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Seriously, it's way cheaper to hit up McDonald's than to eat even the bare minimum from Taco Bell now. Even their drinks are insanely expensive.
For me, McDonald's is way too expensive for what it is anymore. I'm a little ways away from the $8.29 Big Mac, but not by too much. At my local grocery store, I could put together a better burger for significantly cheaper. That's even if I buy premade patties, buns, and sauces, rather than make them from base ingredients. Buying pre-prepped veggies could get expensive though. They'd need to drop the cost by about 50% for them to reach a point consider to be value, which they can't afford to do.
They can afford it, but they'd rather have the money.
Unfortunately, given that I'm in the NYC DMA, individual franchisees probably couldn't afford to cut their prices in half, as much as that sucks to admit. Minimum wage here is $15.49 per hour, which is ridiculous. Utilities, insurance (both for the business and the workers), sanitation, taxes, rent, ongoing franchising fees, and material costs do add up. Plus, they're not seeing the volume that they had been, due to a combination of people like me who aren't going there and the fact that they're open less hours (because reliable overnight labor is too expensive).