Today was a Tuesday like any other -- starting work at 2:30 AM, unloading a big-assed truck, and murmuring various death threats against Canadian Tire for physically, mentally, emotionally, romantically, and financially ruining me -- until my brother's doctor's appointment today. The appointment which was due to take an hour took just over an hour and forty five minutes, so I was starting to get hungry. As of 12:45 PM today, I was ravenous (not having eaten anything substantive since 5:30 PM the evening previous).

I had to forego my haircut in order to drive my brother to his appointment -- I have to go to bed in just a few hours in order to be able to get enough sleep before work at 12:30 AM tonight (early tomorrow morning, technically). Knowing this, I was eagerly looking forward to my Tuesday treat: a Big Mac Meal, Supersized, with a Coke, and an Extra Big Mac. Having missed it the week previous, I was anticipating it eagerly. I was rudely surprised.

This meal ordinarily costs me $7-some-odd. Instead, it cost me $10-some-odd. Having phased out their daily McDeal Menu items in favour of a new "everyday deal menu", I could no longer get my acquired taste. The particularly infuriating part is that the only foretelling of the change was the tiny little pamphlets which were available at the in-store counter, which described the new everyday items coming into effect on April 18th... and did not mention that the program would replace their current McDeal Menu.

Now, I don't know if you fully understand free market economies, but let me establish a simple fact: the meal essentially amounts to two thin pre-frozen beef patties, bulk sauce, shredded pre-frozen lettuce, sliced frozen pickles, pre-frozen machine-extruded buns (the scattering of sesame seeds added during the baking process are probably the most expensive ingredient), a syrup infused with water and carbon dioxide on-site (both are incredibly cheap to obtain), and pre-formed pre-frozen potatoes flash-fried in vegetable oil. This costs way less than $7 to obtain and produce, even factoring in the costs of maintaining the store locations, running the grills and fryers, keeping a fleet of resupply trucks on the road, and keeping a minimum-wage staff available. At the $7 price, I wouldn't doubt for an instant that the combined gross profit per-unit of a Big Mac Extra Value Meal is at least 40% -- shave 10% off of that for overhead and you have 30% profit per unit sold.

But that's not good enough for McDonalds. They need to have an obscene profit margin to be happy -- so, they downsize their McDeal Meals to offer tiny double cheeseburgers, chicken burgers, and bacon cheeseburgers, and pass this off as being an improvement by offering these cheap products (which have an even more obscene profit margin, I might add) every day as opposed to restricting it to certain days of the week.

There are some basic rules of economics which they seem to have entirely passed over: if you offer a product that people enjoy, but would not ordinarily buy, at a lower price than usual, you will sell more units and achieve a much larger customer base, actually coming ahead in the long run. I don't like McDonalds' food. But I like Big Macs. I find myself returning weekly for my Big Mac Meals, and I buy two burgers (one at the non-"extra-value" price) and pay them an extra 70 cents ("supersizing") in order to get a few more cents' worth of potatoes and pop.

McDonalds is now appealing instead to the lowest common denominator: those people who don't care what they eat, as long as they eat it cheaply. Now, I'm not professing to claim that McDonalds is a resort of middle-classmen who are looking for a nice restaurant to take the family to, but the whole idea of completely cutting off the middle class* in favour of the lower class strikes me as a brick-stupid move.

Well, I paid today. But they'll be lucky if I buy a Big Mac more than a couple times a year now. Advertisers take note.


* (I consider myself middle class based on my amount of disposable income. However, I definitely do not qualify as middle class in terms of actual gross income -- I'm at the bottom rung of the Gods and Clods ladder. ;-))