It cost damn near 40 bucks to get two Jimmy John's sandwiches delivered. I could make 40 sandwiches for that price.

Going vegan in the midwest has made avoiding fast food way too easy.

Businesses will charge as much as they can get away with.

If they CAN charge, they WILL charge, and as long as you keep buying, they'll keep gouging.

I hate to say it but maybe we could all afford to eat a little less often. We have an obesity epidemic. This "bliss point" hyper palatable processed garbage is killing us. If we stopped buying it, and learned to just fucking live with being hungry every so often, we wouldn't be dying of heart failure as much.

It's actually serious enough that fast food companies are planning to reduce prices. It's unheard of.

My solution to making home cooking taste better than fast food was buying a fat sack of MSG and using it in everything. Truly it’s the king of flavor.

Conservatives gonna use this to justify shooting down minimum wage raise smh.

This is HORRIBLE! If we DON'T give these places TAXPAYER BAILOUTS then we will be FORCED to eat at the cheaper LOCAL PLACES!

-Small Business Loving Republicans

I stopped going to five guys three years ago when a burger, fries, and a drink hit over $20. I'm not sure the local place was ever under $10.

On the flipside it’s forcing people to make healthier choices.

If fast food prices get unaffordable, maybe people will eat healthier in the future. I cannot see a downside to this, at least not long term.

If you have been eating fast food for anything other than a treat, something is wrong anyways.

It's never really been cheap, and it certainly has never been good for you.

Weird that everyone is suddenly talking about it now.

And 5 guys? Lol it's always been way over priced.

And many parents working two jobs while living in a food desert have few good alternatives. Ain't got the time nor money.

That's how you keep folks scared.

That's even more reason to stay away from that junk rubbish.

I think they all tried to become semi-fancy to compete with restaurants, instead of focusing on being cheap, cheap, cheap.

The devil's bargain that the American Middle Class struck in the 70s was that women would enter the labor force and all the domestic work would be handled by a professional service sector. Rather than cooking at home, we all eat out at cheap kitchens. Rather maintaining a home, we just rent. Rather than spend a day cleaning, we have dishwashers and rumbas and cheap immigrants to do maid work. Rather than spending time outdoors, we get a gym membership. Rather than providing child care ourselves, we outsource to daycare centers. Etc, etc.

That deal has been breaking down since at least the Housing Crisis of '08, but its really kicked into high gear after COVID. What was supposed to be cheap industrialized outsourcing has climbed in cost by leaps and bounds.

You can argue that the original deal sucked. Establishing a permanent underclass to do the grunt labor of civilization had all sorts of awful knock on effects, not the least of which was the food getting saltier and sugarier and generally more awful for our physical health.

But the alternative is what? Tell half the population to get back in the kitchen? Boycott Big Agriculture? Just eat smaller portions?