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It’s less a story about burgers and more a story about trust. Specifically, it’s a story about the promise McDonald’s has made its customers for decades. It’s also about the trust problem the company created entirely on its own when its customers decided it was no longer keeping that promise.
The actual story here is that McDonald’s rolled out its new McValue menu, featuring items that are all “under $3 each.” It’s built around what the company calls “predictable everyday low prices.” There are no more complicated app-only promotions, no more buy-one-get-one deals, no more dollar menu nostalgia. Instead, you get prices that are, depending on how you do the math, roughly two and a half times what customers remember paying not that long ago.
The backlash has been immediate and, honestly, a little brutal. There are Reddit threads full of people reminiscing about 99-cent McDoubles. Customers are publicly mourning the death of the “buy one, get one for $1” deals that used to anchor their lunch routine. The general sense is that McDonald’s has lost touch with what its customers actually perceive as a value.
Here’s the thing: none of this is actually about the $2.50 cost of a McDouble.
McDonald’s built its entire competitive position on one very specific idea — that value and convenience are more important than anything else. If you were hungry, McDonald’s was fast, and the price was low enough that evaluating your options felt like a waste of time.
Which is why a $2.50 McDouble isn’t being evaluated against inflation-adjusted commodity prices or franchisee labor costs. It’s being evaluated against what McDonald’s itself promised for thirty years. The company ran dollar menus and two-for-one campaigns long enough to wire a specific expectation into an entire generation of customers. Unwiring that expectation requires a lot more than a press release about a “value platform.”
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