For several years, I was commuting nearly daily from Louisville to Lexington, Kentucky, and always tended to plan a pit stop at the McDonald’s closest to the midway point, largely because it had both the cleanest public restroom along the route and surprisingly decent coffee. Most of the mornings I came in, there was a corner table of older men in their 70s and 80s who would meet up mostly to nurse their own cups of coffee and complain. “It’s a group for ranting,” one of the participants told me with a sly smile.
And rant they would: about politics, about the daily news, about the dry growing season and any number of personal grievances. One of the most popular was the price of the food on the menu board across the restaurant dining room. As one of the men once bemoaned while tapping his receipt with his thumbnail, “Fast food just isn’t cheap anymore.”
However, it’s not just McDonald’s.
Things have changed since 2016, when Marketplace ran a report answering the question of “Why fast food is cheap. Really cheap.” In it, they spoke with Buzzfeed editor Vanessa Wong, who had spent time covering what had come to be regarded as a serious price war between the major fast food companies. At the time, fast food as an industry was in a tense spot; after years of losing customers to fast-casual restaurants like Chipotle and Panera Bread, the competition for any remaining drive-thru loyalists was hot.
In February of that year, Wong reported, McDonald’s announced that customers could pick two of four “iconic menu items,” including a Big Mac, Filet-O-Fish, a Quarter Pounder with Cheese or a 10-piece order of Chicken McNuggets, all for $5. This coincided with Wendy’s “four for $4” deal, as well as Burger King’s “five for $4” promotion.
Seven years later, Wendy’s has actually overtaken Burger King as the most expensive fast-food chain with the average meal costing $6.63.
Across the board, fast food menu prices jumped significantly throughout the pandemic. As reported by CNET, data from Pricelisto, a website that tracks menu prices for United States fast food chains, shows that menu prices were up about 13% from 2021 to 2022. Wendy’s and Chick-fil-A were both on the higher end of price increases, with a respective 35% and 15.6% increase over the previous year’s prices.
In 2023, the numbers only continued to climb; a report from the National Restaurant Association shows that menu prices in September rose by 6% over the same period in 2022. This is both a good and a bad thing.
I know, I know. Are price increases ever really a good thing? It’s tough to say “yes,” especially when there’s currently a score of people waiting in lines at fast food chains across the country, each with a few dollars in their pocket hoping that it’s enough to scrape together a satisfying meal. However, on a more global scale, the fact that the price of fast food has risen to the point that it’s hitting the Reddit headlines, means that perhaps consumers — especially those who don’t truly rely on McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Taco Bell as an affordable solution to hunger — will start to assess more critically the conditions from which their value meal emerges. As the pandemic showed us, cheap food always comes at a cost.
There’s a lot that goes into how a meal is priced, including the cost of labor, the cost of ingredients and the cost of logistics and transportation — essentially how much it costs to get all the elements of said meal from wherever they originated into the walk-in. Over the last several years, most of these factors have gotten more expensive.
The price of minimum-wage labor, which buoys the fast food industry and has for decades, is rising, which is a good thing, despite the throngs of fast food leaders warning that it may result in higher prices. For decades, many full-time fast food workers were living beneath the poverty line themselves, which was one of the biggest motivations behind the new California law passed in September that will raise the minimum wage for the state’s fast food workers to $20. In doing so, Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom said he wanted to dispel the long-held notion that fast food work was just for teenagers, rather than household leaders trying to provide for their families.
“That’s a romanticized version of a world that doesn’t exist,” Newsom said. “We have the opportunity to reward that contribution, reward that sacrifice and stabilize an industry.”
Fast food restaurants are also navigating the same ingredient inflation that home cooks are facing.
Food prices in August 2023 increased 4.3% from the same time in 2022, and those numbers were already high, too. As TIME reported in January, nearly every food group cost more in 2022 than it did in 2021; per Bureau of Labor Statistics data, grade A eggs were up 138%; margarine was up 43.8%; butter sticks were up 38.5%; all-purpose flour was up 34.5%; and spaghetti and macaroni noodles were up 31.3%.
For the last several years, most restaurants have also been subject to unexpected ingredient shortages and supply chain delays, as the increased demand for delivery and takeout exacerbated runs on items like paper napkins, coffee cups, straws and to-go containers.
Yet despite all the costs that go into creating a Baja Blasted, Ronald-approved, finger lickin’ good meal, fast food’s identity and legacy in the United States is practically inseparable from topics of inequality and poverty, which is one of the thornier sides to the current price increase.
It’s well-documented that nutritional, accessible, and culturally relevant food is disproportionately situated in middle- and high-income neighborhoods. Meanwhile, as public health historian Chin Jou wrote in her 2017 book “Supersizing Urban America,” following the 1968 riots in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., then-president Richard Nixon thought that promoting “Black capitalism” could serve as a balm for civil unrest. His administration began issuing federal funds to incentivize McDonald’s and other fast food chains to enter low-income, primarily Black markets.
As Max Holleran wrote for The New Republic:
In a position statement released after he created the Office of Minority Business Enterprise in 1969, Nixon stated: “What we need is to get private enterprise into the ghetto, and get the people of the ghetto into private enterprise—not only as workers, but as managers and owners.” The program was allocated $65 million in the first year, although Nixon asked for three times as much, and fast food companies were some of the most eager participants. They used federal money to expand franchises from the white suburbs into low-income black neighborhoods, providing an easily-copied business model and a tested product.
This is one of the several systemic reasons why many residents of urban communities in the United States have access to multiple fast food restaurants, but not necessarily a good grocery store.
As a result, as NPR reported in 2020, about 19 million people, or roughly 6% of the population, live in a food desert where access to fresh, healthy food is limited. The fresh food that is available is also often pricier; a 2010 estimate from the USDA found that groceries sold in food deserts can cost significantly more than groceries sold in suburban markets, meaning people in low-income communities impacted by food insecurity often pay more money for their food.
Of course, it’s not just residents of low-income communities who eat fast food. In fact, as Vox reported, research shows that the wealthier one is, the more they actually eat fast food. “About 32% of people who earn less than 130 percent of the federal poverty line — $32,630 a year for a family of four — ate fast food daily,” Vox’s Rachel Sugar wrote. “But 42 percent of people above 350% of the poverty line — $112,950 a year or more for that size family — were daily consumers.”
These statistics both push back on the stereotype that poor people are less discriminating in their diets, as well as crystalize the difference between consuming fast food as a convenience and as a need. It’s easy to decry fast food as “lazy” when you don’t have to take two buses after work to the nearest grocery store only to pay more for basics than one would in a suburban community outside the city. Even the National Institute of Health has determined that “people experiencing food insecurity may adopt an unfavourable diet with high fast-food intake due to financial constraints, as this kind of diet is generally less expensive than healthier diets.”
However, regardless of how much the price for a chicken sandwich or side of fries increases, at the end of the day, fast food companies are multinational corporations who can’t — and honestly shouldn’t — be compelled to stand in as supplemental nutrition assistance in the form of dollar menus and seasonal deals. That responsibility largely belongs to the United States government, who is currently fumbling the ball, especially after the election of infamous SNAP-hater Mike Johnson as the new House speaker.
More Americans than ever need affordable solutions to feed themselves and their families, and fast food is no longer the cheap way out.
