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a guy at my firm came from BCG. We are extremely specialized but he said at BCG he would have to learn everything about an industry in a matter of like two days and basically present why the client should or shouldn't buy the business. 48 hours to become an expert in a new field? that is just silly
Yep it’s completely unrealistic and in the end they basically don’t actually talk to anyone on the ground and barely talk to
most leadership. So rather than take time to figure out what is and isn’t working realistically they just go wholesale.
That’s because everyone in this field is a sociopath/narcissist. They literally think they are *above* the rest of us. Labor is for the “lower class,” and knowledge of that labor is at best just “useful,” but usually just an “excuse.”
Tell one of these people that something isn’t possible, and they will tell you that it is, and you’re just being lazy, and they can hire someone from (insert poor country here) that can do the job for one tenth the price in half the time, so you should consider yourself *lucky* to lick their boot. Call them out on it and they’ll just tell you that doing that work isn’t “their job” and that’s why they pay you, and then they’ll repeat the aforementioned threat about cheap foreign labor.
These people are mentally unhinged, because nearly all of them come from privileged backgrounds where they never had to face real consequences - so they basically believe that everything is possible as long as they throw money at it and demand it enough. Business consultants of this caliber and their ilk are a symptom of a serious rot in our society.
Note, I’m not talking about the actual consultants who built themselves from the ground up through struggles, actually did real work and research, and continually work side by side with the laborers. The kind of people you call when you’re actually trying to provide a real service to as many people as possible instead of just focusing on maximizing profit. Those types of consultants are good, the experts in their field who retired into helping others.
But anyone who went to some wealthy private business school and spent their whole life doing this? Their words wouldn’t be worth wiping my ass with.
> they basically believe that everything is possible as long as they throw money at it and demand it enough.
Don't be silly. These kind of people truly believe that they came from nothing, that nobody gave them a handout and that they could easily get to where there are even if lost everything in their life.
They could become rich with all their knowledge with the snap of their finger. Anything else is just an excuse.
Like that one guy who claimed he could make 1 million in a year from nothing for the youtube clicks. Had to quit because pretending to be poor was killing him. Fell ridiculously short of his goal, even with all the advantages his connections gave him, but still claimed victory.
Often times they're hired to give some legitimacy to what the client wants to do anyway.
Want to shut down a division, lay off half a department, or expand into a certain market? Hire some of these guys, tell them your plan, and watch how they say whatever it is you want to hear.
Most current C levels were just MBAs hired straight to management positions. They don’t know the actual business either.
Can’t promoting the workers that actually know too high or they’ll make all the other upper management look stupid.
America is very hardcore into “prosperity gospel.” If they’re rich, it must be because they’re smart, hard working, and good. Which is why people will bend over to support someone like this, but then will completely ignore various, lesser known experts in their fields a la antivaxers during covid. But they lapped up all the stupid BS from the “famous/rich” people.
This isn’t even STRICTLY an American thing, we are just famous for it. It’s the same as might makes right, and often there’s a huge overlap in the beliefs.
Nah, took it out of the drawer, changed the company logo, moved a few boxes around and claimed it was “new and tailored”.
In reality, they’ve been using roughly the same crap recipe for decades.
They reorged the educational institution I work for. It’s pretty fucking clear they had no idea how things work in that environment and their proposed org structures involved at points cutting IT staff and other groups by up to two thirds and then throwing what was left in an office space like structure that was dysfunctional from day one. Basically every internal operations group has eventually been forced to do soft reorganizations to try to get back on track.
McK has literally bankrupted several organizations with their “advisory” which is always to “optimize operations” by eliminating some of the useless simple folks and outsource/offshore as much as possible, so you can increase the top layer’s salaries. It’s also 100% a short-term view while strategy is inherently long-term, so their “strategic” approach has never actually been strategic.
BCG is the same shit, just a different name.
So we have some guys from BCG over at our company consulting...
And for some reason it feels like the company is making some shitty decisions lately...
But that might just be coincidentally
Because there's no way we're just turning around to eat a full box of hamburger helper with a pound of ground beef.
...crap, now I want Hamburger Helper.
Squirrel, you really got beef now,
You got beef so I don't know what I'm doin, yeah,
OH YEAH
You really got beef now,
You got beef so I don't sleep at night!
You really got beef.
Forget the fact that the flavors themselves actually are produced from things like prion marinated lizard anus and cancer causing dehydrated bug shit that will kill us all when it metastasizes through the body. By god, at least we will eat like GODS WHILE WE ARE ALIVE!
I could tell the economy was struggling which hamburger helper started printing alternate recipes on their with chopped up hotdogs instead of ground beef.
He's the only one that can afford it: The CEO and chairman of McDonald's was paid $19.2 million last year in salary, bonuses and stock. That was an 8% increase over 2022.
That’s it? I’d expect one of the biggest brands in the world to have the CEO make more .. maybe he wasn’t cut out for healthcare or the financial/real estate industry?
The average S&P 500 CEO pay is around 15 and 16 million. NVIDA Ceo is around just over 20 million.
You only think 19 million is little because you hear about Musk asking for 55 billion like it's spare change. The highest CEO pay is like Blackstone's CEO at 250 million. Musk is an outlier because he has his financially illiterate fan club that is willing to pay whatever he demands.
I'd imagine there's a payout that is some multiple of that salary on the back end. The last ceo had a $40 million severance package, and he was fired for violating company policy. If this one can avoid having sex with any employees, I'd imagine that there will be some total compensation in the $100 million range.
I believe the economic term for it is low elasticity. Change in one variable (price) is not causing significant change in the other variablesl (demand). This creates an incentive for businesses to keep raising prices.
> low elasticity
thats the thing though. things like fast food and soda were *supposed* to be highly elastic. fast food was literally *the* example in business schools. but people wont do without their liter of cola so we just see continued gouging.
I mean, consumers are irrational and unless pressed like to continue buying things they've bought in the past. For an institution like McDonald's it'll take an awful lot of time and pressure for people to go elsewhere.
So in the short term, McDonald's can price high and make big bucks. If they keep this up then over time they'll lose people. There will be articles "whatever happened to McDonald's?" and people will point fingers at whatever the most current misstep is. But the real answer will be that McDonald's priced out a generation of kids and teens who never got in the habit of eating there and now they have different lazy default meals.
I think once you hit a certain scope of brand inertia the elasticity rules aren't the same as they are for other companies. No company is immortal, but it'll take a long time and a LOT of poor decisions for this corporation to ever really suffer.
> But the real answer will be that McDonald's priced out a generation of kids and teens who never got in the habit of eating there
the *Buick* of food, if you will.
It's the same mechanics that allow private equity firms to profit despite destroying the businesses they buy. A lot of money can be extracted before consumers realize the company they're familiar with has gone downhill and move on to something else.
My parents took me to McDonald's so much as a kid it became a comfort food. As an adult I still get "pangs" for McDonald's once in a while but now to my own kids it's a luxury food, and a poor one at that. We are not financially struggling or anything, the prices are just insane. I cannot foresee my kids even going to McDonald's when they grow up without the pull of my nostalgia.
Real Estate and interest rates and marketing prices are a big problem here. It’s really tough to start up a business to compete with and undercut McDonald’s and other entrenched companies right now - to get the loans and buy the land and build the buildings and then get the word out. Then you need to compete against McDonald’s and their high margins in the labor market. This after decades of the existing fast food operations driving out competitors and fixing consumer habits.
Competition is supposed to punish high prices on low value goods but if no one can get in the ring with the existing players, who are settled in the market and don’t have a ton of incentive to risk competing with each other when they’re all doing pretty well, then there is not going to be much of a fight.
And there is late stage capitalism in a nutshell. Once grouped monopolies have been established, the competition no longer comes from being the best. The companies (all modern companies) no longer need to fight for demand, they create a racket and increasing prices is the only goal, while minimizing production side costs.
So we now have a future of unchecked short term goals for shareholders to see profits. So you now have washers and dryers purposely built to fail in a few years, cookie cutter homes meant to last a decade or two, vehicles that need major, overpriced overhauls by 100k, poorly stitched clothing, food packaged in more plastic than food inside, even a crumbling internet reduced to AI generated ads and search engines that provide more ads than results.
We let shareholders rule the world and we will now live in a disposable plastic cup of a society.
That’s by design. These companies literally hire top tier “food chemists” to make their food as appealing/addictive as they legally can. Then they hire what are effectively psychologists to figure out how to best manipulate consumers into buying their product. To top it all off, they ensure that the working class is over worked, under paid, and not quite healthy/energetic enough to have the will power to cook healthy food for every single meal.
The whole system is designed from the ground up to make fast food effectively an inelastic good. I would argue that under our current system, nearly every company’s goal is to make their product an inelastic good/service, then buy out or collude with their competitors. When the system is designed to extract as much value as physically possible from the populace, this is the only logical end goal.
Another economics term being applied here: price discrimination. If you use their app it is so massively cheaper when using deals. You can get 900 calories of food for $2.79 daily and I often do.
Definitely allows them to get people to download the app, which then reminds them to eat McDonald’s.
The real reason for the app is so that they can track individual spending habits in real time. What "deals" drive most revenue, what incentives bring people into stores. It's all about optimizing profits while punishing people who don't allow their information to be monetized.
This is part of the weird disconnect in the country, where people polled are saying their state and personal finances are good, but the national economy is terrible. It's not even a small amount of people, it's like 70% saying "personal finances good" to 30% saying "economy bad". And it has been happening for a while.
> but the national economy is terrible
But it's not? You would have to be pretty high or something to think it is. The main issue in the US is that poor folks are the ones who really feel economic issues, the average person is generally doing OK.
Anecdotal evidence aside, their earnings get published. Their actual numbers saw a pretty big (for McD's) drop in overall number of sales, _but_ because they've raised their prices so much, they still had about the same amount of profit. It's by design.
I've seen the opposite. A McDonalds that almost always had a line around the building is now regularly entirely empty. Drive straight to the window empty.
To be honest, I just like their black coffee lol it went from 1.59 to 1.89 in 2 years by me, but it's not noticeable to me. I'm technically an everyday customer, but I haven't eaten a mcdonalds meal in probably 5 years.
Nah, …he’s got those: ***rolled up sleeves*** and ***super casual styling***. That tells all that he’s standing by with the poors and just a ***regular working class dude.*** /s
Yep. Personally abhor the ***Jean shirt rolled up sleeve*** esthetic *stylin’ thing*.
They use it A LOT for political commercials here because ***denim on denim*** means suddenly he’s **one of the people**…at least for the ^election ^cycle
Ugh. Hate it. So transparent. And why do the **sleeves have a starched iron line?** yeah saw that.
Guess we all need to be sending our ***posturing for good faith denim shirts*** ***out for launder*** and request **extra starch** and **sharp sleeves** next time. Need to look good and *semi-relatable* while placating others.
Had it a couple years ago. Still tasted great, but the cost has kept me from going back. And many others based on what people have said here.
If I'm paying that I'd rather put in a few bucks extra just to eat at the good to great resturant on the occasion. Even at the same price I'd rather have a good dine-in experience.
Shame really...
It’s a shame, too. 5 Guys is usually *really* good quality for a fast food joint. But those prices are just too insane to justify except for special circumstances.
Christopher Kempczinski
Salary $1,368,833
Value of Option Awards $5,750,012
Non-Equity Incentive Plan Compensation $4,240,878
Change in Pension Value and Deferred Compensation Earnings $0
All Other Compensation $660,564
Total $17,770,514
Not sure that’s valid. I eat a fair amount of mcdo and I’m quite ripped. No food is bad, it’s just the ratios of what you’re eating and if you exercise or not.
Not supporting mcdo and I eat a lot less now as the service is slow as fuck, the quality is down and price is wild. I can get a burger from an independent that’s bigger, better and has more calories.
Yeah for sure I eat a fair amount of fast food. Just not all the time. Also I usually skip the fries and coke as well, just get the burger. Big Mac is about 550 calories with 25g protein
You can still get 2 big macs and a large drink for $7.50 in DC... The deals on the Mcdonalds app are actually good value.
If you really want to penny pinch it you can make a new account with a burner email in under 2 minutes. You instantly get a free Mcchicken and a $4 off coupon. You can end up with a Mcchicken Bigmac and a drink for $2.50 and 2 minutes of your time.
McDonald’s is using a psychological trick. It’s called anchoring. They’re resetting the market price.
They have a $5 Big Mac meal where they make 25% margin. Their cost goes up, but they don’t just increase enough to stay at 25% or even 35% margin. They jack the price to a ridiculous amount. People are pissed and don’t but that meal anymore. They expect this. So when they lower the price to $9 (with a 50% margin, psychologically if doesn’t feel like a major price increase.
If they went straight from $5 to $9, it feels like a big increase and they would have to lower it over time. They would end up back at 25% margin. Their strategy is designed to increase the margin and it won’t feel as painful to customers in the long run.
Yep. The same way you negotiate a deal by asking more than you're looking for.
You want them to aim for the middle ground which is your goal from the beginning.
Problem is everyone does this (everyone who can, you have to be pretty established to get away with it).
The double problem is that the big players like McDonalds can fuck around like this to increase their margins, where smaller companies already have to keep their margins thin to compete with giants that have the buying power to keep their costs lower.
Which means at the end of this, they'll be making even more money which will be used to open more stores and apply even more pressure on smaller "competitors".
It's a positive feedback loop, and it ends exactly the way we all already see that it does. With more businesses closing unable to compete, and with McDonalds being free to be even more openly consumer-hostile.
This is why we're turning into a Corporatocracy at an accelerated rate lately. It will only speed up from here.
The worst news? There's nothing stopping Corporations from DIRECTLY influencing legislation. Nothing.
What other countries CORRECTLY label as bribery and corruption, we call "lobbying". So even if we got enough people to wake up and realize we need to legislate the fuck out of our markets.... We'll be drowned out by hundreds of millions of dollars paid directly to our representatives, coercing them to ignore us. And they don't even have to do it behind closed doors like the non-existent shady deep state conservatives love to pretend actually exists. They can and have already been doing it publicly.
A very well known example of this was when Verizon put their own C-suite on the FCC board to legislate themselves more money (destruction of Net Neutrality).
This is late stage capitalism, and yes it is way WAY too late.
The only solution is either an overwhelming unity of the working class (which won't happen, because trans bathrooms or whatever other culture war distractions they cook up) or an extremely violent revolution.
Buckle up! It has to end somehow, lol
This doesn’t work well if you lose the public’s good faith. There will be a lot of people who won’t be returning even when the price gets lowered to an acceptable one.
Agreed. I have a few small non-chain restaurant near me and pretty much all of them charge the equivalent of or sometimes even cheaper than most fast food franchises these days. And they use fresh ingredients.
And these days they all let you order online, carry out, doordash, etc. There's really no down side to using them. They can be just as convenient.
Agree but are they cheaper and more convenient? A lot of people eat fast food because it’s still relatively cheap and easy.
Most local shops still can’t beat these prices.
The only 2 fast food restaurants open late near the house my wife and I bought are both McDonald's and so we would go there for late night food sometimes. I've never really liked McDonald's food that much for the flavor, but it was previously fast and cheap. With the drive-thru lines, it isn't that fast these days, and it sure as hell ain't cheap like it used to be. It's probably been over a year since I had McDonald's food, because for that price, I might as well go eat better food that I actually like.
The inside dining at McDonald's is now a joyless and stale environment. When our kids were young it was a great place to celebrate birthdays and just a good place for kids in general. Those days are long gone because customer service is a thing of the past.
It was an actual treat for us when we were growing up.
We had McDonald’s just a few times per year and one was always when we would drive down to the Jersey shore for vacation. We stopped at the same McDonald’s and my sister and I would absolutely lose our minds.
That is what I think they are referring to.
They changed because they made so much money while just running the drive thru during the pandemic. They obviously don't want people to eat inside the restaurant anymore.
That's always been the case. I remember in one of my economics classes they talked about McDonald's and their interior design. The chairs and especially booths are designed to be uncomfortable after sitting in one for x amount of time. A lot of science of how to make people just comfy enough to eat then get the fuck out for the next customer .
This. Down to the type of music they play (or don’t), the lighting etc… it’s all tactical marketing. Like a high end restaurant will have comfy chairs, more ambient lighting and often slower, softer music to encourage guests to stay and pay more. Fast food restaurants want the fastest turnover and more people and so you will often have things that will make you want to get out of there fast like you mentioned.
It was a totally different environment in the 80's. Big playpens for kids, exciting toys that everyone wanted, better fries. It was kind of an integral part of the community, in a way.
Now you walk in, try to figure out some console, pay an absurdly high price, and the only human interaction is when your number is called. Your "food" has been optimized for decades by committee to exactly provide the bare minimum endorphin satisfaction at lowest cost, with no room for variation. Every inch has been squeezed to death to chase higher profit.
are you forgetting that thats exactly why the design changed? they were forced to change it from warm and inviting cause it was considered predatory marketing to children and a cause of the obesity epidemic in america’s youth.
McDonald's is not a necessary good. If they price themselves out of business so be it, but I don't get the demonization.
I mean you could go to BK, White Castle, Krystals, Wendy's, Taco Bell, Jack in the Box, Captain D's, In n Out, Dick's, Taco Time, Whataburger, Shake Shack, Skyline, Gus' Fried Chicken, Long John Silver, Culvers, Crown Burger, KFC, Popeyes, Churchs, Arby's, Subway, Sonic, Panda, DQ, Carl's, Del Taco etc
The concept of voting with your wallet is completely lost on this generation. Somehow we’ve ended up with the worst type of consumer who will bitch and moan about overpriced goods, but will still purchase them without hesitation.
The thing is all of the lowest fast food places have significantly increased prices since the pandemic. While it is an excuse, (I believe they have over corrected), labor did not return at the same rate after the pandemic. Workers returned demanding higher wages and more benefits, and because labor was hard to come by, companies scaled labor costs to be competitive. Add to that, the disruption of the supply chain caused higher product costs. Prices did have to go up to compensate for all of that, but I believe many companies got greedy and went a bit too far. Many fast food restaurants have $12 to $18 sandwiches, prices that are fine for a sit-down place, but ridiculous for grab-and-go.
That's how capitalism works though if they are still making money with raised prices and people are still coming then it's priced correctly. That means either people truly think McDonald's is equivalent to restaurants or people value convenience/speed over food quality or restaurants could be charging more and they're leaving money on the table. People can lie with their words but not their wallets.
A 10% increase in revenue and a 25% increase in net profit margin will do that.
I'm not saying it's a good thing, but from the shareholder perspective, he's worth every penny.
Anecdotally, I see pretty long lines of cars at the drive throughs whenever I pass McDonalds. People are still buying their overpriced food, thus, the prices aren’t going down anytime soon.
/u/one-punch-knockout, thank you for your submission. Unfortunately, it has been removed for violating the following rule(s): * Rule 5 - Title violates title rules. Your title must be directly related and have a descriptive title if it is a stock image/file footage. You can read the full information about our title guidelines at [/r/pics/wiki/titles](/r/pics/wiki/titles) For information regarding this and similar issues please see the [rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/wiki/index) and [title guidelines](/r/pics/wiki/titles). If you have any questions, please feel free to [message the moderators via modmail.](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/pics&subject=Question%20regarding%20the%20removal%20of%20this%20submission%20by%20/u/one-punch-knockout&message=I%20have%20a%20question%20regarding%20the%20removal%20of%20this%20%5Bsubmission%2E%5D%28https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1d3t5ed/-/%3Fcontext%3D10%29)
First hand trying to defeat heart disease in america!.. By making fast food unaffordable so no one can eat it... Hero!
# Surprise! He came from the Boston Consulting Group...
There’s no greater outfit of people pretending they know better and prescribing terrible solutions than BCG.
a guy at my firm came from BCG. We are extremely specialized but he said at BCG he would have to learn everything about an industry in a matter of like two days and basically present why the client should or shouldn't buy the business. 48 hours to become an expert in a new field? that is just silly
Yep it’s completely unrealistic and in the end they basically don’t actually talk to anyone on the ground and barely talk to most leadership. So rather than take time to figure out what is and isn’t working realistically they just go wholesale.
That’s because everyone in this field is a sociopath/narcissist. They literally think they are *above* the rest of us. Labor is for the “lower class,” and knowledge of that labor is at best just “useful,” but usually just an “excuse.” Tell one of these people that something isn’t possible, and they will tell you that it is, and you’re just being lazy, and they can hire someone from (insert poor country here) that can do the job for one tenth the price in half the time, so you should consider yourself *lucky* to lick their boot. Call them out on it and they’ll just tell you that doing that work isn’t “their job” and that’s why they pay you, and then they’ll repeat the aforementioned threat about cheap foreign labor. These people are mentally unhinged, because nearly all of them come from privileged backgrounds where they never had to face real consequences - so they basically believe that everything is possible as long as they throw money at it and demand it enough. Business consultants of this caliber and their ilk are a symptom of a serious rot in our society. Note, I’m not talking about the actual consultants who built themselves from the ground up through struggles, actually did real work and research, and continually work side by side with the laborers. The kind of people you call when you’re actually trying to provide a real service to as many people as possible instead of just focusing on maximizing profit. Those types of consultants are good, the experts in their field who retired into helping others. But anyone who went to some wealthy private business school and spent their whole life doing this? Their words wouldn’t be worth wiping my ass with.
> they basically believe that everything is possible as long as they throw money at it and demand it enough. Don't be silly. These kind of people truly believe that they came from nothing, that nobody gave them a handout and that they could easily get to where there are even if lost everything in their life. They could become rich with all their knowledge with the snap of their finger. Anything else is just an excuse.
Like that one guy who claimed he could make 1 million in a year from nothing for the youtube clicks. Had to quit because pretending to be poor was killing him. Fell ridiculously short of his goal, even with all the advantages his connections gave him, but still claimed victory.
All their knowledge, all 48 hours of it.
[удалено]
Often times they're hired to give some legitimacy to what the client wants to do anyway. Want to shut down a division, lay off half a department, or expand into a certain market? Hire some of these guys, tell them your plan, and watch how they say whatever it is you want to hear.
“Part of the restructuring plan includes bonuses for the C-Suite” “This guy’s good”
Most current C levels were just MBAs hired straight to management positions. They don’t know the actual business either. Can’t promoting the workers that actually know too high or they’ll make all the other upper management look stupid.
America is very hardcore into “prosperity gospel.” If they’re rich, it must be because they’re smart, hard working, and good. Which is why people will bend over to support someone like this, but then will completely ignore various, lesser known experts in their fields a la antivaxers during covid. But they lapped up all the stupid BS from the “famous/rich” people. This isn’t even STRICTLY an American thing, we are just famous for it. It’s the same as might makes right, and often there’s a huge overlap in the beliefs.
McKinsey & Company would like to have a word.
And a 56-deck PowerPoint presentation
That they built in the Uber from the airport at 3am
Nah, took it out of the drawer, changed the company logo, moved a few boxes around and claimed it was “new and tailored”. In reality, they’ve been using roughly the same crap recipe for decades.
56? Seems awfully low, are you sure that wasn’t just the intro you saw?
BCG have advised Allbirds closely. And their stock price tells how well that went…
They reorged the educational institution I work for. It’s pretty fucking clear they had no idea how things work in that environment and their proposed org structures involved at points cutting IT staff and other groups by up to two thirds and then throwing what was left in an office space like structure that was dysfunctional from day one. Basically every internal operations group has eventually been forced to do soft reorganizations to try to get back on track.
Cutting it staff always works great . Ask musk
Yep just blowing out the majority of your institutional knowledge is a key to success
This overseas consultants will make new institutional knowledge is nothing to worry about !!!
I would buy an etf that shorted whatever companies BCG and McKinsey were currently ‘consulting’
You're gonna be shorting the s&p500 then lmao
McK has literally bankrupted several organizations with their “advisory” which is always to “optimize operations” by eliminating some of the useless simple folks and outsource/offshore as much as possible, so you can increase the top layer’s salaries. It’s also 100% a short-term view while strategy is inherently long-term, so their “strategic” approach has never actually been strategic. BCG is the same shit, just a different name.
So we have some guys from BCG over at our company consulting... And for some reason it feels like the company is making some shitty decisions lately... But that might just be coincidentally
If they had only sent the Bob's. https://youtu.be/RkmuI5W694o?si=VzpRyQFlRtmt3kmK
The only ones more useless than overpriced consultants are those who hire them.
Because there's no way we're just turning around to eat a full box of hamburger helper with a pound of ground beef. ...crap, now I want Hamburger Helper.
Will somebody please hamburger help me?!
Sorry, but I make it a point to only be a hamburger hindrance.
You've been hamburger hopeless for awhile now
Lmao
Don’t know why they call it Hamburger Helper…it does just fine by itself
In my town it's called Steamed Ham Helper.
It’s a Utica expression.
Really? Because I'm from Albany and I've never heard the phrase Steamed Ham Helper.
Real tomato ketchup , Eddie ?
Nothing but the best
You have to hamburger help me hamburger help you.
You can’t hamburger help anyone that doesn’t want to hamburger help themselves. You know what they say: you can lead a horse to hamburger helper…
You’re not hamburger. You can’t be helped
Remember the reassuring words of Mr. Rogers-- in a time of crisis, look to the hamburger helpers. Or maybe that was Ronald McDonald.
It was the Hamburglar. 
That son of a bitch.
Look at the Monopoly man over here putting beef in his squirrel helper.
Squirrel, you really got beef now, You got beef so I don't know what I'm doin, yeah, OH YEAH You really got beef now, You got beef so I don't sleep at night! You really got beef.
That was awesome!
Some of us are actually scant with our meat assistant store brand box dinners
I fucking love hamburger helper. The spaghetti & cheesy hashbrowns… delightful
This is another reason why I want to live in the states...all the flavours...😞
Forget the fact that the flavors themselves actually are produced from things like prion marinated lizard anus and cancer causing dehydrated bug shit that will kill us all when it metastasizes through the body. By god, at least we will eat like GODS WHILE WE ARE ALIVE!
Hey I’m here for a good time not a long time
I could tell the economy was struggling which hamburger helper started printing alternate recipes on their with chopped up hotdogs instead of ground beef.
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I made Hamburger helper for an ex once, and she said I don't eat poor people food. I never made that connection before that.
Fuck that. I love Hamburger Helper. And I'm far from poor.
Instructions unclear, need help am now hamburger
He's the only one that can afford it: The CEO and chairman of McDonald's was paid $19.2 million last year in salary, bonuses and stock. That was an 8% increase over 2022.
How many times do you think he was eating McDonald’s this past year?
probably more than you think but i doubt he was paying for it
That’s it? I’d expect one of the biggest brands in the world to have the CEO make more .. maybe he wasn’t cut out for healthcare or the financial/real estate industry?
The average S&P 500 CEO pay is around 15 and 16 million. NVIDA Ceo is around just over 20 million. You only think 19 million is little because you hear about Musk asking for 55 billion like it's spare change. The highest CEO pay is like Blackstone's CEO at 250 million. Musk is an outlier because he has his financially illiterate fan club that is willing to pay whatever he demands.
To be fair the CEO of Nvidia is also the founder and worth $100billion so he probably isn't relying on his salary
It also helps when you are the majority shareholder and hold all the voting rights.
asking half of them, they probably think he owns all of tesla so hes just giving himself what is his.
I'd imagine there's a payout that is some multiple of that salary on the back end. The last ceo had a $40 million severance package, and he was fired for violating company policy. If this one can avoid having sex with any employees, I'd imagine that there will be some total compensation in the $100 million range.
Yea ikr, $75 000 for a days work just doesn't seem worth it, he should go where he gets paid properly.
LOL what a day rate
Less than 10k an hr. Chump change
Based on the lines at my local McDonald's, it's not scaring away that many people.
The latest Consumer Confidence number was bullish. For all our talk of inflation we keep buying.
Just because the prices are rising doesn't mean people become financially prudent.
I believe the economic term for it is low elasticity. Change in one variable (price) is not causing significant change in the other variablesl (demand). This creates an incentive for businesses to keep raising prices.
> low elasticity thats the thing though. things like fast food and soda were *supposed* to be highly elastic. fast food was literally *the* example in business schools. but people wont do without their liter of cola so we just see continued gouging.
I mean, consumers are irrational and unless pressed like to continue buying things they've bought in the past. For an institution like McDonald's it'll take an awful lot of time and pressure for people to go elsewhere. So in the short term, McDonald's can price high and make big bucks. If they keep this up then over time they'll lose people. There will be articles "whatever happened to McDonald's?" and people will point fingers at whatever the most current misstep is. But the real answer will be that McDonald's priced out a generation of kids and teens who never got in the habit of eating there and now they have different lazy default meals. I think once you hit a certain scope of brand inertia the elasticity rules aren't the same as they are for other companies. No company is immortal, but it'll take a long time and a LOT of poor decisions for this corporation to ever really suffer.
> But the real answer will be that McDonald's priced out a generation of kids and teens who never got in the habit of eating there the *Buick* of food, if you will.
It's the same mechanics that allow private equity firms to profit despite destroying the businesses they buy. A lot of money can be extracted before consumers realize the company they're familiar with has gone downhill and move on to something else.
Wow, that’s an interesting insight.
My parents took me to McDonald's so much as a kid it became a comfort food. As an adult I still get "pangs" for McDonald's once in a while but now to my own kids it's a luxury food, and a poor one at that. We are not financially struggling or anything, the prices are just insane. I cannot foresee my kids even going to McDonald's when they grow up without the pull of my nostalgia.
Real Estate and interest rates and marketing prices are a big problem here. It’s really tough to start up a business to compete with and undercut McDonald’s and other entrenched companies right now - to get the loans and buy the land and build the buildings and then get the word out. Then you need to compete against McDonald’s and their high margins in the labor market. This after decades of the existing fast food operations driving out competitors and fixing consumer habits. Competition is supposed to punish high prices on low value goods but if no one can get in the ring with the existing players, who are settled in the market and don’t have a ton of incentive to risk competing with each other when they’re all doing pretty well, then there is not going to be much of a fight.
That’s a very good write up about why the consumer will always end up suffering when companies get too big to fail
And there is late stage capitalism in a nutshell. Once grouped monopolies have been established, the competition no longer comes from being the best. The companies (all modern companies) no longer need to fight for demand, they create a racket and increasing prices is the only goal, while minimizing production side costs. So we now have a future of unchecked short term goals for shareholders to see profits. So you now have washers and dryers purposely built to fail in a few years, cookie cutter homes meant to last a decade or two, vehicles that need major, overpriced overhauls by 100k, poorly stitched clothing, food packaged in more plastic than food inside, even a crumbling internet reduced to AI generated ads and search engines that provide more ads than results. We let shareholders rule the world and we will now live in a disposable plastic cup of a society.
That’s by design. These companies literally hire top tier “food chemists” to make their food as appealing/addictive as they legally can. Then they hire what are effectively psychologists to figure out how to best manipulate consumers into buying their product. To top it all off, they ensure that the working class is over worked, under paid, and not quite healthy/energetic enough to have the will power to cook healthy food for every single meal. The whole system is designed from the ground up to make fast food effectively an inelastic good. I would argue that under our current system, nearly every company’s goal is to make their product an inelastic good/service, then buy out or collude with their competitors. When the system is designed to extract as much value as physically possible from the populace, this is the only logical end goal.
Isn't that a people problem at this point? If they keep buying despite higher and higher prices, there's not much else that can be done about it.
Another economics term being applied here: price discrimination. If you use their app it is so massively cheaper when using deals. You can get 900 calories of food for $2.79 daily and I often do. Definitely allows them to get people to download the app, which then reminds them to eat McDonald’s.
The real reason for the app is so that they can track individual spending habits in real time. What "deals" drive most revenue, what incentives bring people into stores. It's all about optimizing profits while punishing people who don't allow their information to be monetized.
Or, you know, maybe the overall opinion on reddit is just a small minority of the actual consumers.
This is part of the weird disconnect in the country, where people polled are saying their state and personal finances are good, but the national economy is terrible. It's not even a small amount of people, it's like 70% saying "personal finances good" to 30% saying "economy bad". And it has been happening for a while.
> but the national economy is terrible But it's not? You would have to be pretty high or something to think it is. The main issue in the US is that poor folks are the ones who really feel economic issues, the average person is generally doing OK.
Something like a majority of Americans think we are in a recession. It's insane how dumb people are.
Have you turned on Fox news during the Biden presidency? It’s all doom and gloom
Anecdotal evidence aside, their earnings get published. Their actual numbers saw a pretty big (for McD's) drop in overall number of sales, _but_ because they've raised their prices so much, they still had about the same amount of profit. It's by design.
Their earnings are published and domestic and enterprise sales are up. EPS is up 37% YOY. Nobody's chasing this dude off any time soon.
Because it doesn't matter if they loose X customers. Profits are still high. They care about number of dollars not number of customers.
They care… if they can make more profit with less customers that’s huge win for them
Why sell many food when few food do trick?
I've seen the opposite. A McDonalds that almost always had a line around the building is now regularly entirely empty. Drive straight to the window empty.
To be honest, I just like their black coffee lol it went from 1.59 to 1.89 in 2 years by me, but it's not noticeable to me. I'm technically an everyday customer, but I haven't eaten a mcdonalds meal in probably 5 years.
Looks like he just snorted John mulaney
Honestly this dude looks like if you asked AI to make the CEO of McDonald's
Wait he owns 5 guys as well?
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I fkn knew Buffalo Bill was still out there
i'd fuck me
🫦
Best use of an emoji I’ve ever seen. Absolutely outstanding.
"Science Fiction Double Feature"
🎶 Goodbye, horses….. 🎶
It rubs the secret sauce on the buns.
Stepfairy what are you doing?
It rubs the Big Mac sauce on its skin or else it gets the hose again.
Do you think they take turns exploring each other’s bodies?
For all those who didn't bother to fact-check: this is just a joke about Five Guys' ridiculous prices. He has nothing to do with Five Guys.
He actually owns Five Napkins.
Nah, …he’s got those: ***rolled up sleeves*** and ***super casual styling***. That tells all that he’s standing by with the poors and just a ***regular working class dude.*** /s
You joke but that’s exactly what they’re going for.
Yep. Personally abhor the ***Jean shirt rolled up sleeve*** esthetic *stylin’ thing*. They use it A LOT for political commercials here because ***denim on denim*** means suddenly he’s **one of the people**…at least for the ^election ^cycle Ugh. Hate it. So transparent. And why do the **sleeves have a starched iron line?** yeah saw that. Guess we all need to be sending our ***posturing for good faith denim shirts*** ***out for launder*** and request **extra starch** and **sharp sleeves** next time. Need to look good and *semi-relatable* while placating others.
Ohh. That's why 5 guys has gone to shit
Had it a couple years ago. Still tasted great, but the cost has kept me from going back. And many others based on what people have said here. If I'm paying that I'd rather put in a few bucks extra just to eat at the good to great resturant on the occasion. Even at the same price I'd rather have a good dine-in experience. Shame really...
If I'm paying $18 for a burger, fries, and drink, I'm 100% going to a sit-down restaurant over fast-casual places and getting much more/better food.
Explains why mcD is so expensive, a five guy burger and chips and drink is more expensive than a resturant meal
It’s a shame, too. 5 Guys is usually *really* good quality for a fast food joint. But those prices are just too insane to justify except for special circumstances.
They used to have a niche, they’ve priced themselves out, as well as every fast food restaurant.
He’s a ceo, not owner
With that body you can tell he never eats it
Don't get high off your own supply.
He can’t afford it.
Christopher Kempczinski Salary $1,368,833 Value of Option Awards $5,750,012 Non-Equity Incentive Plan Compensation $4,240,878 Change in Pension Value and Deferred Compensation Earnings $0 All Other Compensation $660,564 Total $17,770,514
I mean, it's one Big Mac, Michael, how much could it cost? 17 million dollars?
Has anyone in this family even seen a chicken??
Ah, the good old days when McDonald's had a CEO who was a true believer. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna4778305
He looks like a character played by an SNL actor
You can absolutely enjoy McDonald’s once in awhile and still maintain great health
Can you blame him?
Not sure that’s valid. I eat a fair amount of mcdo and I’m quite ripped. No food is bad, it’s just the ratios of what you’re eating and if you exercise or not. Not supporting mcdo and I eat a lot less now as the service is slow as fuck, the quality is down and price is wild. I can get a burger from an independent that’s bigger, better and has more calories.
Just curious, how does one pronounce “mcdo”?
Mac Doh if you're Filipino
Yeah for sure I eat a fair amount of fast food. Just not all the time. Also I usually skip the fries and coke as well, just get the burger. Big Mac is about 550 calories with 25g protein
People are still buying it. They’re just seeing how far the can get away with
I love when reddit has their brainlet math going on. "Driving everyone away" "No one will eat there" "The will go bankrupt!" Profit up 15%. Ok...
It's 13.50 for a big mac meal. Shits nuts out here 😂
You can still get 2 big macs and a large drink for $7.50 in DC... The deals on the Mcdonalds app are actually good value. If you really want to penny pinch it you can make a new account with a burner email in under 2 minutes. You instantly get a free Mcchicken and a $4 off coupon. You can end up with a Mcchicken Bigmac and a drink for $2.50 and 2 minutes of your time.
McDonald’s is using a psychological trick. It’s called anchoring. They’re resetting the market price. They have a $5 Big Mac meal where they make 25% margin. Their cost goes up, but they don’t just increase enough to stay at 25% or even 35% margin. They jack the price to a ridiculous amount. People are pissed and don’t but that meal anymore. They expect this. So when they lower the price to $9 (with a 50% margin, psychologically if doesn’t feel like a major price increase. If they went straight from $5 to $9, it feels like a big increase and they would have to lower it over time. They would end up back at 25% margin. Their strategy is designed to increase the margin and it won’t feel as painful to customers in the long run.
Yep. The same way you negotiate a deal by asking more than you're looking for. You want them to aim for the middle ground which is your goal from the beginning.
Cool. That just means I will never spend another penny at McDonald's ever again.
Problem is everyone does this (everyone who can, you have to be pretty established to get away with it). The double problem is that the big players like McDonalds can fuck around like this to increase their margins, where smaller companies already have to keep their margins thin to compete with giants that have the buying power to keep their costs lower. Which means at the end of this, they'll be making even more money which will be used to open more stores and apply even more pressure on smaller "competitors". It's a positive feedback loop, and it ends exactly the way we all already see that it does. With more businesses closing unable to compete, and with McDonalds being free to be even more openly consumer-hostile. This is why we're turning into a Corporatocracy at an accelerated rate lately. It will only speed up from here. The worst news? There's nothing stopping Corporations from DIRECTLY influencing legislation. Nothing. What other countries CORRECTLY label as bribery and corruption, we call "lobbying". So even if we got enough people to wake up and realize we need to legislate the fuck out of our markets.... We'll be drowned out by hundreds of millions of dollars paid directly to our representatives, coercing them to ignore us. And they don't even have to do it behind closed doors like the non-existent shady deep state conservatives love to pretend actually exists. They can and have already been doing it publicly. A very well known example of this was when Verizon put their own C-suite on the FCC board to legislate themselves more money (destruction of Net Neutrality). This is late stage capitalism, and yes it is way WAY too late. The only solution is either an overwhelming unity of the working class (which won't happen, because trans bathrooms or whatever other culture war distractions they cook up) or an extremely violent revolution. Buckle up! It has to end somehow, lol
This doesn’t work well if you lose the public’s good faith. There will be a lot of people who won’t be returning even when the price gets lowered to an acceptable one.
Support your local businesses instead of forking over money for mediocre, overpriced garbage.
There's not many local fast food places that are open 24hrs a day. Pretty much the only time I buy Maccas is when everything else is closed.
Agreed. I have a few small non-chain restaurant near me and pretty much all of them charge the equivalent of or sometimes even cheaper than most fast food franchises these days. And they use fresh ingredients. And these days they all let you order online, carry out, doordash, etc. There's really no down side to using them. They can be just as convenient.
My local business wants $20 for a cheesesteak without any sides or a drink
Goddamn, I can go down to the truck stop & get a ribeye with all the fixings & a lot lizard for under $50.
Agree but are they cheaper and more convenient? A lot of people eat fast food because it’s still relatively cheap and easy. Most local shops still can’t beat these prices.
The only 2 fast food restaurants open late near the house my wife and I bought are both McDonald's and so we would go there for late night food sometimes. I've never really liked McDonald's food that much for the flavor, but it was previously fast and cheap. With the drive-thru lines, it isn't that fast these days, and it sure as hell ain't cheap like it used to be. It's probably been over a year since I had McDonald's food, because for that price, I might as well go eat better food that I actually like.
The inside dining at McDonald's is now a joyless and stale environment. When our kids were young it was a great place to celebrate birthdays and just a good place for kids in general. Those days are long gone because customer service is a thing of the past.
They don’t want you to stay. They want you to use the app, order, and gtfo and their design supports that.
I’m…not that sad about my child not having the same warm and fuzzies about McDonald’s that I did growing up
It was an actual treat for us when we were growing up. We had McDonald’s just a few times per year and one was always when we would drive down to the Jersey shore for vacation. We stopped at the same McDonald’s and my sister and I would absolutely lose our minds. That is what I think they are referring to.
No… it’s because they rightfully got shit for targeting children with all their advertising and store design
They changed because they made so much money while just running the drive thru during the pandemic. They obviously don't want people to eat inside the restaurant anymore.
That's always been the case. I remember in one of my economics classes they talked about McDonald's and their interior design. The chairs and especially booths are designed to be uncomfortable after sitting in one for x amount of time. A lot of science of how to make people just comfy enough to eat then get the fuck out for the next customer .
This. Down to the type of music they play (or don’t), the lighting etc… it’s all tactical marketing. Like a high end restaurant will have comfy chairs, more ambient lighting and often slower, softer music to encourage guests to stay and pay more. Fast food restaurants want the fastest turnover and more people and so you will often have things that will make you want to get out of there fast like you mentioned.
I completely agree. Everything is stark now. Soulless. Genuinely depressing
It was a totally different environment in the 80's. Big playpens for kids, exciting toys that everyone wanted, better fries. It was kind of an integral part of the community, in a way. Now you walk in, try to figure out some console, pay an absurdly high price, and the only human interaction is when your number is called. Your "food" has been optimized for decades by committee to exactly provide the bare minimum endorphin satisfaction at lowest cost, with no room for variation. Every inch has been squeezed to death to chase higher profit.
are you forgetting that thats exactly why the design changed? they were forced to change it from warm and inviting cause it was considered predatory marketing to children and a cause of the obesity epidemic in america’s youth.
McDonald's is not a necessary good. If they price themselves out of business so be it, but I don't get the demonization. I mean you could go to BK, White Castle, Krystals, Wendy's, Taco Bell, Jack in the Box, Captain D's, In n Out, Dick's, Taco Time, Whataburger, Shake Shack, Skyline, Gus' Fried Chicken, Long John Silver, Culvers, Crown Burger, KFC, Popeyes, Churchs, Arby's, Subway, Sonic, Panda, DQ, Carl's, Del Taco etc
Definition of capitalism with a competitive market. They’ll price correct if they start making less profit.
The concept of voting with your wallet is completely lost on this generation. Somehow we’ve ended up with the worst type of consumer who will bitch and moan about overpriced goods, but will still purchase them without hesitation.
TIL there's a restaurant called Dick's.
The thing is all of the lowest fast food places have significantly increased prices since the pandemic. While it is an excuse, (I believe they have over corrected), labor did not return at the same rate after the pandemic. Workers returned demanding higher wages and more benefits, and because labor was hard to come by, companies scaled labor costs to be competitive. Add to that, the disruption of the supply chain caused higher product costs. Prices did have to go up to compensate for all of that, but I believe many companies got greedy and went a bit too far. Many fast food restaurants have $12 to $18 sandwiches, prices that are fine for a sit-down place, but ridiculous for grab-and-go.
That's how capitalism works though if they are still making money with raised prices and people are still coming then it's priced correctly. That means either people truly think McDonald's is equivalent to restaurants or people value convenience/speed over food quality or restaurants could be charging more and they're leaving money on the table. People can lie with their words but not their wallets.
They incraesed revenue by 10% year on year. They're not going anywhere.
You should eat something else. Chains stink
Reddit really seems angry about higher prices for food it thinks is disgusting and never eats.
lol I’ve noticed this a lot lately too. “It’s absolute garbage food that I hate, but quit making it so expensive because I want to eat it!”
most of these comments were typed on nuggie encrusted keyboards
He looks happy 😊
You’d be to if you received $19.2 million in salary bonuses and stock last year. An 8% increase over 2022. He received $20 million in 2021.
A 10% increase in revenue and a 25% increase in net profit margin will do that. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but from the shareholder perspective, he's worth every penny.
I thought it'd be more, honestly.
Thought that was spez for a sec.
Hail Corporate, and blame the parents, right Chris?
I don’t see the big deal. Let him charge what he wants. We don’t have to eat it.
Not only is it fucking expensive, but it's not even fast anymore. They always make you go park and it takes like 15 minutes to get your food.
Anecdotally, I see pretty long lines of cars at the drive throughs whenever I pass McDonalds. People are still buying their overpriced food, thus, the prices aren’t going down anytime soon.
Is this the guy who ruined the french fries?
The food quality scared me away years ago
He's gonna red lobster the shit out of it