My partner, doomscrolling Uber Eats for something to munch, exclaimed that McDonald’s here in Japan has gotten too expensive, so it generated some food for thought and future analysis.
To gather data, I used Archive.org and the McDonald’s Menu to record prices for the most common McDonald’s food items. I found the following data:
McDonald’s Does Not Like To Raise Prices
In the period in question, there has been per Japan CPI, about a 7.2% average increase in consumer prices due to inflation, and in our basket of McDonalds above, a 15.8% increase in local yen prices over the last 7.5 years. Most of this increase has occurred in the last three years during the coronavirus pandemic and the cessation of zero-interest-rate policies in the United States.
While this sounds bad, the Yen exchange rate has weakened by 20.8%, and in dollar terms, McDonald’s Japan is actually currently 4.2% cheaper than seven+ years ago.
I am using USD as my example, but the yen has weakened against many different currencies, making food imports more expensive. For example, I believe Chicken Meat is currently sourced from Thailand, and then yen down 25% against baht in this period.
McDonald’s Takes Advantage of Surpluses and Shortages
If you look at the items / prices over time graph, you may notice one very interesting time period where McDonald’s had a surplus of potato and priced ALL sizes of fries at 150 yen:
They are also famous for doing this when pork is cheap enough in the US with the McRib.
Franchisees / Delivery Make Up Most of the Markup
Interestingly enough, ordering for pickup using the app incurs a tax of (at my local McDonald’s) 7.7% over MSRP. I would prefer this to not be the case, because ordering on the app for pickup should cost them less than having to take an order in person.
Also individual stores’ pricing vary, that 7.7% might just be my local price being higher than others.
Where the price really starts to hurt is delivery, where prices are 40.3% higher than MSRP (from that same store), including a really unbelievable ¥930 print for 15-piece chicken McNuggets (over the counter: ¥490).
One potentially clever hack would be to use Uber Eats to pick a cheaper delivery McDonalds if your closer one is a franchise that has set higher prices, as the official app does not let you select the store.
