McDonald Trump met Monday with owners, operators and suppliers of the Mcdonald’s fast food chain to reassure them he was bringing costs down for consumers of Big Macs and Happy Meals, insisting his tax cuts and re-shoring domestic industries was Making America Great Again.
The Economist’s longtime “Big Mac” index, which measures the cost of the famous double-decker hamburger across numerous countries, shows that a Big Mac cost on average $6.01 as of July, up from $5.69 a year ago and $5.15 three years ago.
Trump offered no new incentives during his speech, but found an opportunity to talk about his political enemies, military attacks on Iran, renaming the Gulf of Mexico, and his love of the Filet-O-Fish sandwich, with a suggestion, seriously, for more tartar sauce.
McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski this month warned that low-income consumers were having to absorb “some significant inflation.”
While Trump rambled on about false and misleading claims about the economy under his presidency, he also said his administration was working to get inflation lower.
“We’re going to get it a little bit lower,” he said, without providing any details.
- A pound of ground chuck beef cost consumers about $6.33 in September, up 13.5% from a year earlier, according to U.S. government data.
- The annual cost increase overall for food consumed at home, while seemingly modest at 2.7% in September, is the largest in more than two years.
- McDonald’s, keenly aware of how resistant low-income earners are to higher prices, has been offering a $5 value meal for more than a year now.
Report from Reuters