@snoop-blog: Many of them are like that, personally I find it quite amusing.

@morouxshi: Is a 20 piece nuggets $5 or less, cause otherwise you could get five 4-piece from the Dollar Menu. I know three 4-piece nuggets is less than two 6-piece.

Bring back the special 29 cent hamburger and 39 cent cheeseburger!

If the double hamburger has only one slice of cheese, isn't it still, errr, a cheeseburger?

Holy crap.

You guys in the UK already pay over a freaking pound for most of this stuff. Which is 2 bucks or more last time I checked.

So if I got a job offer in the UK, that means it needs to be roughly the same number of GBP as I'd need USD to live here in the US. Even though that would be twice as much "money," it'd have the same buying power as an equal amount of dollars. Ridiculous.

I think you guys are getting ripped off.

I honestly doubt that people would stop getting the double cheeseburger if the price went up slightly. You don't haggle with your crack dealer when his prices go up, do you?

The people who say they'll stop going to McD's if they change the burger or raise the price are the same people who say they'll quit smoking if cigarettes go over $3, $4 etc...but are still smoking.

I haven't eaten McD's in months but just reading this article makes me want one. Talk about deep-seated addiction!

I bought 2 yesterday for $1 each. My local McD's is only placing 1 slice of cheese. I had not noticed it before. I wonder how long it has been going on.

And yes, I am a sucker for the 2fer pies and $1 dbl cheeseburgers. ;-)

Thank goodness a simple hamburger might reappear on the menu. I find it just silly to have to order a quarter pounder with cheese without cheese because a plain quarter pounder isn't listed anywhere.

Plain Bun
3 Beef Pattys
3 Shots of Ketchup
2 Shots of Big Mac Sauce
1 Shot of Mustard
4 Pickles
Onion on each patty

Took them about 3 minutes of button pushing on the register, I only did it once, though.

A good friend is a manager at a Burger King very close to that particular McDonalds. They price matched their Double Cheeseburger for several months late last year and early this year. With more meat per patty/sandwich, his food cost was 61 cents.

The Wendys here just raised their prices approx. three percent. This is the third such increase in nine months. Their value menu is up, as well.

They aren't paying for middlemen and then again for retail markups like you and me. They have vast economies of scale that will blow your mind worse than that time in the 7th grade your older sister's boyfriend let you take a puff on his joint (kids: just say no to drugs and read "Fast Food Nation" instead). That double cheeseburger probably doesn't actually cost McD's more than about 15¢. The rest is for slave wages and maintenance on Ray Kroc's liquid-nitrogen suspended animation tank in North Scottsdale.

Now that that's out of the way, why is ch?ese suddenly such a precious thing? 2 laser-thin slices of processed analog is tipping over the profitability of McD's? Did the cows join a union or something? Tonight my pizza was noticeably skimpy on the cheese. These fast-food people better stop ripping off customers, or people will start buying Kraft pizza kits like they did back in 1976.

@chocogray: Yet it is not the franchise owners who ultimately make decisions like whether or not the DCB stays on the dollar menu. If McD corporate decides it's not on, then it's not on. If corporate says no cheese, then there's no cheese. I'd completely agree with you if it was a decision left up to each individual franchise, but it is not. Sure, the franchises may see some benefit out of it, but who really reaps the rewards here... the same folks who made the decision in the first place, McD corporate.

Now when I make a burger at home, if I made it exactly the same as McD it would be: the bun costs 17¢ from Costco, the meat, 1/5 of a lb., 91% lean at $1.99 per lb. that I paid for at Food-4-Less = 40¢. Generic cheese is currently on sale for $1 for 16 slices or 12.5¢ for 2 slices, plus 2¢ for the pickles, mustard & ketchup.
That's a total of 72.5¢ for the total food ingredients at retail prices.
Cooking & wrapping it can't be more than 15¢ which gives us a total price 87.5¢.

Since McD gets vastly lower prices due to their huge buying power & they are using a lower grade of beef than I bought, their cost, even at the inflated prices of the last few months can't be more than 75¢.

But I don't eat cheese, so when I get it, their cost is about 63¢.

There's no way in hell they're losing money on the double burger!
They're just not making as much on the double as they were a year ago.

@RickinStHelen:

Right on. I hate the cheese, so why should I be paying for it? Over at Wendy's when I order a Classic Double with no cheese I get a price reduction. HOw about it McD's?

@elgringoguapo:

Yum, Fazolli's. But their portions are two farking small. I have to order two meals just to have enough, and of course two meals is just way too much food. Thank god for doggie bags and 3PM snacks.

Double Quarter Pounder WITHOUT Cheese. Hmmmm. I visit so often the drive thru clerk knows my name.

Yes, by all means offer a double hamburger. I hate that crappy over processed fake American cheese that is used by fast food joints.

However, if you were to buy the soy products, they'd be dirt cheap. It's all the processing that drives up the cost, as well as the fact that their main market is vegetarian people, which is a niche market made up of people who won't switch to meat just for economic reasons. McDonald's already pays for a ton of processing on their food, but they make up the overhead in sheer volume. They could easily make a cheaper soy burger, but they'd probably have to drop their 100% Beef claims. I imagine they could probably do a 60% tofu 40% beef blend and get away with it, if their goal is to just cut costs.

I recently realized that, and of course got the double cheeseburger for a higher value. Never again. Those things are vomitous.

Is this really what we're worried about? Cheese on the dollar menu at McDonalds? How fat are we America!?!!

@Greasy Thumb Guzik:

Dang it Greasy Thumb Guzik. Now you got me hankerin' for a Big Mac.

I did see the waste sheet about 18 months ago at a McDonald's, but the only one I could read was the Big Mac.
The menu price of a Big Mac at that time was $2.49, but the waste sheet listed its value at 51¢.

Since the double cheeseburger is a Big Mac without the lettuce, middle bun or special sauce, its waste value will be much lower than a Big Mac, even with inflation!

I'd think that McDonalds would either buy in bulk or manufacture it themselves. Either way they wouldn't be paying anywhere near what mere mortals pay for things.

@riverstyxxx: LOL!!

One of my biggest pet peeves has to do with cheese on hamburgers. Way back when, you used to have to ask for cheese, and they added about a dime to the price. Somewhere along the way, they made cheese standard, and now you must request no cheese, and they do not reduce the price. So in effect, I subsidize all the cheese-eaters. Even worse, about one out four times when I order no cheese, I still get a cheeseburger.

If you need to cut costs, McDonalds, how about charging extra for cheese!

An extra .25 cents can make a huge difference. Took at 20 oz coke bottles. The extra .25 cents is hurting them and 20 oz sales are dropping. I have not bought a 20 oz in 2 years since the price increase.

I enjoyed ordering 3 double cheese burgers back in the day. If the cost goes up .25 per sandwich that difference plus the tax is almost as much as an additional burger, small fry, or small drink.

I'll stick to Fazolli's with the free unlimited breadsticks. Who knows how long that will last.

@GMfish

Dude, you continue to miss the point: virtually every meat bearing item on the dollar menu is a loss-leader. Even if you were to only count the food costs of the burger (and not the proper overhead applications, bags, wrappers, etc), the burger itself doesn't draw profit. It does, however, mean more people buy more stuff they otherwise might skimp on.

Have you been to Wendy's lately ? The chicken and burgers on the 99 cent value menu are like 50% smaller. They are on the road to Krystallization (making tiny burgers Kystal Burger size).

I thought it was one Wendy's so I tried another, same thing. Its been over 6 months now since I went to Wendy's. At least admit you shrunk your food.

Let me back up a bit. Someone posted the myth that the McDonalds Dollar Menus is a loss leader. I can understand why someone would think that because a double cheese burger for a buck is pretty cheap. But because I've read the newspaper every day since high school back in the 70s, I pick up weird bits and pieces of news that other people might miss. Once such bit was the profitably of the Dollar Menu.

Remembering that story I googled it and quickly found an article saying exactly that, the Dollar Menu, in and of itself, is profitable. (That's what "turning around a company" means. It means the company goes from not being profitable to being profitable. I thought everyone knew that, but apparently some people more ignorant than others.)

For some reason you want to deny that. I'm not entirely sure why your unsupported belief that McDonalds sells loss leaders makes you happy, but it apparently fills you with great joy.

Because I would never want to interfere with a person's happiness, and because it never makes sense to argue with a dogmatist, I'll drop out of this pointless argument with you. Be happy!

Not to be a dick, GMFish, but since you were, I will:

What, do you not know the difference between revenues and profits? Here's a hint, profit is whats leftover after you take cost of goods sold out of the gross reciepts.

Wasn't McDonald's, long ago, the chain that advertised "change back from your dollar?" Assuming you ordered a hamburger, fries, and a Coke, that is. And it was more than 30 years ago. But still.

@Applekid: WIN!

I wonder if I could pay them Tuesday for a Double Cheeseburger today.

I'm happy without cheese, make it a Double Hamburger

Anyway, McDonald's cheese is completely disgusting and I order everything I can without it, so I'd be very happy to see a Double Hamburger for $1.

Once again, yes it does. I even italicized the relevant the portion for you up above. Here it is yet again:

Yet its turnaround has come not from greater sales of healthy foods but from selling more fast-food basics, like double cheeseburgers and fried chicken sandwiches, from the Dollar Menu.

In other words, back in 2006 McDonalds turned itself around to profitably by "selling... double cheeseburgers... from the Dollar Menu." The article does not say anything about the Dollar Menu subsidizing more expensive items. Which is your argument. I don't know why we're even arguing about this. Why do you have a vested interesting in being wrong? It makes no sense.

Although if they only made the mcRib a full time menu item the profits from that would more than offset whatever losses from the dollar menu...

@GMFish: The article doesn't specifically say which items are profitable - rather that the menu itself drives profits. Look at the example of the girls who came in - buying fries and icecream too. Both of which are huge profit bringers for fast food.

Once again, read the article. It specifically says that the double cheese burger is profitable.

@snoop-blog: Where I worked, the cheeseburger was $1.09. People would come in and ask for "Double cheeseburger, lite meat" to save $0.09.

@coren: they still have a mcchicken sandwich on a bun. but since the new southernstyle chicken came out, they wont put the mcchicken on a biscuit anymore.

Not true, read my comment above. The Dollar Menu was in and of itself highly profitable. Here's another quote from the article.

McDonald's has attracted considerable attention in the last few years for introducing to its menu healthy food items like salads and fruit. Yet its turnaround has come not from greater sales of healthy foods but from selling more fast-food basics, like double cheeseburgers and fried chicken sandwiches, from the Dollar Menu.

@shoelace414: Must be regional - I can still get a double stack/snack attack, Jr Bacon, Jr Cheeseburger, fries, frosty, small drink - all for .99 each

@coren: not anymore- all of their drinks are now $1, no matter what size you order. I actually like it. If I want a #2, but only want a large drink (not large fries also) I can upgrade for no extra charge. But now that drinks are $1, what will they use to make their money back with?

@EtoilePB: They must promote from within. Okay a low blow I know, but I am a former mcd's worker so it's ok.

@fostina1: If you mean the McChicken, it might just be a few McDonalds - if you mean something else, tell me more..I haven't heard of this one

I used to work retail across the street from a McDonald's and we'd often pool cash and send one person over for food. A 4-piece McNuggets was on the dollar menu, but a 6-piece was $1.89. So 12 McNuggets from the dollar menu = $3, but two 6-piece = almost $4.

Until recently, the dollar menu was a huge source of profit for McDonalds. Here's an article from 2006 about it.

The enormous success of the Dollar Menu, where all items cost $1, has helped stimulate 36 consecutive months of sales growth at stores open at least a year. In three years, revenue has increased by 33 percent and its shares have rocketed 170 percent, a remarkable turnaround for a company that only four years ago seemed to be going nowhere.

I had my first double cheesburger in about 2 years last week....oy...I think I lost about 3 lbs that night....

Maybe they can stretch the definition of "100% beef" to include the less beefy parts of the cow.

I certainly do not want cost-cutting when it comes to food. The extra 25 to 50 cents for the dbl cheezburger shouldn't put anyone out.

I voted no cheese, since I don't really need to be eating them anyway,

Of course, this fails to consider that the dollar-menu co-habitator McChicken is my new crack, thereby rendering the point rather moot.

Here's how retarded the MD's in my area is...

double cheese burger- $1

regular cheeseburger- $.99

WTF?

Aside from the fact that I don't eat at McDonald's ever, it does cross my mind to ask when companies are going to stop making consumers pay for lost profits. McDonald's loses some money because the cost of materials goes up, but that doesn't mean they're in the red. They're still making ridiculous profits, just a little less so than before. As unacceptable as less profits is, they feel the need to make customers pay more (or lower the quality of the food even more, which would almost seem to be impossible) to maintain gross levels of profits.

... The same thing could be said about the oil industry, but that's neither here nor there...

first they lose the $1 chicken biscuit. now the double cheesburger. guess im switching to wendy's. ill save .01 anyway.

To me the double cheese is the glorious gloop that makes the Double Cheeseburger so great. I'd more likely order a dollar burger with a single patty of meat with two slices of cheese (top and bottom) than a double patty burger with no cheese.

As for the topic, If they were to do any changing around I would ask they just make the regular cheese burger a $1 and raise the price for the double to 1.25 or 1.50, rather than messing around with such things as "Double hamburger with cheese".

One of the stores in downtown Atlanta (Peachtree Center) sells it for over $2, and has for quite some time.

Typically, the McD's double-cheesburger is my fast-food fix and coming in at $1 is pretty sweet. I've always wondered why they sell them so cheap so this isn't a surprise.

I believe BK's are either $1.49 or $1.89, depending on location.

One of my biggest pet peeves is when I order a hamburger at a restaurant and I'm asked, "would you like cheese on it?" If I want cheese on it, I'll order a cheeseburger!