As Americans continue to struggle to make ends meet in this era of high inflation, one website is trying to help McDonald’s customers find the best deal on Big Macs in their area.
McDonald’s suffered a backlash when news broke that some locations were charging up to $18 or more for a Big Mac sandwich. And costs for the nation’s biggest fast-food chain have generally been skyrocketing all across the board. But prices are often different from one McDonald’s location to another, especially since many are owned and operated by franchise owners and not the corporate headquarters.
That being the case, the cost of your Big Mac could vary wildly, even in your own area. So, customers are being tasked with strategizing their fast-food purchases in this era of Bidenflation.
That is where the Pantry and Larder’s McCheapest map comes in.
Bargain hunters logging onto the site will see a map of the U.S. and can double-click over their state to zero in on their home town where they can see all the Mickey D’s locations in their area.
Each location is color-coded, with red for the most expensive, yellow for mid-priced and green for the cheapest (gray means the site has not recorded a price).
The cheapest Big Mac on June 5 was $3.49 in Stigler, Oklahoma. They highest-price one was $8.09 in Lee, Massachusetts.
“When we first created the map, inflation and rising food prices were dominating the news. We wanted to create something that highlighted how much food prices varied across the country,” Veronica Fletcher told Food & Wine magazine. Fletcher is founder and publisher of Pantry and Larder.
“Everyone can relate to the price of a McDonald’s,” Fletcher added, “and there are well over 10,000 locations in the U.S., which made the Big Mac a perfect fit. We also wanted the map to be useful. By using every McDonald’s location, users can zoom into their area and check where their cheapest Big Mac is.”
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The only drawback is that the prices on the map are not exactly up to date. Fletcher noted that they are currently working on an update, but that the prices are still relatively useful to show where each McDonald’s location prices in compared to the others nearby.
Fletcher went on to say that tracking the price of Big Macs is the perfect way to reflect the fast-food industry.
She explained that people love fast food for a number of reasons, but also because “it’s this value for money that keeps people coming back to fast food burgers. I also think lots of people have a nostalgic connection to burgers and remember when they used to cost half the price they do today.”
Pantry and Larder created a similar interactive map to compare the price of eggs across the country.
Along with the customer ire over the $18 Big Mac prices, some customers were also irked at McDonald’s for its recently announced $5 meal deal plan when they discovered that it was only for a limited time and at a limited number of locations.
Even more customers questioned the chain after it floated a McNugget meal deal costing a whopping $25 that included a 40-piece box of Chicken McNuggets, with two large fries, but no drinks.
The news over the skyrocketing prices led McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski to promise that the company would turn its attention back to “affordability,” the Daily Mail reported.
The CEO’s remarks also came on the heels of reports that foot traffic in America’s fast-food joints decreased by 3.5 percent between January and March since last year, according to the Wall Street Journal. It is a statistic that shows that many Americans are beginning to put tough limits on the number of times they eat out.
McDonald’s, though, is only one of the many fast-food places raising prices as costs and inflation buffet them. To name only a few, Burger King, Chipotle and In-N-Out have also raised prices to offset higher labor costs, which inevitably get passed down to customers.
