The hashbrowns McDonald’s sells are sourced from Simplot Foods. If I remember correctly, you can buy around a hundred of them for $20 or $30 or so. Insane markup, especially at the scale they must buy them at, but not surprising. How else would the C suite survive?
You’re also paying for rent, staffing, equipment, oil, taxes, salt, and probably a lot of things I’m not thinking of.
Still they’re only costing them maybe a buck, tops.
So I’d be interested to know how the flailing commercial real estate market is affecting McDonald’s prices right now, given that McDonald’s is a real estate company.
Former McDonald’s CFO, Harry J. Sonneborn, is even quoted as saying, “we are not technically in the food business. We are in the real estate business. The only reason we sell fifteen-cent hamburgers is because they are the greatest producer of revenue, from which our tenants can pay us our rent.
Instead of making money by selling supplies to franchisees or demanding huge royalties…the McDonald’s Corporation became the landlord to its franchisees.
They bought the properties and then leased them out – at large markups. In addition to that regular income, the corporation would take a percentage of each shop’s gross sales.
Today McDonald’s makes its money on real estate through two methods. Its real estate subsidiary will buy and sell hot properties while also collecting rents on each of its franchised locations.
I wonder how much all of the price increases are due to the commercial real estate market…
So if they’re around 30 cents at cost and 3.19 at sale, that’s about 11X markup to account for OH, G&A, and profit
Depending on the location of the restaurant, OH can be to to 400%, they have to pay a franchise fee, 45K a year, which is not significant compared to sales, but let’s its 5% of sales, that means that around 6X of the markup is profit
They can just lower their expectation of profit and still be more than ok
The $45K is a one time fee, after that there’s monthly rent, which significantly varies by site
Imagine finishing an hour of grueling work, and your boss comes over and hands you two hash browns…
They’re like… really tasty tho…
“Glad to hear. Now get back to work!”
Yes sir 😔
You can buy 10 of them for less than McDonalds’ price for 1 ($3.42 versus $3.49).
Put one in an air fryer for 12 minutes at 350. What comes out is indistinguishable from the McDonalds version.
If you don’t have an air fryer, they can be had at Goodwill all day every day for around ten bucks.
I guess you could do that… OR you could do an hour of grueling work and have your boss give you two of them.
So you’re saying that in one hour, they can earn enough calories for at least 1.5 hours of hard labor?
Sounds like a living wage to me, with only 16 hours a day you can provide for the most demanding caloric needs
And at 140 calories a piece your 8 hour shift gets you 16, about 2,240 calories. So like, just barely enough to live.
I know other McD’s food is better at calorie/$ but still.
Just get yourself 2 fulltime McDogshit jobs, work 16 hours and sleep the remaining 8, you’ll have enough to eat and you won’t have any expenses since you don’t have time to do literally anything!
Now keep doing that for around 300 years and you miight have enough hashbrowns saved up to make a deposit on a house!
So I’m not sure what your math is for this but I made me intrigued to just check something.
So assuming a person literally did this. Got 2 back-to-back positions at a minimum wage paying McDs. Put the first paycheck into paying just for hasbrowns for calories, put the second entirely into the cost of a house bank account right now and do nothing but sleep the last 8 hours. And don’t move on days off to avoid requiring calories.
Ready for this?
You would have enough saved up to buy a house in 29 years.
At the average house cost of course which is now $418,000. Up 36% since 2020.
Holy shit.
I mean potatoes were a pretty staple food item for the poor so if you are getting paid only enough for your basic calorie needs of prepared potatoes from one of the largest food providers in the world that’s still saying a lot about how low minimum wage is.
It’s some really poignant math still.
theres a great recipe for hashbrowns on tiktok. but corporate backed politicians want to ban it. FML. literally
They don’t want to ban recipes for hash browns. They want to ban that Chinese spyware of an app. Read their TOS. It’s one of the worst I’ve ever seen in terms of collecting any and every piece of data on you that they’re able to.
I wish politicians would focus on writing proper digital privacy laws instead, but I’ll take what I can get. Hopefully banning TikTok will open the floodgates towards building a safer, more private web for everyone.
Hopefully banning TikTok will open the floodgates towards building a safer, more private web for everyone.
I woulnd’t get your hopes up. I think everyone will just migrate to TikTok But American™
You see, this is my biggest gripe with TikTok, so many people treat it like the ONLY place to get information. Just search “McDonald’s hash browns copycat recipe”.
You miss their point. They’re arguing about the discoverability of that content, not the existence.
(Which is also a stupid point regardless, but whatever)
This is such a weird post, implying that tiktok is the only place to find a good hashbrown recipe and therefore it shouldn’t be banned.
I know lemme.ml is a tankie instance but come on
thats an interesting argument ( for the sake of argument or rhetoric).
my claim is that tiktok provides irreplacable value as a service that i choose to use.
you claim is that i cannot claim that tiktok’s information is scarce.
i would argue that its not simply limited only to said info… its also alot of other factors.
These were 2 for $1 a few years ago. The only way to do McD for cheap now is to order in the app, they always have coupons and bogo deals. I was against these apps for privacy reasons for a long time but the upside is not having to hand your card to a random McD worker and worry about it getting skimmed. Also if you drive thru you just tell them your name or order number and that’s it.
This was their intention. Artificially force you to think you HAVE to use the apps. Then in the apps these companies collect all your data and also you waive lots of potential rights like forced arbitration.
Ya but free burger
You know, this simple and concise answer sums up the argument pretty well.
It’s borderline extortion to raise prices on you unless you’re using the app, but what if the app selling your data enables the food to be cheap?
Is the data you are protecting, which is essentially just information about what you do and where you go with your phone, worth selling for an occasional free burger?
Do you live in a socioeconomic group that allows you to pay premium to keep your data private? That’s essentially what this has become. Either you let this corporation sell your data for a free burger or you pay full price for their menu.
Frankly, from the bigger perspective, it’s more than a lot of apps will give you for your data anyway.
I like that even a well paying job sounds ridiculous when paid out in equivalent hashbrowns. Look at Mr. IT over there, earning over fifteen hashies an hour. Must be nice eating so many hashies, yum yum.
Bezos made 7.9 million an hour, so converted to the new metric, he’s eating 2.25 million hashbrowns an hour. Seems a bit excessive, you’re definitely going to have indigestion.
starting a petition to report all CEO salaries as hashbrowns/hour
I used to think about purchases as how many McDoubles I could buy instead. That’s back when they were $1.
I did the same with frozen Cokes before they went up to $2
