Tracking McDonald's Price Increase Backlash with Social Data

Tracking a negative McStory

We're big fast-food fans at Infegy. One of the best parts about fast food is the search for the best value. The fast food industry in the United States is fiercely competitive, with dozens of large restaurant chains jockeying for a competitive advantage.

Over the last three years since the pandemic, we've noticed sharp increases in the cost of menu items, with McDonald's being the most visible example of rising prices. We weren't alone. Pulled out in Figure 1 is a sample of the numerous news of anecdotal reports of unhappy customers complaining that the value of fast food, particularly McDonald's, was being inflated away with ever-increasing menu prices.

McDonald's response

This online criticism from the mainstream media got so heated that McDonald's released a one-pager at the end of May 2024, refuting much of the online reporting. Sometimes, organizations worry that their response will add to the crisis itself. If an organization is at the point where they have to respond, it means that brand strategists within the company have noticed the criticism. McDonald's has been even more public about a response, pushing against it in their fourth-quarter earnings call.

Detecting anomalous Reddit post volume

To do a quick verification, we queried the Infegy Social Dataset for posts mentioning the entity, McDonald’s, as well as inflation-related terms like “price increase,” “cost,” or “value menu.” We quickly found that a large proportion of traffic was from Reddit, with a few viral posts responsible for much of the attention. One post showed a $17 sandwich meal, while another post, pictured below, showcased how regular menu item prices had surged over the last ten years since 2014.

We look at a Topics analysis, located in Figure 3, to see how specific menu items appeared within these underlying posts. As shown in the word cloud below, we found that Oreo McFlurries and Big Macs appeared within a predominantly negative context, meaning social media users were talking about them negatively. In general, if you’re a brand strategist working at a large food and beverage company, social listening data can be crucial to see how consumers view specific products within your brand.

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