As a foster parent of a six-year-old girl, Brendan Baber from Kenosha, Wisconsin, has to juggle homework, laundry and the never-ending war over what’s for dinner. Lately, that war has had a single recurring battlefield: the McDonald’s drive-thru.

His foster daughter, whom he and his wife are raising alongside their three other children, thinks McDonald’s is “the height of cuisine”, says Baber, 57, a content marketer on a low six-figure salary. So he finds himself in the glow of the Golden Arches week after week, watching the total climb on the digital menu board.

“You can’t get a large fries for less than five bucks any more,” he says. “And every kid wants the f***ing fries.” He noticed the prices really started to climb during the pandemic “when all of the supply chains went to hell”, and they haven’t come back down.

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Ralph Severson has watched the same story play out from the cab of a work truck. At 60, the licensed contractor runs FM Pro Remodelers in New Albany, Indiana. “Construction and skilled trades run on fast food,” he says. “We eat fast food just about every day.”

Menu favourites like the Big Mac have sustained hungry Americans for decades

ADAM GRAY FOR THE TIMES

Lately, though, the crew looks at the prices on the board and keeps the truck rolling. “We’ll eat McD’s if there aren’t any other convenient options,” Severson says. “But the value isn’t there any more.”

To some Americans, McDonald’s is an occasional treat. For decades, though, it was also one of the few places where a family on a tight budget, a crew of low-wage workers or someone living out of their car could count on a hot meal for just a few dollars. Now, they don’t know where to eat.

As Americans wrestle with soaring rents, gas prices and grocery bills (that are roughly 25 per cent higher than before the pandemic), the question is whether even McDonald’s has slipped out of reach for the people who relied on it most.

In 2000, a Big Mac cost about $2.24. By mid-2025 the average price had climbed to $6. Adjusted for general inflation, that $2.24 sandwich from 2000 would work out to about $4.22 in today’s dollars. In other words, a McDonald’s signature burger costs roughly 40 per cent more than it did 25 years ago.

Other menu options have soared too. A FinanceBuzz analysis found that a quarter pounder with cheese meal more than doubled over the decade, from $5.39 in 2014 to $11.99 in 2024. A ten-piece McNuggets meal climbed from $7.19 in 2019 to $9.19 in 2024. Across ten popular menu items, McDonald’s prices have roughly doubled since 2014, far outpacing the roughly 31 per cent rise in overall consumer prices over that span.

On Monday President Trump tried to turn this anxiety into stagecraft. At the McDonald’s Impact Summit in Washington, he stood before franchise owners and suppliers, praising the chain as “70 years of American greatness” and calling himself one of its “most loyal customers”.

President Trump works behind the counter in Pennsylvania during the campaign trail last year

DOUG MILLS/GETTY IMAGES

The event was billed as a conversation about affordability, and Trump folded the food chain into a broader promise to “make America affordable again”, touting his One Big, Beautiful Bill with pledges like no tax on tips and more generous overtime rules. In effect, the Golden Arches became a campaign backdrop: a way to argue that his policies would ease sticker shock at the very moment figures from McDonald’s itself show prices still grinding higher.

The public doesn’t seem convinced. “Nearly eight in ten Americans see fast food as a luxury because of rising prices, and that is a relatively new phenomenon,” says Matt Schulz, a consumer finance analyst for LendingTree. “It tells you that many Americans definitely feel squeezed financially.”

The frustration shows up in satisfaction scores too: in the 2025 American Customer Satisfaction Index, McDonald’s finished last among 23 major fast-food chains for the third year running.

Part of the reason why McDonald’s is more expensive is that some of its own costs really did go haywire, largely for reasons outside its direct control — including higher beef and chicken prices, and sharp increases in wages and benefits. But for someone like Severson, the nuance doesn’t matter much when he sees the total on the screen. “We’ve all felt the cost of inflation, but how did the dollar menu become the three-dollar menu in just a couple years?” he asks.

Plenty of former regulars are making the same calculation. John Raisor, 42, who lives in Sulphur, Kentucky, and works in digital marketing, puts it bluntly. “No one can eat a fast-food lunch for less than $10 now. A few years ago you could feed four people on that much,” he says.

McDonald’s is not the only offender. The same FinanceBuzz study found that Popeyes prices had climbed an average of 86 per cent and Taco Bell’s about 81 per cent over the past decade, with Chipotle close behind, up about 75 per cent. Wendy’s briefly held the title of most expensive major fast-food chain in 2022, with the average menu item at $6.63 after a 35 per cent jump in just over a year. If McDonald’s no longer feels cheap, it’s partly because almost no national chain does.

McDonald’s executives know they have a perception problem. The chief executive Chris Kempczinski has admitted that McDonald’s “hasn’t focused strongly enough on value”, and says the company is trying to re-establish itself as the low-cost option in a tightening economy.

The fast-food restaurant has been promoting deals to try to win round customers deterred by climbing prices

ALAMY

Their solution has been to offer a flurry of deals. McDonald’s has rolled out waves of limited-time $5 combo meals in the US, and this year retooled its McValue line-up around a handful of $5 and $6 meal deals to win back budget-conscious diners.

Increasingly, though, the bargains live behind a login screen, with the McDonald’s app being the only place to unlock these deals.

A lot of people don’t want to chase digital coupons. Baber’s oldest daughter keeps telling him he’s doing it wrong. “She’s all, ‘Just use their incredibly frustrating app and you won’t have to pay five bucks for a large fry,’” he says. Baber wants no part of it. “I find their app quite user-hostile,” he says, and he figures the best deals are “short-lived anyway, just there to drive adoption. So not worth the bother”.

Schulz says that tension between the maze of deals and the basic need for something cheap and filling is exactly why fast food has become emblematic of the affordability crisis.

For now Baber will keep doing the maths in the drive-thru line, deciding whether the latest meal deals promise to be “just enough food to sate a hungry child for six bucks”, or if it will be a noodles-and-complaints night.

“I’m not asking McDonald’s to save my life,” he said, “and I realise there is no budget that can survive eating out every night. But I would like to say ‘yes’ to my kids without blowing the week’s budget on overpriced French fries.”