Everyone knows McDonald's is a real estate investment company. They do not make real money in their food service, they make the real money on real estate. They spend millions on market research to buy locations.
In short, McDonald's could have kept their prices low, they could've kept their dollar menu, and it wouldn't have had any sort of real effect on their bottom line.
>Imagine a company with $40 billion dollars’ worth of real estate assets (before taking depreciation into account) and yearly revenues of $9 billion, of which nearly $4 billion is profit. That’s the McDonald’s real estate investment trust (REIT). Not bad right?
>To put those numbers into further perspective, this fictional REIT would represent over 40% of McDonald’s current market cap while bringing in 80% of its profits.
So why did they raise their prices? This is political.