This is kind of what I tell people: the egg sellers were greedy a few months ago and now they're not greedy. Same with oil. From 2014 to like 2020 we managed to convince them to be kind and generous, but they forgot it in 2020. Unfortunately, our oil priests died of COVID so the oil merchants started being greedy again. We need more oil priests.
The FTC findings show that the high prices were (and are) because of excessive profiteering by the grocery stores. It's not a mystery or a debate anymore. And it is not "inflation", sticky or otherwise. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/03/...
> Grocery retailer profits rose & remain elevated: Food and beverage retailer revenues increased to more than 6% over total costs in 2021, higher than their most recent peak in 2015 of 5.6%. In the first three-quarters of 2023, retailer profits rose even more, with revenue reaching 7% over total costs, casting doubt on the assertions of some companies that rising prices at the grocery store are the result of retailers’ own rising costs.
Maybe some of you downvoters can provide some research studies that support your perception instead of just trying to bury the only hard evidence in this thread.
Why do they say "Food and beverage retailer revenues increased to more than 6% over total costs in 2021" instead of an accepted term like gross margins or net income or something I can go look up myself easily
Even if I take your premise the non-GAAP metrics don't count (we'll ignore the revenue aspects) and excessive is underdefined there is one solid take away: the megacorps like Nash Finch the like said that higher material costs drove their price increases. This is shown to be false (https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/p162318supplych...). So they lied. Which group will you believe given that? The megacorps like Nash Finch or the FTC?
That report does not show it to be false. Imagine if someone was selling a widget for $10 and their cost of materials is $8. Then, let's say their cost of materials increases to $10 and they raise their price to $13. Their gross profit margin has gone from 20% to 23% even as two thirds - the majority - of the price increase was driven by higher material costs.
This is interesting when applied to the early pandemic because you could argue that price increases were not general and in many cases they were not sustained either (e.g. sharp spikes in eggs and lumber were just as sharply reversed). In recent times it seems like we are seeing "true" inflation though.
Any article that argues for a particular cause of inflation that doesn't highlight the actual inflation of the money supply by politicians and bureaucrats on both sides of the aisle is disingenuous at best, and purposefully deceitful at worst.
Money supply is not the only, or even not necessarily the majority cause for inflation. Velocity of money matters, consider how for over a decade after the 2008 crisis North America & Europe struggled with low interest rates, high deficits, and nearly no inflation. Inflation is simply a more complex phenomenon then what it is framed as politically.
The reason greed has been ignored is that it lacks explanatory power. No one has established the mechanism by which greed varies over time, therefore affecting prices. Firms having greater pricing power - and reaping the benefits of that via higher profit margins - does not prove that greed has increased.
Capitalists are greedy is a basically accurate but also obvious observation that doesn't really teach us anything about the world.
It's not greed that has varied. It was an inflationary shock. Greed explains why it hasn't gone back down once the shocks are gone. It's basically price collusion - nobody wants to be the first to decrease prices, so nobody does.
Before the inflation, there wasn't an opportunity to collude in this manner.
I think they realized that customers are not as sensitive to price as they thought. So they push it, because why not? It's food. People eat. And they'll just keep pushing it until it stops working.
ok but that is not informative. What was magically discovered around 2021 that helped them realize customers were not price sensitive? why did customers become that way?
What I'm trying to say is that greed is the default. sometimes they lose 5% . sometimes they earn 5,10,20% . All of those years they are greedy. It's not 3x greedy one year and -3x greedy another
I'll try to be constructive here. We're looking at a single data point and saying "greed".
There are many motions across the fast food industry. it's likely customers are trading down from high status (now unaffordable) restaurants into mcdonalds, and now mcDs can charge those customers a bit more.
this has much more explanatory power and is more plausible than "greedy" . It's also verifiable.
"greedy" can't be observed , or verified. it's not empirical.
If you want to remove all agency from it, we can go there. They're seeing they can raise prices and not suffer (immediate) harm. So they do.
It's that simple. Maybe they can successfully pawn off blame for the price increases elsewhere (OPEC, inflation, whatever). But it tends to fall flat when you see record profits. We're getting squeezed for whatever they can get from us.
"Still, executives said on the soft drink maker’s earnings call Tuesday morning that the American consumer, across income strata, “remains in good shape.”"
You are correct. "Prices continue rising" isn't a grammatical passive. The subject are prices, which are performing the action of rising, all by themselves.
I see in Pullum that this mischaracterization fits example (23) about how BBC's Tim Lewell claimed that "five girls have died" is a passive construction compared to "the man went in and shot five girls".
These sentences displace the action from the the true agent, onto the object. Passive sentences are disparaged for something similar, but not the same: avoiding mentioning the agent.
Actually, displacing the action onto the object is worse than simply avoiding mentioning the true agent.
"Five girls were killed" is passive, but at least acknowledges that someone or something did it to them.
Same with the passive "prices continue to be raised".
I think it's safe to assume a company as large as mcdonalds does research on consumers in one of their largest target markets. The CEO may not have personal experience, but I'm sure they have (or have access to) way more data about the matter than actual low-income consumers.
Low income consumers are mcdonalds strongest demographic.
Either megacorps are the evil geniuses with a purposeful plan to destroy America through greed that everyone here claims: And so would be qualified to know. Or they're not.
Im not sure hope you guys continually come up with and believe antithetical cliches.
I'm in a different part of the Americas so I have no direct experience with this, but my understanding from Americans I know is that ~80% of workers below the median received no expansion to unemployment, just the three one-time payments ($1200, $600, $1400) while having reduced wage earnings.
I don’t follow this logic. How would extended unemployment benefits, which ran out in September of 2021, be providing a three year runway for low-income consumers?
McDonalds has gotten so expensive. a mcdouble that was literally $1.50-$2 2-3 years ago is at least $4 now. Unless you game coupons you’re spending a similar amount to dine in restaurants in my experience.
Inflation is the average increase in the cost of goods across the whole economy.
Cost of some goods grows at different rates from the cost of others. Since COVID, service jobs have seen wage growth that's been much faster than the overall inflation rate.
if companies increase the prices, then increasing the salaries cancels out of the price increase.
It's like a room with 10 adults and 20 phones, every adult can get 2 phones, then inflation man brings 10 adults into a room decreasing everyone's entitlement to 1 phone each.
The the company adds 10 adults and then 10 phones, it means that every one still gets the same reduced amount of phones: 1.
Your comparison is really strange, and I didn't say that the salary increase was too be equal to the price increase.
I was not going against capitalism and increasing benefits in that comment, just for some equality. After all if no one can pay the increased prices the system crashes too.
It's why they push it harder when theres a convenient excuse to raise prices. Less reputational or brand harm if you get to blame Middle East, OPEC, hurricanes, inflation, etc.
And for a lot of the big ones, they can always drop prices back and crush competitors before going back up.
their app and kiosk coupons are onerous. one per order. your discounts are geo-locked for 15 minutes per order. any mistakes are penalized with a app lockout.
Their app restrictions were designed by a prison guard sitting with a lawyer
I think of my local grocery store (HEB - a Texas regional chain that I have a lot of respect for) as essentially that. Just grab a sandwich or salad and take it to a self checkout. Certainly it’s helped keep my cost of lunch down and been healthier than fast food by far.
McDonald's used to be fast & cheap. But it's become slow and expensive. My local McD has switched to ordering kiosks with shitty touch screens, which are hell of a lot slower than in person ordering used to be. The UX is awful. Each item you add requires multiple taps, often a good 50cm away from the previous tap, and they try to trick you into adding shit you don't need at every possible opportunity. Then there's a 50% chance that the payment terminal won't work.
Every time I end up at McD's, I wonder why the hell I bothered.
I also have a sneaking suspicion that the BigMac has gotten smaller of late. But maybe I've just gotten fatter.
Counting dollars, my local McD's used to be the cheapest option, and their salads were quite good.
They're no longer the cheapest option, and the salads are no longer available. There's something going wrong there. I can get cheaper, healthier, better food at e.g. my local Subway, and many other places.
It is still reasonably fast (although not super-fast). Unique to my location, the service is excellent.
subway is falling into the same greedflation trap. a simple sandwich can run $10 - $12 these days with no add-ons or sides. better to pay $15 for something local and actually quality
I don't think "counting taps" is the point here. Virtually all UX research ever indicates that any friction added to interactions usually means losing customers at the margin. Maybe customers don't cancel the current transaction, but some of them are still going elsewhere next time because they don't want to deal with whatever friction you've inserted.
I guess the point is that yes it was always unhealthy but at least you could get something tasty cheap and fast, but now the unhealthy part is more difficult to ignore if everything else has also gone to the gutter.
When I made Big Macs in the late 80s, they were made of two "10 to 1" patties (i.e. 10 to the pound, 1.6 ounces each). That's still the formula, according to their web site.
I did see a Reddit post that claimed that the product was physically bigger from 1972-1975. It doesn't show the ingredients, and it looks from the picture as if it is bigger bread rather than more meat. (You can't see any meat in the photo of the bigger sandwich.)
The big mac had around 500 calories when it came out in the 70ies, in the 90ies that changed to 640, at the start of the century they changed it to around 705, now its down to 500 again.
Interesting. I wonder what changed. Formulation of the bun? Or the "special sauce"? Or perhaps just a change in the way calories are calculated.
I recall a time when the Big Mac was the gold standard of "this product has too many calories", and articles would decry things that somehow managed to have more. Now, it's hard to find anything with a mere 500 calories.
The UI of the kiosks are quite blatently designed to try to sell you more stuff than to make ordering easier. Give me the same interface you give the employees and I'd be a lot happier.
are we having different kiosks in china? because i don't remember any experience about things being pushed on me. there is a list of categories with one category being recommendations or hot/onsale items or something like that, and a list of items in each category. you scroll through and pick the item you want. when you select an item you get a few recommendations to go with that. usually they make sense or i ignore them.
> Then there's a 50% chance that the payment terminal won't work.
where is this? In CA, almost all payment terminals seem to work in retail for me. Businesses would not stay in business easily if their payment accepting device was broken.
(And for McD's, it's not too difficult IMO to select & checkout via their native iOS app.)
I usually use the kiosk. It took me a few times to figure it out but if there's not already someone at the register with nobody in line then I'm faster with the kiosk. Especially because when I customize the ingredients the person at the register usually either gets it wrong or can't understand so I have to repeat myself. I guess they only put new people at the front register anymore at the McDonald's near me.
I'm 192cm (6'4) tall and those screens are a pain for me to use. Also, adding you your comment
>Every time I end up at McD's, I wonder why the hell I bothered.
I feel the same everytime i open my burger box and see a smashed pile of crap that is nothing like the burger in my mind or on the ad. Marketing is strong. Fortunately I maybe go to BK or McD once a year, but always disappointed.
I think you need to specify where you're talking about, because in my neck of the woods (Denver) those prices are way higher than what we see. It's right about $10 for McDonald's (give or take a bit depending on what you get), and it's still quite possible to go out to restaurant for $25/person.
Should we bring in more below-minimum wage agricultural labour?
Should we reverse wage growth in the poorest segment of society - the people that grow and cook your food?
Should we lower commercial and residential rents?
Should we redistribute the record profits that (some) parts of the capital-owning class are reaping?
Your life is just catching up to the reality that X hours of labour is required to provide you with 1 hour of luxury, and when that labour starts getting paid more for their work, prices go up.
(It's the same reason childcare is unaffordable. One care provider is only allowed to watch after 3/4 infants. If you want 8 hours of childsitting a day, that means that half of your salary must go to pay for it.)
Where else do you think they are coming from? Did restaurants suddenly become a money-printing business with 30% margins overnight, or something? Because for the past 50 years, running one was a great way to:
* Do a ton of work
* Make very little money
* With a constant risk of going out of business and losing everything hanging over your head.
The reality is that rents are in the stratosphere, low-end wages are growing, and so are profit margins for many (but not all) producers of goods that the economy runs on. All of these costs get passed up the supply chain to you, the customer.
It's very sad and all that a senior SWE no longer gets paid 15 times what their barista does (It's only 8 times now!), but we all have to tighten our belts and adapt to this brave new world.
Or we could eat the landlords, but that's not a hugely popular sentiment at the moment.
It can and the reason is plainly obvious regardless of how difficult the answers are for you to accept. A restaurant is at the apex of the supply chain, and reflects all of contributing cost increases, direct and indirect. Whether it's higher fuel prices, higher labor prices, higher equipment prices, higher real-estate prices, higher food prices, higher shipping prices, higher taxes, higher healthcare costs or any other increasing cost the restaurant has to cover it all, or go out of business.
I go to lots of restaurants that have barely increased prices in the last few years; certainly nothing like double. They aren’t publicly traded though.
There's a lot of broader context from operators that should be given attention too.
McDonalds has been abusing operators with a mandatory expanding menu full of complex items that puts a lot of operating cost onto the franchisee (operator). And lately mandated tech upgrades to support mobile ordering, along with aesthetic upgrades that most customers hate.
These menu items come with expensive equipment, supply and staffing commitments .
Consumers see this in memes about the "soft serve machine being broken". The truth is the menu has exploded with hard to assemble items (e.g. mcwrap, sandwiches, salads) and flimsy equipment.
And more recently mandated technology upgrades to support mobile & kiosk ordering to drive staff away from the counter and into the kitchen. Along with drab aesthetic upgrades that cost millions per location.
You'll notice In n Out, a privately owned company, has bucked the trend and refuses to do mobile ordering or doordash for this reason. They've kept their real estate traditional. Their menu hasn't changed in 50+ years. As a result, margins are high, operations are efficient, staff are well comped and happy.
Just keep in mind there's a lot to "inflation" driven by short term and risky business strategies that now have to be recouped by consumers.
And it's worth observing that McDonald's is sort of structurally obliged to be doing all that. It's a trap that many very large companies find themselve stuck in and that in many cases becomes the poison that feeds their ruin.
If McDonald's didn't "keep up with the Joneses" as their both their peers and upstart-darling competitors dressed up their menus and digitized their engagement, they'd be giving up their prestige as a defining brand in fast food and would set themselves down the road to being the next generation Arby's, A&W, Dairy Queen, etc -- nostalgic and lingering, perhaps, but no longer a global titan of their current scale.
They may be playing out a losing strategy as you point out, but they also may not have had a winning strategy; at least not at the corporate level. And for corporate, this one has the advantage of extracting more short-term money from operators along the way, so it's not entirely a surpise that it's the one they'd run with.
Also... McDonalds isn't in the business of selling food. It is in the business of owning real estate and selling "inputs" to its franchise holders. It makes money by selling equipment and food inputs to franchisors. It can't grow revenues if it doesn't find new things to sell to franchisees.
If you have plenty of money, I’m curious how you define “expensive” (since it’s clearly not whether it affects your personal economy or not) — what’s cheaper than mcdonald’s, or better at the same price point?
Last few, rare, times I visited there was always a special on the app that was reasonably priced. Some large burger for 99p or something. So there is some price discrimination. I do miss their 35p ice cream cones in summer
those "specials" often have razor thin margins because the goal is driving app installs. more personal data/push notifications = constant stream of money = more value than they'd get selling one burger at menu price. notice how there are no deals if you just visit the mobile site in a browser?
How is having data more valuable than selling a physical hamburger? If the data engineering program of McDonald's was so encompassing as to engulf the entire Earth like a paperclip maximizer, creating the astronomical sized volume of data required for a data science that can do something or enable a scientist-operator to know something, then yes, the maximization of mobile app installations for a data farm should be done. But a company like McDonald's isn't taking over the planet, nor could it ever. It doesn't have the skills or the talent needed for a global viewpoint and operation. McDonald's is intermediate or marginal to intelligence, rather than having an adjacency which is close to super-intelligence.
So, are the modern corporations making a big mistake with their current information technology trends and goals?
> So, are the modern corporations making a big mistake with their current information technology trends and goals?
Imho, yes. They think they can improve their marketing efficiency with it, but the truth is that the effects cannot be measured. As ex-sales and ex-marketers tends to be overepresented at the exec level of $bigco, they will say it does have an effect, but its mostly wishful thinking.
Inflation keeps going up if people don't change their spending habits in response to prices going up. I actually switch to eating at McD's more, as a replacement for others, because they haven't raised their prices much. I've written Five Guys off completley. Not so much because I can't afford it, but because they'll keep raising their prices until people respond.
I found Five Guys to be ridiculously expensive for sub par food before COVID inflation. Decent burgers almost anywhere else I found cost significantly less.
While prices have risen and are still rising sharply I find as a retired senior there are lots of ways around this from coupons to biweekly senior care packages to dollar stores and also I grow a bit of my own food in the backyard.
You can only process and engineer food to be so cheap until its no longer food. I think most people accept that a lot of this "food" is crap but it beats hunger, esp when you're poor.
McDonald's annual cost of goods sold for 2023 was $10.931B, a 9.58% increase from 2022. McDonald's annual cost of labor for 2023 was $2.885B, a 10.24% increase from 2022. The spread on beef/lb since 2020 is 40% delta, flour 60%, and cheese over 100%. Big Cheese Industrial Complex. I guess if McDonalds is greedy for people spending more money, the workers and the farmers are greedy too. Especially in California, where workers just got a 25% wage increase. As you said, /u/imglorp, "It's just greed"
An inevitable conclusion of extreme corporate profiteering and reckless and absurd inequality: a populace too poor to afford to pay into the consumption Pyramid Scheme. The skewed, power-law like distribution is now more lopsided than the Gilded Age. Even American millionaires (not billionaires) are asking to be taxed more because "Who wants to live in a poor country?", but have seen little traction because the billionaires' lobbyists have regulatory- and legislative-capture of the political class.
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[ 12.2 ms ] story [ 2401 ms ] threadAgreed. It's possible to understand some bad, unfunny jokes.
> those are separate qualities.
They're related qualities. A good joke depends on its being understood.
> Grocery retailer profits rose & remain elevated: Food and beverage retailer revenues increased to more than 6% over total costs in 2021, higher than their most recent peak in 2015 of 5.6%. In the first three-quarters of 2023, retailer profits rose even more, with revenue reaching 7% over total costs, casting doubt on the assertions of some companies that rising prices at the grocery store are the result of retailers’ own rising costs.
Maybe some of you downvoters can provide some research studies that support your perception instead of just trying to bury the only hard evidence in this thread.
It's not a quantitative assessment even though it's about numbers.
This is interesting when applied to the early pandemic because you could argue that price increases were not general and in many cases they were not sustained either (e.g. sharp spikes in eggs and lumber were just as sharply reversed). In recent times it seems like we are seeing "true" inflation though.
Capitalists are greedy is a basically accurate but also obvious observation that doesn't really teach us anything about the world.
Before the inflation, there wasn't an opportunity to collude in this manner.
The time before inflation? When was that? The middle ages?
There has been a recent marked increase in inflation. That is the inflation I refer to.
Learn to read maybe.
What I'm trying to say is that greed is the default. sometimes they lose 5% . sometimes they earn 5,10,20% . All of those years they are greedy. It's not 3x greedy one year and -3x greedy another
There are many motions across the fast food industry. it's likely customers are trading down from high status (now unaffordable) restaurants into mcdonalds, and now mcDs can charge those customers a bit more.
this has much more explanatory power and is more plausible than "greedy" . It's also verifiable.
"greedy" can't be observed , or verified. it's not empirical.
It's that simple. Maybe they can successfully pawn off blame for the price increases elsewhere (OPEC, inflation, whatever). But it tends to fall flat when you see record profits. We're getting squeezed for whatever they can get from us.
round is a shape.
Fixed your passive voice there!
I see in Pullum that this mischaracterization fits example (23) about how BBC's Tim Lewell claimed that "five girls have died" is a passive construction compared to "the man went in and shot five girls".
These sentences displace the action from the the true agent, onto the object. Passive sentences are disparaged for something similar, but not the same: avoiding mentioning the agent.
Actually, displacing the action onto the object is worse than simply avoiding mentioning the true agent.
"Five girls were killed" is passive, but at least acknowledges that someone or something did it to them.
Same with the passive "prices continue to be raised".
Either megacorps are the evil geniuses with a purposeful plan to destroy America through greed that everyone here claims: And so would be qualified to know. Or they're not.
Im not sure hope you guys continually come up with and believe antithetical cliches.
Cost of some goods grows at different rates from the cost of others. Since COVID, service jobs have seen wage growth that's been much faster than the overall inflation rate.
It's like a room with 10 adults and 20 phones, every adult can get 2 phones, then inflation man brings 10 adults into a room decreasing everyone's entitlement to 1 phone each.
The the company adds 10 adults and then 10 phones, it means that every one still gets the same reduced amount of phones: 1.
I was not going against capitalism and increasing benefits in that comment, just for some equality. After all if no one can pay the increased prices the system crashes too.
Churn is acceptable, if not desirable.
And for a lot of the big ones, they can always drop prices back and crush competitors before going back up.
Their app restrictions were designed by a prison guard sitting with a lawyer
Every time I end up at McD's, I wonder why the hell I bothered.
I also have a sneaking suspicion that the BigMac has gotten smaller of late. But maybe I've just gotten fatter.
They're no longer the cheapest option, and the salads are no longer available. There's something going wrong there. I can get cheaper, healthier, better food at e.g. my local Subway, and many other places.
It is still reasonably fast (although not super-fast). Unique to my location, the service is excellent.
Approximately what percentage of the readers of this site would you estimate are laboring under the assumption that eating at McDonald's is healthy?
It turns out that it's not strictly necessary to constantly lecture other people about things like this.
When I made Big Macs in the late 80s, they were made of two "10 to 1" patties (i.e. 10 to the pound, 1.6 ounces each). That's still the formula, according to their web site.
I did see a Reddit post that claimed that the product was physically bigger from 1972-1975. It doesn't show the ingredients, and it looks from the picture as if it is bigger bread rather than more meat. (You can't see any meat in the photo of the bigger sandwich.)
I recall a time when the Big Mac was the gold standard of "this product has too many calories", and articles would decry things that somehow managed to have more. Now, it's hard to find anything with a mere 500 calories.
where is this? In CA, almost all payment terminals seem to work in retail for me. Businesses would not stay in business easily if their payment accepting device was broken.
(And for McD's, it's not too difficult IMO to select & checkout via their native iOS app.)
I forgot how I used to order McDonalds at the counter, and wait in front of the register I paid at until I got my food (because it only took moments).
Now I order, leave with my receipt, and come back when they call my number, a procedure I used to associate with "trendy" places.
> Every time I end up at McD's, I wonder why the hell I bothered.
when their spicy mcchicken stops being good, i'm gone
>Every time I end up at McD's, I wonder why the hell I bothered.
I feel the same everytime i open my burger box and see a smashed pile of crap that is nothing like the burger in my mind or on the ad. Marketing is strong. Fortunately I maybe go to BK or McD once a year, but always disappointed.
McDonalds is no longer affordable by low-income consumers.
They really need to lower food prices. It's ridiculous that they are charging $15 for a burger, fries and a drink.
The bill for eating out at a restraunt for 2 people was $60 ... now its $120 minimum.
Should we bring in more below-minimum wage agricultural labour?
Should we reverse wage growth in the poorest segment of society - the people that grow and cook your food?
Should we lower commercial and residential rents?
Should we redistribute the record profits that (some) parts of the capital-owning class are reaping?
Your life is just catching up to the reality that X hours of labour is required to provide you with 1 hour of luxury, and when that labour starts getting paid more for their work, prices go up.
(It's the same reason childcare is unaffordable. One care provider is only allowed to watch after 3/4 infants. If you want 8 hours of childsitting a day, that means that half of your salary must go to pay for it.)
* Do a ton of work
* Make very little money
* With a constant risk of going out of business and losing everything hanging over your head.
The reality is that rents are in the stratosphere, low-end wages are growing, and so are profit margins for many (but not all) producers of goods that the economy runs on. All of these costs get passed up the supply chain to you, the customer.
It's very sad and all that a senior SWE no longer gets paid 15 times what their barista does (It's only 8 times now!), but we all have to tighten our belts and adapt to this brave new world.
Or we could eat the landlords, but that's not a hugely popular sentiment at the moment.
McDonalds has been abusing operators with a mandatory expanding menu full of complex items that puts a lot of operating cost onto the franchisee (operator). And lately mandated tech upgrades to support mobile ordering, along with aesthetic upgrades that most customers hate.
These menu items come with expensive equipment, supply and staffing commitments .
Consumers see this in memes about the "soft serve machine being broken". The truth is the menu has exploded with hard to assemble items (e.g. mcwrap, sandwiches, salads) and flimsy equipment.
And more recently mandated technology upgrades to support mobile & kiosk ordering to drive staff away from the counter and into the kitchen. Along with drab aesthetic upgrades that cost millions per location.
You'll notice In n Out, a privately owned company, has bucked the trend and refuses to do mobile ordering or doordash for this reason. They've kept their real estate traditional. Their menu hasn't changed in 50+ years. As a result, margins are high, operations are efficient, staff are well comped and happy.
Just keep in mind there's a lot to "inflation" driven by short term and risky business strategies that now have to be recouped by consumers.
And it's worth observing that McDonald's is sort of structurally obliged to be doing all that. It's a trap that many very large companies find themselve stuck in and that in many cases becomes the poison that feeds their ruin.
If McDonald's didn't "keep up with the Joneses" as their both their peers and upstart-darling competitors dressed up their menus and digitized their engagement, they'd be giving up their prestige as a defining brand in fast food and would set themselves down the road to being the next generation Arby's, A&W, Dairy Queen, etc -- nostalgic and lingering, perhaps, but no longer a global titan of their current scale.
They may be playing out a losing strategy as you point out, but they also may not have had a winning strategy; at least not at the corporate level. And for corporate, this one has the advantage of extracting more short-term money from operators along the way, so it's not entirely a surpise that it's the one they'd run with.
So, are the modern corporations making a big mistake with their current information technology trends and goals?
Imho, yes. They think they can improve their marketing efficiency with it, but the truth is that the effects cannot be measured. As ex-sales and ex-marketers tends to be overepresented at the exec level of $bigco, they will say it does have an effect, but its mostly wishful thinking.
https://cdn.financebuzz.com/filters:quality(75)/images/2024/...
https://www.cheesereporter.com/prices.htm