Note that that’s the federal minimum wage. In many states it has gone up. It’s more than $10.32 in (by my count) 28 states:
It’s worse when you buy gas in Canada - Canadian dollars and liters. Impossible to know what you are paying. All I know is I bought a lot of liters.
As a Honda lover I both resent that comparison and can’t argue with it. That actually makes a lot of sense.
McDonald’s is for when you want a meal but you don’t want it to taste like much.
Management has heard your concerns. Bloomberg (sub req)
McDonald’s Corp is looking to launch a $5 meal deal in the US that the burger chain is betting can lure penny-pinching consumers back in. … On the company’s first-quarter earnings call, Chief Executive Officer Chris Kempczinski said McDonald’s had to be “laser-focused on affordability” given how price-weary diners have become. The company’s results were weaker than expected.
“What we don’t have in the US right now is a national value platform,” Kempczinski said, prompting questions from analysts about what such an offer might entail.
I know the feeling. When I’m in the US, I have to buy gas in these mysterious units called “gallons” that no one else on the planet uses and have no logical relationship to anything. I imagine it has some useless archaic definition like the amount an average horse will piss in a day.
It was originally used for measures of wine. It’s now legally defined as 231 cubic inches of gasoline (petrol), which is exactly 3.785411784 liters of it at 60 °F (15.6 °C). All measurement units are now legally defined as so that they all go back eventually to the legal definition of a second. So an inch is now legally defined as 2.54 centimeters. A meter is now legally defined as the distance light travels in a certain fraction of a second. A second is now legally defined in terms of the frequency of the caesium 133 atom.
Obviously, if you need a “smart phone” to take advantage of the sale prices.
What’s more, they try to screw you using fake shrinkflated gallons instead of real gallons. Better keep that pocket calculator handy.
Look at the label on the container. If they label the container as a gallon of milk (or whatever) and it’s not a gallon, the manufacturers can be charged with fraud. Some supermarkets and similar places will have a sticker on the shelf below the containers which will give not just the price of each container but also the “cost per unit” which gives the cost per pound (or per number of things in the container).
Or like I said, impossible.
The wine can help ease the pain though.
At this point, though, you can get one for free if you couldn’t otherwise afford it. Not a great one, mind you: all the truly free ones seem to have like 2GB of RAM. But they exist.
(You can get “free” phones that have 4GB with a pay as you go plan. But the ones that come with the Lifeline service that some companies offer seem to only have 2GB.)
In 2023, 90% of American adults have a smartphone, according to Pew Research.
A lot of places give out cell phones to homeless people in shelter. It’s pretty necessary if you want to get a job.
Looking into it, that deal is basically a happy meal minus the toy. I think it supports that McD’s is going for a ‘mass luxury’ model. It’s a nod to get the lower income buyers but restricting their choices to the point that people who can will pay the higher prices for what they want. It’s sort of a po’boy (poor boy) model, where a restaurant will make a limited or single low cost item as to not exclude those who can’t afford the rest.
I also suspect it’s trying to retrain people into ordering a complete meal, instead of just the main part. This was an issue with their dollar menu to some degree. People learned to buy more of the less profitable items and less of the high profit ones.
What you said was that it was a “useless archaic definition”. It’s not a useless definition any more than liter is. It’s the measurement that people use in a given large region. When Americans go to a gas station, they check the price that a gallon costs. That allows them to compare different gas stations to choose the cheapest one. It also tells them if the cost of gas has gone up. When Canadians go to a gas station, they check the price that a liter costs. This allows them to do the same things as the Americans do with the prices they see there. Both measurements are ultimately arbitrary. All measurement systems are ultimately arbitrary. There’s not a big sign in the sky telling us which measurement system to use.
Yes, the U.S. should have changed to the metric system around fifty years ago when most other countries had already done so. The American government failed to do so because they listened to some of its citizens who said something like, “I don’t want to learn anything new. It was hard enough to learn all the measurements we use now during my childhood and adolescence. So I’m going to campaign against anyone who insists I use a new system.” Of course, the fact is that the metric system is used for certain purposes in the U.S., like medications. Every country had to go through some work to change from an old measurement system to the metric system.
It was the Canine who spoke of a “useless archaic definition” in terms of how much a horse can piss in a day. I, for one, was shocked that a search of the NIST Office of Weights and Measures website for “horse urine” didn’t confirm his story. I now suspect he might have been pulling our leg.
Well, it’s a McDouble instead of a cheeseburger so you’re getting an extra patty and losing a piece of movie franchise branded plastic.
A cheeseburger happy meal has 700 calories and I’m going to guess the extra patty adds another 50-100. Back when the dollar menu was a dollar, I knew people who would happily get a McDouble, small fries and a drink for $3 and found it a sufficient amount of food for lunch.
Sorry, that was sloppy of me.
That was me, but it added up to more than $3 when I also bought the three-pack of their delicious chocolate chip cookies (another dollar). That was a meal deal!