The World Of Fast Food

McDonalds is rolling out a new $5 meal in an attempt to get some customers back amid their soaring prices. We're seeing more of this as inflation causes all prices to go up. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
McDonald's is cooking up a limited five dollars value meal
an effort to win back the customers they lost who
felt out. Priced eighteen dollars Big Max and six dollars
hash Browns seen in places like Connecticut came at the
cost of complaining consumers. For the first time in years.
McDonald saw profit loss last quarter, and people may be
opting out of dining out because it's just become more

(00:21):
expensive roughly four point two percent more than this time last.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
Year, so that's not surprising. Prices are up, maybe people
start eating less. That's its own interesting story. That aside,
there are two articles that I'm kind of combining for
this conversation that I think are interesting just culturally about
where we are with bad food for small six dollars,
for that little triangle of hash browns. Are you kidding me?

(00:46):
It's crazy ough. I ate fast food too often and
the prices are redict article in New York Times about
how McDonald's won one wo n one one at the
cultural battle. There was a moment when Supersize Me came
out in the early two thousands. It was a movie
where a guy ate only McDonald's and claimed it made

(01:08):
his liver fail and all these different sorts of things.
And then uh so there was a culturally a moment
there where like McDonald's was seen, muck was seen as
a bad term McMansions. They used some other examples of
muck being a term of like derision. Well since SENTI
Scottish racism. By the way, since that moment two decades later,

(01:29):
it points out in the New York Times, not only
is McDonald's bigger than it's ever been, with nearly forty
two thousand global locations, but fast food in general has boomed.
There are now some forty chains with more than five
hundred locations in the United States. That's amazing. There are
forty fast food chains that have more than five hundred locations.

(01:50):
I could name fifteen, maybe I couldn't certainly name forty.
Fast food is the second largest private employment sector in
the country after hospitals, and thirty six percent of Americans
eat fast food on any given day. Nearly forty percent
of Americans eat fast food any given wow wow, and
the three major appeals of fast food remain intact. It's cheap,

(02:12):
although not as much as it used to be. It's convenient,
and people love the way it tastes. Also, it turns
out that years of saturating American childhood with fast food
has paid dividends. The kids from the early two thousands
that were getting toys in their happy meal or whatever
are now millennials among the group with the highest rate

(02:33):
of fast food consumption a day. That high rate you
heard was everybody. It's much higher for the millennials. And
they have a lifetime of memories that connect them to
fast food brands McDonald's in particular in their head, so
they're eating a lot of it. Now to this other
article that's in Business Insider today about what's going on
with Starbucks and how if you've been to Starbucks lately

(02:53):
and you look up at their menu, you don't see
much coffee. We've been saying this for years. I've been
saying this for ye it's not a coffee shop, it's
a milkshake house. Well, they've embraced that more than they
ever have. It's difficult to find anything on the menu
that's got much to do with coffee. It's all milkshakes,
and they're packed and people buying the other ten dollars

(03:14):
worth of fat and sugar. So McDonald's won wn that
whole battle cultural battle. It's so interesting. You can start
as one thing and then add a bunch of stuff
that's like masquerading as a cousin of that thing when
it really isn't, And you feel better about walking into
a coffee shop than a McDonald's. I guess Armstrong and

(03:39):
Getty