McDonald's see price changes over time

For as long as I can remember, fast food carried a dual purpose. It was expeditious and cheap. Since the late 2010’s, fast food prices have started to go off the rails. To be fair, everything is expensive these days, but I find it particularly astounding how much a few items from Taco Bell now cost. It’s easy to spend nearly $20. In college I’d spend $5 on a box with 4 or 5 items. To quote Timothy Chalamet, quoting Bob Dylan, “The times, they are a changin’”.

In a world of rapid inflation, not all players operate by the same rules. McDonald’s is the number one public enemy with its 100%+ price increases in the past decade.

This got me thinking about how mobile ordering has soared in popularity with many fast food chains. Given that it’s now easier than ever to digitally order food, what if there was transparency around historical pricing? You can imagine an experience where you could specify a previous year and see how much the price of an item has gone up since then.

Given the murky picture of historical pricing data, the variance in individual franchises, and how much this would enrage consumers, something like this will never get built. If it did, there would be people rioting in the drive-thru.

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