mediocre burger and greasy fries. I started bringing lunch from home, and meal prepping specifically for work lunches. Took that $15 a day, multiplied by five, and set up an automatic transfer of $75 every Friday. It’s added up nicely, and I’ve been eating great lunches!
So yeah, McDonald’s can bite me.
You think McDonald’s is expensive, I just checked the prices at my local White Castle. The original single slider, that puny square of paper-thin meat with holes punched in it, where you always ate the pickle because it doubled the weight of the burger, it’s now $1.60.That makes four of them (a standard order for my wife, I usually got five) a $6.40 treat.
Add more for cheese.
Was it this one?