4 ms·

Everything I care about definitely seems to have gone up a lot more than the nominal inflation rate would suggest. Maybe not 50%, but... certainly more than 20%

Everything I care about definitely seems to have gone up a lot more than the nominal inflation rate would suggest. Maybe not 50%, but... certainly more than 20% over the last two years. Then again that's been true since I started paying attention to this stuff almost 20 years ago. The reported inflation rate's never felt all that close to how much stuff I buy's actually going up in price (the reported rate's consistently a lot lower than that). HOWEVER, in the specific case of McDonalds, you have to factor in that they've spent the last few years aggressively optimizing for price discrimination. If you're poor, you use the app and physical coupons and never pay menu prices, but something closer to what the prices used to be. If you're not poor you pay menu prices and wonder when fast food stopped being cheap (it didn't, they just make you trade some time and effort to get "normal" prices now)

norwalkbear 4y ago
Yea, the expert class is under idealogical capture You got fraud in many fields like social science. depression, and Alzheimer's research were the hot fraud of the last couple weeks. Experts are just spinning things to fit their idealogies. Regular folks must start evaluating how inflation is personally affecting us and make noise.
spookthesunset 4y ago
Is the menu prices on the app less than you'd see at the drive through window?
- trebbble 4y ago
  Not sure. I know they push tons of deals through the apps. I know this second-hand, including from someone who routinely gets entire meals from Taco Bell, specifically, for a couple dollars—just as you used to be able to do off the normal menu. Sometimes he can get absurd amounts of food for less than a dollar—just as you used to be able to do couponing or deal-hunting. In short, what it looks like to me is the normal prices became "sale" prices, the former sale prices became super-duper-sale prices, and the new menu prices are a totally new massive-profit-margin category that didn't exist before. This is actually pretty similar to what pizza chains have been doing far longer and to a greater degree than other fast-food joints used to—it's long been the case that you can get 30-50% off your chain pizza order with coupons, and that there are always a bunch of coupons available to suit many common orders, such that there's rarely a reason to order anything at full menu price from a major pizza chain unless you just can't be bothered to track down any of the deals (hence, it's price discrimination, with a side of psychological manipulation to make you think the "deals" are actually bargains when they are, rather, simply not rip-offs). As for my own experience: we usually do Arby's when we want garbage food. We can easily drop $40 there at menu prices without going nuts—or we can get all of the exact same stuff for $15 or less, with coupons (the key: lots of their coupons list, in small print, a count of times you can apply it in the same visit, so you may be able to use a single coupon for, say, "$3 sandwich + fries" to buy five of those meals at once at the coupon price). Again, these places have long had coupons, but they didn't used to constantly have lots of coupons or other deals active at once, and the difference between coupon and menu prices didn't used to be so extreme. Actually, noticing that Arby's prices had damn near doubled over just a couple years (pre-pandemic) was what prompted me to take notice of this situation, which does appear to be playing out industry-wide.

norwalkbear 4y ago

Yea, the expert class is under idealogical capture You got fraud in many fields like social science. depression, and Alzheimer's research were the hot fraud of the last couple weeks. Experts are just spinning things to fit their idealogies. Regular folks must start evaluating how inflation is personally affecting us and make noise.

spookthesunset 4y ago

Is the menu prices on the app less than you'd see at the drive through window?

trebbble 4y ago
Not sure. I know they push tons of deals through the apps. I know this second-hand, including from someone who routinely gets entire meals from Taco Bell, specifically, for a couple dollars—just as you used to be able to do off the normal menu. Sometimes he can get absurd amounts of food for less than a dollar—just as you used to be able to do couponing or deal-hunting. In short, what it looks like to me is the normal prices became "sale" prices, the former sale prices became super-duper-sale prices, and the new menu prices are a totally new massive-profit-margin category that didn't exist before. This is actually pretty similar to what pizza chains have been doing far longer and to a greater degree than other fast-food joints used to—it's long been the case that you can get 30-50% off your chain pizza order with coupons, and that there are always a bunch of coupons available to suit many common orders, such that there's rarely a reason to order anything at full menu price from a major pizza chain unless you just can't be bothered to track down any of the deals (hence, it's price discrimination, with a side of psychological manipulation to make you think the "deals" are actually bargains when they are, rather, simply not rip-offs). As for my own experience: we usually do Arby's when we want garbage food. We can easily drop $40 there at menu prices without going nuts—or we can get all of the exact same stuff for $15 or less, with coupons (the key: lots of their coupons list, in small print, a count of times you can apply it in the same visit, so you may be able to use a single coupon for, say, "$3 sandwich + fries" to buy five of those meals at once at the coupon price). Again, these places have long had coupons, but they didn't used to constantly have lots of coupons or other deals active at once, and the difference between coupon and menu prices didn't used to be so extreme. Actually, noticing that Arby's prices had damn near doubled over just a couple years (pre-pandemic) was what prompted me to take notice of this situation, which does appear to be playing out industry-wide.