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McDonald's is losing its low-income customers

latimes.com

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Re: McDonald's is losing its low-income customers

#361

Post by linguae »

SapporoChris wrote: post #239
bromuro wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in Spain i have had only good experiences and i love sometimes going to McDonald!

Here in Japan I have only had good experiences, but I can't say I love going to McDonalds. The breakfast offerings are decent and it's extremely fast service. During peak times seats will be around 95 percent full but the restaurant remains very clean. I think the cleanliness in part is due to the patrons being responsible.

I’m an American living in the San Francisco Bay Area who travels to Japan twice per year. McDonald’s in Japan is better than McDonald’s in America. McDonald’s in Japan not only is cleaner and has better customer service, but is cheaper.

McDonald’s in America wasn’t always expensive; I was in high school and college in the 2000s when the dollar menu had double cheeseburgers, chicken sandwiches, and small orders of fries. The regular menu didn’t break the bank, either. Prices started shooting upward in the 2010s; first the Double Cheeseburger on the dollar menu got replaced with the McDouble (one slice of cheese instead of two), then it exited the dollar menu and became 2 for $3, then 2 for $4. But after COVID, prices exploded. I remember the first time seeing a fast food combo meal selling for more than $10 sometime about five years ago, but it was the most expensive meal on the menu. Nowadays in my area $10-$12 combo meals are the norm. It’s sad and maddening; my salary hasn’t risen at this level!

Meanwhile in Japan, I could get a Big Mac meal for around ¥800. Even when the yen was strong, $8 beats $11. At today’s yen valuation ($5.09), it’s more than half the cost, and with better customer service at that!

I make six figures but I feel like fast food prices in California are a ripoff ($10+ for a crappy meal? No thanks!), and so I quit eating out except when traveling or for entertainment, such as hanging out with friends.

Re: McDonald's is losing its low-income customers

#362

Post by fragmede »

epolanski wrote: post #358

I never understood how can eating at McDonald's be cheaper than cooking your own meals. I'm not from US, but checking US grocery shops, you can eat meals made of chicken breast, bread and vegetables well below 5$ per person, well below 20$ in total for a family of 4. Yet every time I see those discussions, fast food is always presented as a cheaper option?

Simple conomy of scale. McDonald's buy chicken in bulk from vendors, and get a better deal than Safeway/wherever you shop does, they get industrial bulk handing deals and yeah they have to pay for employees to cook the food, but that's amortized over all the other customers. So it can be cheaper, the same way that it's cheaper to get oil out of the ground, refine it, do a bunch of chemistry to it, form it into plastic knives and forks, make a box for it, decorate that box, put the cutlery into the box, ship that box halfway around the world, put it in a store, and all of that's still cheaper than getting someone to wash a metal fork for you to eat dinner with.

What blew my mind is when someone explained to me the cultural difference with some places in south east Asia. In the US, eating out at restaurants is what rich people do. But in certain places in south east Asia, having a kitchen, having appliances like a fridge, having electricity for them, having dining space, having the time to go to the market to haggle with vendors, all of that adds up so it's the rich that can afford to eat at home, and everyon else eats out. So it's location dependent.

Re: McDonald's is losing its low-income customers

#363

Post by bragh »

rootusrootus wrote: post #263
bragh wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't a few months, it was a few years of back-and-forth political and corporate shenanigans with a new narrative every few months that the $CURRENT_THING crowd happily ran along with. January 2020: there is nothing to afraid of, the new disease is mostly harmless and affects only the elderly and immunocompromised. Closing down borders is xenophobic. March 2020: do not go outside unless critically necessary and i…

I certainly got tired of the people who decided the answer was to become antisocial and not even try to mitigate the risks, and then shame anyone who did. Lost a bit of my faith in humanity. Well, more than a bit, I think.

And all those years could have been avoided by treating a new unknown disease as it should have been treated instead of trusting China's word on it. Go figure.

Re: McDonald's is losing its low-income customers

#364

Post by lotsofpulp »

throw-the-towel wrote: post #354
johnisgood wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is very easy to learn. If I could learn it, so can anyone else. :P I have not cooked my entire life, for the most part, but when my situation requires me to cook, then I can. I find a relatively easy recipe and I just follow the instructions. It has worked out fine for me. > Jamie Oliver famously asked British school kids to name objects such as an apple, a potato or a cucumber, and plenty of them did not know Oka…

> If I could learn it, so can anyone else. More than a billion people have successfully learned to speak Chinese, some of them very stupid. Yet here I am, struggling to remember the hanzi and the tones.

Different skills take different amounts of time and parameters to master.

Comparing learning a language to watching a video or reading a recipe and spending a few weeks adding some oil and spices in a pot or pan is ridiculous.

Re: McDonald's is losing its low-income customers

#365

Post by baiac »

bdavbdav wrote: post #357
Libidinalecon wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea you can't eat a healthy and cheap diet is just absurd. This is exactly how I eat. Lean chicken breast is some of the cheapest protein. Eggs have come back down to be a good deal. Oatmeal, sweet potatoes and rice are cheap. Olive oil is cheap. Walmart has frozen kale in a bag for $1.50. People don't eat healthy because they don't want to eat healthy. It doesn't taste as good and is not as much fun. My weekly…

Where do you live that chicken breast is cheap? It’s about £7/kg for the crummy water filled breast here in UK

Can't really say about the UK but the cheapest options here are in order 1) frozen chicken leg quarters and 2) an entire chicken (fresh, not frozen) which you have to break down yourself. Both options are around 3-3.5€/kg

Re: McDonald's is losing its low-income customers

#366

Post by georgefrowny »

thelock85 wrote: post #276
silisili wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least from my perspective, COVID broke everything. People are more awful, quality is more awful, and prices are way up. I dread even eating out anymore as I fully expect to overpay for bad food and service. There's an argument to be made that inflation is ultimately the driver of all three complaints, but boy did that all happen seemingly overnight.

I have a slightly different take that everything was really broken right before, but Covid and its response brought everything to bear. I see this play out a lot in ed reform politics where leaders conveniently compact decades of prior failure into the “Covid gap”. To be sure Covid and the response produced a slew of new problems, too, but I think they are massively inflated by prior failures.

The UK is still blaming all sorts of stuff on the pandemic that are actually structural failures showing effects. It's a especially convenient time for cover considering Brexit happened in early 2020 and between then and now no major party has been willing to come out and say that Brexit has been damaging.

I don't even think it was necessary for Brexit to have been a net negative. There are plenty of ways the UK can thrive outside the EU, but the UK governments have basically done the square root of fuck all between 2016 and now to plan or execute on anything substantive.

That said, long-term problems included a lot more than Brexit, like the slow euthanasia of the industrial base and the parting out of anything but nailed down to the highest bidder.

Re: McDonald's is losing its low-income customers

#367

Post by throw-the-towel »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #364
throw-the-towel wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I could learn it, so can anyone else. More than a billion people have successfully learned to speak Chinese, some of them very stupid. Yet here I am, struggling to remember the hanzi and the tones.

Different skills take different amounts of time and parameters to master. Comparing learning a language to watching a video or reading a recipe and spending a few weeks adding some oil and spices in a pot or pan is ridiculous.

Sorry, I wanted to sound edgier and made my point less clear! What I wanted to convey is, it's waaaaay easier to learn a skill when you've been exposed to it since you were a baby.

Re: McDonald's is losing its low-income customers

#368

Post by diogenescynic »

ghc wrote: post #335
diogenescynic wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Propaganda? COVID was the third most common verified cause of death in the US in the first 18 months after the lockdown started in March, and that's despite the lockdown. That's 10x more deaths per month than the particularly bad flu last year. Do you not remember the morgue trucks? The whole health system was overwhelmed.

[flagged]

Re: McDonald's is losing its low-income customers

#369

Post by diogenescynic »

hasperdi wrote: post #328
diogenescynic wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> .001% higher than the flu That isn't true. Just from this paper https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9115089 ... COVID-19 killed roughly five to seven times more hospitalized older adults than influenza. Anecdotal, my uncle, several friends' relatives died from COVID during those lockdowns. I don't know / heard anyone died because of flu (in my extended circle of people I know)

[flagged]

Re: McDonald's is losing its low-income customers

#370

Post by inglor_cz »

johnisgood wrote: post #330
inglor_cz wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they lack the skill? You seem to take the ability of people to cook for granted. I don't think it is automatic anymore. Generational transmission of some skills has ceased. Jamie Oliver famously asked British school kids to name objects such as an apple, a potato or a cucumber, and plenty of them did not know. They just stared at the raw vegetables/fruits, baffled. And as of now, you cannot simply vibe-cook u…

It is very easy to learn. If I could learn it, so can anyone else. :P I have not cooked my entire life, for the most part, but when my situation requires me to cook, then I can. I find a relatively easy recipe and I just follow the instructions. It has worked out fine for me. > Jamie Oliver famously asked British school kids to name objects such as an apple, a potato or a cucumber, and plenty of them did not know Oka…

"It is very easy to learn. If I could learn it, so can anyone else. :P "

Well, the Neanderthals cooked, so it is not exactly a rocket engineering skill ... but it is probably acquired better from other people than alone, and equipment matters as well.

If you learn to cook from your mother in a well-equipped kitchen, you will probably enjoy the process a lot more than alone with Youtube in a cheaply rented flat with one pot, one dull knife and two dented plastic plates. And if people don't enjoy some learning process, they are much more likely to drop out and resign. Especially if fast food alternatives lurk at them from their smartphones.

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