Where the Value Is on a Fast Food Menu

This site holds priced menus for thirty-five chains across twenty countries, and once you have that much data in one place a few things become obvious that are not obvious from inside a single restaurant.

The same item is not the same price, and the difference is not exchange rates. A Big Mac costs what the local market will pay, adjusted for local costs, which is the entire basis of the Big Mac Index. Comparing the menus across our price tables shows the pattern directly.

The meal deal is usually - but not always - the right buy. Chains price a meal so the drink and side appear nearly free, because the margin on a fountain drink is enormous. Where it breaks down is when you would not have bought the drink, in which case the "saving" is money you would not have spent.

Menu engineering is a real discipline. Items in the top-right of a board, items in a box, and items with a price written without a currency symbol are all there on purpose. So is the deliberately expensive item next to the one they actually want you to buy.

Prices move faster than menus do. Our tables carry the date the menu was recorded and the currency it was recorded in, because a price without a date is a rumour.