McDonald’s earnings, revenue miss estimates as consumer pullback worsens
McDonald's earnings, revenue miss estimates as consumer pullback worsens
Looks like McDonald's is reaping what it sowed. Shit food at shit prices and no one wants to buy?! SHOCKER.
I went to McD’s a week ago for an Egg McMuffin meal with an extra hash brown and a large Coke for the drink: $15.00. Less than 2 years ago, this exact meal was like $5.
I hope they go down in flames at this point.
I don't understand getting to the drive-thru and seeing those prices and ordering the food anyhow. Why don't you just tell the person, "actually, never mind. this is too expensive?"
Go to a grocery store nearby and grab a deli sandwich and fountain drink. At least it'll be fresh food.
If you are pressed for time and/or have your hungry kids in the car then a couple of dollars isn’t a big deal. But that doesn’t mean those consumers are going to come back again after getting burned by high prices.
Starbucks raised the price of my iced coffee and changed the recipe for the brew. I still ordered and drank it, but I have cut my visits from three or four times a week to only once in the last three months. This means they lost out on not only my drink revenue, but the revenue on what I would have ordered for my wife and kids as well.
Coke for breakfast, yuck
Edit: you can downvote all you want, I’m not wrong. If you’re drinking coke for breakfast, you’ve got issues, maybe negligent parents.
Trying not to be an ass with this info:
A large McDonalds coke is 290 calories and 77 grams of sugar (153% DV). Even a small is 150 calories and 39 grams sugar (77% DV).
I get it, I don’t like my lifestyle being attacked either and I freely admit I consciously choose some unhealthy options in my life such as having a few drinks a week and eating fatty foods or cheesecakes now and then.
But please, if you are starting your day by slamming 70 grams of sugar in your face, please reconsider lol. It’s gonna give you diabetes and ain’t no regular American can afford that.
That doesn’t even take into account what they add to the food itself 😟
Thats ok, you can have something else.
Yeah gross. Everyone knows dr pepper is the breakfast sort drink.
Last time I went to McDonalds it was almost as much as a decent pub burger.
Why wouldn't I just go there and get twice the quality unless I was close by and totally pressed for time?
McDonald's has long forgotten what is supposed to be. Cheap, low quality food. Now it is expensive, low quality food. Like you said...you can get a better burger at a restaurant for the same price if not lower. Longhorn Steakhouse has a burger lunch special for $9.99
Just before COVID they had started to do a bit of a rebrand. They drove the prices up a little they had a decent chicken sandwich that was made of chicken breast. They brought in better buns the burgers were still s*** but the quality was a lot higher and the price was moderately higher. After COVID hit they scrapped all the fancy stuff for the menu and kept the high prices then inflation hit and they doubled those high prices.
Also there are fast food alternatives to McDonalds as well.
IMO, Wendy's has much better burgers. Haven't had Carl's Jr's in a long while but I remember their "$6 Burgers" were pretty good.
Burger King, the meat quality seems to have gone downhill. Like an unchewable but in each meat patty. They used to be my favorite.
Edit: the "$6 burger" is now called the thick burger since it now costs more than $6
In Canada, A&W has cheaper prices for WAY better quality food. It was a few years back we were enjoying some "as a treat" and realized it was not just significantly better than McD's, but also much cheaper, and we decided we just weren't going back.
My household is partial to a couple of chicken buddy burgers in a time crunch.
I'm not paying $16 for a 10 piece nugget, fries, and a drink. I can pay $12 for more and better food at a sit down restaurant next door.
There's a pizza place near my house that does wood-fired NY pizza, two giant slices plus a soda, for $7.50.
I dunno how they're making those prices work, but that's the only junk food meal I'm buying these days. I'd pay more for less food of worse quality at any fast food place.
Because good food is cheap to make, especially when buying in bulk like restaurants. Pizza is super cheap to make from scratch, especially when you factor in restaurants buying in bulk. I make pizza from scratch pretty often, the dough is negligible cost wise (bread flour, water, salt, and yeast), the sauce is semi-expensive to make only because I use the fancy san-marzano tomatoes and make almost a gallon of amazing sauce for $18 (mainly the cost of the tomatoes) - for sauce good enough to get from a restaurant you could easily make a lot more for a lot less. The toppings vary in cost obviously, but those are easy to pass the cost on to the consumer.
Soda is also negligible cost wise, the syrup for a very large cup of soda is maybe a few cents for the restaurant, soda has one of the highest markups of any food items.
I can go to Costco or Little Caesars and get four pizzas for the price of three people to eat at McDonald's.
Have you tried paying attention to what customers want and will accept rather than dictating to them?
Companies are entering a new age of FAFO
Yeah these companies have gotten so out of control. They act like they are gods gift to earth and we should be grateful for anything they allow us to have. The same goes for employment too. They treat people like shit because they think someone else will come around and be grateful for the opportunity.
I'm not accepting that anymore
Fuck you MC Donalds for forcing me to use your god damn stupid ass terminals for ordering something. There are just a few things I hate with such a passion than this god forsaken pieces of shit. Let me order my food at the counter. Its a much better experience and its hell a lot faster. They are one of the many reasons I don't go there.
Honestly I would prefer the terminals to ordering from a person. If they fucking worked that is, big shame they almost never do.
You are so right about those terminals. I hate them with a passion too.
The shareholders probably care, but to the layman, expecting 6.61 billion and only earning 6.49 billion doesn't amount to much. They're not going anywhere.
as a shareholder i also do not care
i had mcdonald’s for lunch today and was surprised how expensive it is now tbh. i know there’s no £1 cheese burger anymore but how is it £1.79
Looking at the stock price movement today, it doesn't seem like the shareholders care, in fact it went up a significant amount probably because they were thinking it'd be worse. They'll care if it continues to get worse, but for now they don't seem to mind.
While crude, there is a whole economic concept around this.
McDonald's is on the boycott list for the Palestinian genocide. I'm really curious if that had any effect.
I would think it's not that much inside the US but McDonald's has a large global presence.
From the article:
“Industry traffic has declined in major markets like the U.S., Australia, Canada, and Germany. In several markets, we also continue to be negatively impacted by the war in the Middle East,” McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski said on the company’s earnings call.
So it does seem to be working to some extent.
I boycotted McD due to this list, UK, and I really don’t miss it. It also got hella expensive and the service got worse.
I must say, boycotting things has had no Ill effect on my life and in fact I likely spend less money than before.
I’ve been boycotting McGenocide, KFC, Coca Cola, etc. for 10 months now and it’s not like it’s any effort at this point. I’m healthy and wasn’t planning on eating that garbage until Palestine is free. And at this point why would I ever eat it again? Shit food, unhealthy, expensive, supporting genocide. Why would I go back to it?
My household has boycotted them due to this so there's definitely some of us.
I haven't gone to McDonald's in YEARS and I'm not missing anything!
Ever since the big Mac meal went over $10, I was out. That was years ago and now it's even worse. I'm also not a sucker for using their god-damned app so I can get a $1 small fry and a free q-tip. If I'm not happy with your prices at the drive-thru, then I'm just not going there.
Their burgers are also filled with soy filler, won’t even fill you up anymore.
Seems like the accountants all across the drive through world have forgotten that the reason cheap food was so popular is that it was CHEAP food.
Ironically even though their main menu items and combos have gone crazy price-wise in the last couple years, McDonald’s is one of the few fast food places I still frequent for lunch because if you use the app you can still get a decently filling meal for 6-7 bucks; 2 double cheeseburgers BOGO $1, large fry (free), large drink at regular price. Not great, but 6 something bucks. The quarter pounder combo meal I used to get has nearly tripled in price in the last 5 years and the Big Mac is not only smaller but way more expensive…
Not sure what they were expecting to happen 🤷♂️
This chart really highlights the problem; since 2014 overall inflation is 31% but MCDONALDS inflation is at 100%!
Raising Cane's is conspicuously absent from that chart. A Box Combo went up 61% over that time period.
I went there a few months ago because of some happy meal toy my kids wanted. It was $60 to eat there. We could have went to Denny’s or Waffle House and gotten a massive amount of food for that price.
Instead, McDonald’s started filling their burgers with garbage filler and charging even more for it. My kids got home and were still hungry. Never going there again.
I wonder how much more money they'd have if they hadn't renovated all their locations into ugly grey slabs of brick and glass?
Bring back the burger stools.
We used to be a PROPAH countreh
McDonalds is expensive as fuck, the food fucking sucks, it used to be I liked going there on occasion, to enjoy some cheap stuff, Cheeseburgers used to be like 1 euros. now they are like 2.50, that's the price of a frozen pizza at a supermarket that I can just throw in to the oven if I am feeling like eating junk food and I don't even have to go to the City for it, wait in line at the drive thru,etc.
Value for money is the heart of the problem. The quality has been declining for a good while now. I enjoy the occasional junk food meal on the rare times I need to travel. And McDonalds was almost always been my choice. But it's been a long time since I have even considered them for that quick stop and go meal.
Inflation or not, I will look for the value I get. I ain't getting it at McDonalds anymore.
McDonald is not a food company, it’s a real estate company.
All the posters complaining about the food quality are missing the point. They could sell cardboard and for years their bottom line would be unaffected until franchisees started failing en masse.
But their bottom line was affected. That's the point of this post.
I don't see how that's relevant. They still want to sell food. They can coast for a while, but this isn't good for them regardless.
Two days ago my gf had a few bites left of a McDonald's cheeseburger and offered it to me. I took one bite and said "No thanks". That she not taste or feel like food. The kicker is that she then offered it to the cat, who will eat anything. I will swear to whatever god you believe in, that cat turned his head away like she was presenting a decayed corpse. She tried two more times and he literally ran away from this burger.
The fact that this shit is overpriced on top of being horrible food adds insult to injury. I don't understand how McDonald's was ever popular to begin with.
When I was deployed, we had a dog at one of our checkpoints that would hang out and follow us. She would eat any MRE we gave her, except the Beef Stew MRE.
We watched this starving dog chomp down everything we gave her, and she had puppies. One sniff of the Beef Stew and she turned her head.
We collectively decided “I ain’t eatin that shit ever again.”
FWIW I never do, but I've given up trying to tell her that.
The cat only gets cheese when the dog does, and very little. And not from me -- they hit her up for it and she caves.
being horrible food
This is the most upsetting of all. I worked a combined 4 years at various restaurants in the 90s (from styrofoam packaging to 'queueing' micro-wave eras), the last part while in college and needing a place where I could get long shifts and legal free food -- hint: Cool Runnings. It was maligned often, even then, but it was honest food, still -- it was mass-cooked, but it was beef and actual pickles and actual onions and real ketchup and such. People complain about it being oily or bland, and that's a taste thing we can't refute; but it was beef and bread and cheese, and that job and a bus pass got me most of the way through where rice and beans couldn't.
I don’t understand how McDonald’s was ever popular to begin with.
I agree with every single criticism of McDonald's that is in this discussion.
But my dude, let me tell you how delicious McDonald's was in the 70s and 80s. Their fries were less crispy than today, but OMFG I would have killed for them. The food was good. It was still fast food, it was never what you'd come up with if you cooked the same thing at home, but their burgers and fries were good. How good other stuff on the menu was is probably more of a mixed bag.
I might let someone have the tip of my pinky if they could magic a double cheeseburger and large McD's fries directly from 1979 onto my plate for dinner one time.
Over the decades they have changed ingredients and formulations in addition to (or in some cases because of, I'm sure) all of this corporate greed. What you eat today is not what we were enjoying back then, and I'm sure what we were enjoying back then was not as good as early McDonald's.
But it was at least cheap, fast, and reasonably enjoyable to eat for a time.
I fucking loved McDonald's soggy beef-fat-fried fries. It's all I ever really wanted from there until they stopped with the beef fat.
I used to have a cat who absolutely loved their French fries. He'd come and beg for them and try to steal them like a dog. When he managed to get one, he'd hold it in his little fist (he had pterodactyly) and eat it like a toddler.
like she was presenting a decayed corpse
I mean.. it quite literally is a ground up corpse. Given this is McDonald's, I wouldn't be surprised if it was a little decayed as well.
Well in a cat's case, it being a corpse is a feature.
I see a lot of people dancing around 2 different points... 1. Fast food costs too much, and 2. The price to value equation sucks now. I absolutely agree with #1, at some point these corporations have to accept that their increased cost of operations (fair wage movements, ingredient costs) do not increase the value of their product. I'm sure they're doing the math... how much can we raise prices before our sales drop off enough to matter. Sounds like they may have finally hit the break point.
#2, I'd argue, has been true for a very long time. Maybe 20 years ago in the days of value menus, fast food was worth it. It was crap, but it was cheap. But food was way cheaper in general, so cooking for yourself was, and still is, a huge cost advantage. if you're careful with your shopping and plan meals, you will eat better, healthier, and cheaper than anything else.
I'm not immune to the occasional fast food stop, but I'm always disappointed. I think it is something that's time has passed and needs to die off.
A two cheeseburger meal costs about eight US dollars where I am. For two dollars more, I can get this humongous burrito from a Mexican restaurant across the street loaded with potatoes, beans, and shredded chicken. For two dollars less, I can get two pieces of fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, and potato salad from the deli counter at the grocery store literally in the same car park.
i haven't been to mcd in years, but my parents were sick with covid and requested i pick up some mcdonalds for them-- JFC how could i have ever thought it couldn't get any worse--what a fucking shitshow
Good
Good
You know it's bad when Americans won't buy burger.
Oh, I still buy burgers. I'll just go to a burger establishment to get them instead. Fast food used to be fast (aka convenient) and cheap. Now it's just fast.
Note that I was not a frequent fast food eater before this, but I have pivoted to going to restaurants when I forget my lunch.
The shrinkflation and price increases would have nothing to do with it all. Mcsmall mac is comical.
Edit: seems that some people dont know what sarcasm is. Thats sarcasm for the uninitiated...
I can get a lunch combo with a burger, fries, and a coke for $8 at a local joint that's far superior to anything McDonald's serves. They priced themselves out of being competitive.
It's like $30 to feed me and two elementary aged children with no drinks. McDonald's is the most expensive of all the fast food places. Arby's is much better and often less expensive.
I vote with my spending. If I’m doing all the work ordering, then I should see cheaper prices. McDs is double-dipping. Saving on wages and trying to charge more. Nope.
I'm in Canada and I tell my kids about the days when McDonald's jr chicken or cheeseburgers were a $1 regular price. I even remember McDonald's doing a $1 big Mac promotion. I ate like 50 big Macs that month
I went to one for the first time in years because I was starving and a shitty hash brown, breakfast sandwich and coffee sounded good. coffee half full, no hash brown and the sandwich gave me a three day bout of food poisoning. never again, I would rather not eat.
They have been busy closing restaurants in the center of Stockholm lately, a few years back they closed the first ever McDonnald's restaurant in Sweden, they also closed the highly popular restaurant at Norrmalmstorg at the same time....
We've been to visit our family in Boo, and gone to I think a Nacka McDonald's.
It's different from the McDonald's I've worked at and seen, in that it's clean and visually appealing. It stands out as being a little up-scale vs American metropolitan McDonald's, which usually seem like late-stage professional surrender, and STILL it stuck out as being "not good enough" for Sweden. I think Trump has been good for people to re-examine their emulation of Americans and decide what they want for themselves. Take-out in Sweden was always expensive, based on visiting over the 20 years since our family grew there and we began visiting, and I barely saw it as a worthwhile thing then; making it more expensive will kill its presence in many countries completely.
I don't care other than economy is a powerful predictor of election outcome. I think we are due for a market contraction, and I've been out of work for 4 months, but I'm hoping it can hold on for another quarter.
Consumer spending continues to show growth and be positive. This is a McDonald's and fast food generally contraction due to the industry's greed -- pricing of fast food has outstripped actual inflation drastically.
Best of luck finding work.
I'm with you, in that I smell a recession. I don't think it will be cataclysmic, but we have a lot of things pointing to some shrinkage:
Consumers are unhappy with greedflation
Housing is fucking expensive and no one has extra cash on hand
Multiple reports of a large percentage people not being able to make bills or worried about making them.
I haven't eaten there in nearly 15 years after a period where every time I ate food at a McDingle's location I got massive food poisoning.
Sounds like I haven't been missing much.
McDonald’s is just a joke at this point. Pretty much stopped getting food from them except for breakfast once in a while, but even stopped that. My usual is a Sausage and Egg McMuffin with extra cheese. It costs a whopping $6.08 in my area.
I said🖕you greedy McCunts, I’m making my own and found a copycat recipe that is really, really good and I honestly can’t tell the difference. I bought ingredients to make 12 sandwiches at $1.73 each and even had two extra patties leftover. A savings of $4.35 per!
Of course we are not including my labor costs, yada yada, but it proves the point. Not to mention McDonald’s pays pennies on the dollar buying in bulk, so even with labor, they are making a killing.
They want to reverse that then lower their prices to account for actual inflation.
The plebs are not buying our shiti slop... poor corpos, didnfu nuffin to deserve this!!! RHEEE
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