its priced as a luxury, but rest assured, quality has dropped conversely.
Quality and size. On a whim I got a fish fillet from McDonalds the other day. At first I thought they gave me a happy meal fish fillet and then I remembered that they don’t have that. It was comically smaller than it used to be.
Unfortunately the fish fillet has always been more expensive than other meals. It doesn’t surprise me that they made it smaller (I assume to price it the same as other sandwiches?).
Fast food has been so ratfucked over the past few years that it wouldn’t be worth it if they hadn’t increased prices by 30%+ to match a sit-down restaurant’s. When you get a fraction of the food and it’s worse, a fast food restaurant adds nothing. Even the convenience is meaningless now that I can order online from most places and it’s ready by the time I get there.
Where I live fast food and a large chunk of sit-down food is the same price, excluding tip. I just order takeout now. Saves money and I always have leftovers.
@[email protected] the sort of thing you expect to see when inflation is down and wages are up right?
Actually, yes. Part of the reason that fast food was so inexpensive was that fast food workers were criminally underpaid. Wages are up because of a combination of a tighter labor market and improved minimum wage laws. I’ve always been in favor of this, but in talking to restaurant owners I understood that they would have to pass increased labor costs on to their customers.
Continuing supply chain disruption from COVID-19 seem to also be a contributing factor, but I’m not sure what a recovery there will look like.
And now there’s not as many fast food workers. They’re being replaced by apps, self-service kiosks, and reduced hours.
Yup, that’s often going to be a tradeoff when increasing a price floor (minimum wage) or when there is a labor shortage. In Oregon when the legislature passed the current minimum wage law, it anticipated that effect. The state’s cost of living (COL) varies widely, with some parts of the state struggling more with COL and others more with unemployment. To alleviate that, there are tiered urban, semi-urban, and rural minimum wages based on the population density of each county.
Personally, I think the apps and self-service kiosks were going to happen anyway. It’s just too tempting from a business perspective when you’re putting in a sales computer system anyway. Versions of self-service restaurants like the automat have been around for over a hundred years. Now with computer systems able to handle orders from multiple sources (app, website, cashier, self-service POS, delivery service) it just kind of makes sense that businesses would want to minimize cashiers. And it’s not like with grocery stores where the self checkout is kinda garbage.
