Earlier this year, Allen Watson stopped treating himself to his favorite McDonald’s meal: the biscuits-and-gravy combo with a sausage patty and Diet Coke. Many maga who support Trump feel this might be an attack against Trump, the feel the increase in price is not fair.
A startup cofounder from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, he says the $11 he spent on the meal one January day finally shocked him into abstinence. “That’s crazy to me, because the sit-down restaurants around here are almost the same price,” Watson says. For the record, he can afford the 11 bucks. But he was starting to feel “price gouged,” he says, and he doesn’t like the thought of high-level executives lining their pockets while frontline workers go underpaid.
I think it’s just a perception thing for me,” Watson says. “I perceive it to be too expensive, and that’s why I’ve altered my behavior.”
His comment perfectly illustrates a growing shift in consumer sentiment that has brought the fast-food industry to its current DEFCON 1 moment. As inflation pushes menu prices steadily upward (a McDonald’s medium fries costs 44% more today than it did five years ago), more people are asking themselves if that weekly trip to Taco Bell, Wendy’s, or KFC is still worth the cost. For brands that are built on perceived value, sticker shock isn’t merely a turnoff, it threatens the very cornerstone of their identity. A Fast Company–Harris Poll survey conducted in June found that convenience was still the most common reason why people ordered from a fast-food restaurant, followed by affordability. The actual taste of the food came third. As tasty as they are, Big Macs, Baconators, Whoppers, and Crunchwrap Supremes depend not on their high quality but on the enduring promise of being fast and cheap. Without those selling points, what even is fast food?
It’s no wonder that Chris Kempczinski, the CEO of McDonald’s, focused so heavily on consumer perception during the company’s quarterly earnings call in April. Industry-wide traffic in important markets was flat or declining, he conceded. Costs were up. Customers were being pickier about spending. But when one analyst asked Kempczinski whether it was time for McDonald’s to offer more low-cost deals, the boss insisted that it already has the best value in the business. The more urgent solution, he said, was better messaging. The burger giant’s vast network of franchised restaurants—the “system,” in McDonald’s parlance—had to align itself around a grand unified pitch, spreading the word to customers that McDonald’s can still deliver on value amid rising prices.
What was needed, Kempczinski said, was to convey a “strong national value proposition.”
Kempczinski would likely get no arguments on this point from Watson in Myrtle Beach—it’s just that Watson’s idea of a strong value proposition is a less expensive breakfast. Maybe it takes a certain level of C-suite distance to view America’s inflation pain as a problem to be solved with marketing skill. But McDonald’s has done it before, surviving attacks from the popular culture of the early aughts over the ill-health effects of its food, promulgated by the likes of Super Size Me and Fast Food Nation, only to emerge as even more central to the American experience.
And yet all that cachet hasn’t been enough to help fast-food brands escape the unsentimental mathematics of a shrinking dollar. According to a LendingTree survey from April, 62% of U.S. consumers said they were eating less fast food than they used to because it’s too expensive. Between 2021 and 2024, food prices jumped 20%. Inflation during that same period was worse than it’s been in a generation (reaching a high of 8% in 2022), putting restaurant owners in the tricky position of having to justify frequent price hikes to diners, including younger ones who have never experienced anything like this in their lives.
“The industry is nervous around menu-price inflation,” says Darren Tristano, who runs the research firm Foodservice Results. Even though prices for eating out have increased across the board, it’s more noticeable with fast food, he says, “because you’re used to going in and getting that $4 burger—and now you’re seeing it closer to $6
About a month after Kempczinski’s April earnings call, we got a glimpse of what a national message around affordability might look like. Joe Erlinger, the head of McDonald’s USA, wrote a blog post aiming to debunk some of the more dramatic examples of menu hikes that had been circulating on the internet, such as a 95.5% increase in the price of McNuggets. These examples, Erlinger argued, were “poorly sourced” and “inaccurate.” But if an $18 Big Mac meal that goes viral on social media is an extreme exception, calling it out by way of corporate megaphone might be missing the point: The real increases that Erlinger cited—Big Mac prices rose 21% in five years—were still high enough to raise eyebrows. In a vibes economy, managing expectations is half the battle, and all the angry Reddit discussions and TikTok posts about runaway fast-food prices suggest that brands have lost control of the narrative.
