Lazy Man and Money

McEconomics!

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This article is from occasional contributor, Kosmo. At the end, I’ll tack on some of my own McDonalds economics thoughts.

McDonalds Economics

Several weeks ago, I was at McDonalds with my 9 year old.  It blew his mind that I was able to put together a package that included more food at a lower price than the standard option.  I’ve turned this into a personal finance lesson for him and his 11 year old sister.

They like McNuggets.  A lot.  Typically, they’ve had the six piece Happy Meal, but they’ve reached the point where they (usually) don’t care about the toy anymore, and they want more food.

What do they want?  Between the two of them, they want 18-20 nuggets, some fries, and two bottles of chocolate milk.

The standard six piece happy meal contains:

  • 6 nuggets
  • Small fries
  • Apple slices or Go-gurt
  • Drink (chocolate milk)

The cost is $4.18 each, for a total cost of $8.36 for two.  They end up with fewer nuggets than they want, but two Go-gurts (which they’re somewhat ambivalent about).  Realistically, they’d need three Happy Meals to get the right number of nuggets.

So I went comparison shopping to see how else I might accomplish the goal.

A ten piece nugget value meal is $7.49.  To get twenty nuggets, I’d have to spend $14.98!  I’d end up with

  • Twenty nuggets
  • Two medium fries
  • Two medium fountain drinks

I’d have to swap out the fountain drinks for the chocolate milk.  I’m not sure if there’s an upcharge for that, because this option was immediately discarded – because I found a better deal.

I went the a la carte option and took advantage of some special deals and coupons.

  • The ten piece nugget is part of a 2 for $5 deal.
  • I have a coupon for a large order of fries for $1.  This is a coupon I can use once per week via the McDonalds app.

Here’s what I ended up ordering:

  • Two ten piece nuggets @ 2/$5 = $5
  • One large order of of fries = $1
  • Two chocolate milk @ $1 = $2

Total cost: $8.  This is 8 more nuggets than the two Happy Meals, and more fries, since a large is more than twice as big as the small.  The cost is 36 cents less than the two Happy Meals!  You may have noticed the missing Go-gurt.  The good news is that you can buy a Go-Gurt or apple slices for 50 cents.  For the sake of argument, let’s say that I get two Go-Gurts.  That brings the total to $9.  I’ve gotten all the food the Happy Meals would have, plus eight extra nuggets, for 64 cents more than the cost of the Happy Meals.

For myself, I got two bacon, egg, and cheese biscuits.  Sticker price $3.39 or 2 for $4.  I would have slightly preferred one bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit and one egg McMuffin, but I’m not going to pass up the 2 for $4 deal.

Later, I pulled out a piece of paper and walked them through the options and prices.  They were impressed at the price differences.

Is this post simply a way for me to brag about my ability to save money at McDonalds.  Well, sort of.  But mostly it’s to illustrate how simple it is to teach some basic personal finance lessons.

Unit pricing is another area where I try to teach the kids an occasional lesson.  Toilet paper is a good place to start, because there are so many options within a brand and style.  Which Charmin Ultra Soft Mega Roll is the best option – the 4 pack, the 8 pack, the 12 pack, or the 18 pack?  You’d expect the per unit price to drop as the quantity increases, but that’s not always the case in the real world.

My nine year old is starting to grasp the concept.  He can already determine which box of garbage bags we should buy.

I’m not necessarily a tightwad.  There are things I’ll spend money one (MLB.TV, for example).  But if I need 36 rolls of toilet paper, I don’t want to pay more per roll simply because I chose the wrong size package.  36 rolls is 36 rolls, regardless of how they are packaged.

I’ve also given the kids a thirty thousand foot exposure to concepts like bank accounts, credit accounts, pensions (and the difference between defined contribution and defined benefit), 401(k)s, 529s, and income taxes.  As they get older, I’ll go deeper into these topics, so that by the time the graduate from high school, they’ll have a solid understanding of personal finances.

Editor’s McDonalds Economics Thoughts

For a long time, we were able to escape the McDonalds Happy Meal trap. Our kids simply didn’t know they existed until Grandma spoiled the plan. They would have figured it out eventually, but I can still fondly look back on those days.

With my kids at age 5 and 6, the Happy Meal is still important to them. However, we use it a treat. Typically, we’d take advantage of the five dollar 20-piece nuggets in our area. That’s the equivalent deal as Kosmo’s (except for the bulk requirement). Since my kids are smaller, we don’t need too much more to feed 3 or 4 of us. A $1 Value Menu sandwich will usually do it.

Recently, we’ve revisited the value of the Big Breakfast with Hot Cakes which is an economical ~1350 calories. Everyone has their favorites and it just seems to work out for us. Once again, an extra $1 value menu sandwich or two can round out a hearty breakfast for the family. It’s been particularly handy at the Orlando airport terminal that we seem to visit a few times a year.

As for teaching unit pricing, my kids are a little young for that. I’m very good with unit pricing, but toilet paper is very, very difficult. The best I can do is look at square footage to avoid the differences in mega-rolls and regular rolls. Doing a dollar per square foot isn’t always easy though.

Instead, I’m going to turn to teaching unit pricing through something that I know my kids will pay attention to: Pokemon. Specifically Pokemon Go has items for sale at the shop. A single super egg incubator will run 200 PokeCoins. However, you can get 10 super egg incubators and a bunch of other useful stuff (lucky eggs, and star pieces) for 1480 PokeCoins in an Ultra Box.

We’ll go down this road in more detail over the next year or so. For now, I explain that I can get a lot more things if I save my PokeCoins and take advantage of the package deal. I have a suspicion that unit pricing will come up in more video games in the future.

Goodbye McDonalds… Hello Taco Bell, Subway, and Dunkin Donuts!

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It feels like I get stuck in a pattern sometimes. I recently wrote Goodbye Google Finance, Hello Google Spreadsheets. The family passed around the plague for a couple of weeks. So I’m going to return back to that formula, because it works.

I have a history of writing about McDonalds. For years and years, they’ve been a great value. I recognize that it is unfortunate that the healthiest food (salads and grilled chicken sandwiches) are the most expensive. Nonetheless, if you were on the go, a single dollar (plus tax) could sustain you for quite a few hours. Here’s a brief history of what I’ve written about McDonalds over the years:

  • Back in 2006, you could use a Bank of America promotion to get 10-cent double cheeseburgers for 3 months!
  • In 2007, I defended McDonalds Double Cheeseburger as be more efficient than making your burgers. Another popular blogger went through a detailed exercise to say it wasn’t so.
  • In 2008, I wrote about McDonalds Eat-in Tax. This got very confusing for everyone, and I still don’t know what the truth is about whether McDonalds charged a separate tax for eating in the restaurant. I just know that on consecutive days, I was charged different prices and the receipt on the second day when I ate in had the difference which appeared to be clearly labeled.
  • In 2009, I wrote about McDonalds switching from the double cheeseburger to the McDouble on the Value Menu. They took away a slice of cheese and called it a McDouble. So if you weren’t paying attention and ordered a double cheeseburger, you paid a 29% premium for that extra slice of cheese. I called it sneaky, but credited McDonalds with good disclosure.
  • There seems to be a gap when not much changed. You could get a McDouble for a number of years for just a buck. Alas inflation, like Father Time always wins*. In 2013, I wrote that people should avoid McDonalds $2 egg. Essentially that was the price difference between Egg McMuffin with Sausage and the Sausage McMuffin. A wise blogger, Tight Fisted Miser chimed in that you could order a side of eggs separately. They were about $1.20 and you seemed to get twice as much egg.
  • In 2015, I wrote how to lose money at McDonalds. It compared making the silly choice of buying a QuarterPounder instead of a McDouble on the Value Menu.

As you can tell, I’ve been a fan of stretching my dollar when I go McDonalds. It may sound like I was a little obsessed, but it’s 6 articles in 11 years, so that’s not too bad, right?

Today, I think you can throw out most of those articles. The breakfast ones might be somewhat relevant, especially the eggs if they still honor that cheap price.

McDonalds went away from the Dollar Menu for awhile. They had various Pick 2 for $2 and Pick 2 for $5. I couldn’t make use of the Pick 2 for $5, but the Pick 2 for $2 of McDoubles could at least be shared with my wife.

Finally, it seems McDonalds has settled on their $1, $2, $3 Dollar Menu.

It seems like great marketing, but not a lot value for consumers.

For $1, you used to get a double cheeseburger. Now you can get a single cheeseburger. As we all know, the single cheeseburger is essentially bread, right? It’s 300 calories, and 8 less grams of protein from the McDouble, which makes it not very much of a meal. There’s a chicken sandwich, but there’s 40 empty calories from mayo. That brings it back down 310 calories.

For $2, you get a little more, but at that point you aren’t getting through for just a dollar. It doesn’t seem like much, especially if it’s only a sometime trip, but if becomes more of a regular thing, you are paying twice as much as you used to.

For the same reasons as the $2, menu, I don’t see a reason to dissect the $3 menu. There’s a triple cheeseburger, but shouldn’t that be less than $3 because I could get 3 of the $1 cheeseburgers and use the left over bread as Frisbees?

I understand that I’m rare to dissect McDonalds Dollar Menu like this. It’s good business for McDonalds and this will help improve their margins (as long as it doesn’t drive customers away). I don’t follow McDonalds stock, but maybe this is a good time to buy.

It would be easy to give McDonalds a pass and say, “Hey that’s just how inflation works.” However, it’s worth looking at a few other chains.

Hello Taco Bell!

Taco Bell’s $1 Menu is so large it feels like all its food is on it. The Beefy Frito Burrito is one such example. It’s not healthy. I don’t think anything with the word “Frito” in it pretends to be. However, it does have 440 calories. That qualifies as a meal for me at a price of a a single dollar.

While on the topic, I hear that the new nacho fries are good. I haven’t tried them, but they sound good. Again, this isn’t an article about healthy eating.

Hello Subway!

Subway seems to be having a hard time with its sales. Things got bad enough that they decided to bring back the $5 footlong while their franchises complain. I apologize to Subway franchise owners. I understand that you might not make big profits if everyone comes in and orders a $5 footlong without a drink or other “upsell” items.

That said, this is good news for me, the consumer! If I want something reasonably healthy (the health police are everywhere on such claims), I can pay $5 and often get 900 calories. That’s enough to two meals (I’m assuming a 450 calorie meal size, which is consistent with the calories in a McDonalds double cheeseburger, which was our baseline.)

So yes, it’s a little more money, but it feels more reasonable as a healthy upgrade.

Hello Dunkin Donuts!

I never thought I’d get Dunkin Donuts into a value article. I’m not a coffee drinker (the horrors!) and when we go there in the morning (my wife’s request), the bill always seems to come out to $12 because the breakfast sandwiches are so much. (The Wake-up Wrap is just an insult to food everywhere.)

However, there was a deal that caught my eye. It may just be my local franchise as I couldn’t find a lot of information online, but after 11AM they lower the price of the sandwiches to $2. That’s a decent price for a sausage, egg, and cheese on a bagel. I can see why Dunkin Donuts would want to do this. Their clients are focused on the morning coffee rush. I would expect business to be very poor after that.

It’s very tempting to do dinners at Dunkin Donuts especially since the only protein my kids will eat are their breakfast sandwiches for some quirky reason. They are small kids, so I can pick up dinner for the whole family for way under $10.

Random Fast Food Stuff

This isn’t part of the point of the article above, but I found these both interesting and worth reading:

* The exception to this is obviously Tom Brady. And yes, this qualifies for my obligatory Tom Brady mention in every article until at least the Super Bowl.

How to Lose Money at McDonalds

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This article is about eating at McDonalds. Please see the disclaimer at the end of the article marked with a “*”. Also, this article includes some clips from a movie with adult language. You’ve been warned.

It’s unofficial food week here at Lazy Man and Money. I noticed my new writers submitted articles about food. I might as well follow suit.

Last week, my wife and I were scrambling to get ready to go to an appointment when we realized that we hadn’t eaten lunch. Worse, we wouldn’t have an opportunity to eat lunch until nearly dinner.

I remembered that we had some “Buy 1, Get 1 Free” coupons from McDonalds recently. The coupon for the Quarter Pounder with Cheese (or Royale with Cheese depending where you live) caught my eye. Hitting the drive-thru seemed to be the obvious solution.

If I didn’t have a coupon and was in a similar situation, I’d go with the McDouble off the value menu. When McDonalds called it the Dollar Menu, it was a very good deal (again, considering the disclaimer below*) at around $0.25 per 100 calories. (This calculation will make more sense in a minute.)

I pull up to the drive-thru and order two Quarter Pounders mentioning the coupon. To my absolute shock, the burger is $3.99. I had expected it to be around $2.50… maybe $2.75.

Drive-thrus are incredibly convenient (especially with kids), but one of their problems is that there’s little time to look at the menu and order. Communication is difficult, so I resigned myself to going down the road I had planned.

Look at this table and see if you can find out why I wasn’t feeling good about the purchase:

ProductProteinFatCaloriesPrice$ per 100 Cal
McDouble2018390$1.49$0.38
Quarter Pounder3128540$3.99$0.74

If you said, “The Quarter Pounder with Cheese is nearly twice the price per calorie for essentially the same ingredients/nutrients”, my response would be, “check out the big brain on Brad.”

If this were the world of soda, the bigger product would only cost a few cents more and be a much value per ounce. Of course, that product is mostly water which makes that pricing model make sense. The Quarter Pounder is so oddly priced that you could buy two McDoubles, throw half of one in floor and squish it with your foot. You’d have almost the equivalent calories, fat, protein and save a dollar.

Fortunately, the coupon giving me two Quarter Pounders for the price of one, put the price per 100 calories in the same range as the McDouble with no couple.

Then again, consumers may not be smart enough to make this connection. After all look at how McDonalds sales earnings have been in the last quarter:

So what do you say? Do you order the Quarter Pounder at McDonalds? Let me know in the comments:

* Whenever, I write about McDonalds there are usually a few health nuts who fly off the handle screaming that McDonalds is unhealthy and doesn’t serve food that should be eaten. I generally agree with that. However, I’ve known quite a few dietitians and they claim that in moderation it isn’t terrible. I don’t choose McDonalds because it’s healthy, but because it is convenient, fast, and low-priced. And I always make up for it by eating 7 pounds of tofu injected with unicorn blood for my next meal.

Avoid McDonald’s $2 Egg

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I don’t like to admit it, but occasionally, I hit McDonalds for breakfast. I have plenty of other cheap, quick breakfast options, but sometimes I just want to get out the door and have something hot. Apparently, I’m not the only one… McDonalds does a great breakfast business.

If you are going to eat fast food (and deal with the health implications), you might as well save money, right? I’m a big proponent of making the most of fast food value menus, which for McDonalds means focusing on the Sausage McMuffin… without egg. There are other breakfast items on the menu, but paying a buck for fried potatoes (hash browns) doesn’t work for me. It’s almost completely void of protein and not filling. The sausage and egg burrito is a little better, but it isn’t enough of a breakfast by itself.

The last time I was at McDonalds ordering the Sausage McMuffin they asked if I wanted the one with the egg. I like egg, so I thought about it and looked at the price. With the egg, the McMuffin jumps to $3.00. At $2, that’s an expensive egg. It probably wouldn’t seem so bad were it at a dinner. Or maybe it just seems worse to me because the Sausage McMuffin is so cheap in the first place… the 200% increase in price just knocks me over.

It feels like a restaurant charging you a dollar for a soda and then another dollar if you want ice in it. Ice is nice, but I can make due without it. If McDonalds would make the price competitive to get the extra egg, I would definitely consider it. For example, if it was an extra 50 cents for the egg, I would get it. McDonalds could profitably offer it too because that’s $6 per dozen and their bulk purchasing power probably has them getting a dozen eggs for under a dollar. That would kill the margins on their Sausage McMuffin with Egg though.

I’m not the only one who sees McDonalds with some crazy pricing inconsistencies. McDonald’s Secret Menu details a poor man’s Big Mac that you can get for $1 instead of $3 or $4. Hint: it’s a customized McDouble.

Some might wonder why I would write an article encouraging people to save a couple of dollars like this. There are a lot of Americans who can’t afford a $1000 expense. Maybe a little creative thinking on some routine purchases would be a significant difference for these people. It all starts with being mindful about the spending… even on the little things like a $3 breakfast.

Three Random Stories (and Personal Finance Links)

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I thought about not posting the last two stories, but I figured they were entertaining and the kind of thing that I would to read if I were someone else. Not too much personal finance after the first story, so if that’s your interest, just jump straight down to the links and enjoy.

Story 1 – Small Business Stimulus Package
You have a small business and need a boost in this economy? This is your lucky day. Ben at Money Smart Life is giving away a Small Business Stimulus Package. You can win $250 in cash and/or various web consulting services.

Story 2 – The Drive-In
I need people’s thoughts on this one. Let me know if I’m a jerk here or not. I’m at the McDonalds Drive-Thru the other day (probably a once-a-month thing and I typically get a double cheeseburger and move on). This drive-thru is a little weird. It actually splits the line into two for ordering and then re-merges them. I guess it’s faster that way because they two people ordering at the same time and can process the food faster. Cool idea, I just don’t know how they manage to give people the right food with the merge. If one side takes 15 minutes and I’m ordering just a double cheeseburger, well you can see how one side could move much faster than the other at times.

I’m done ordering and looking to merge back into the single line. I let one car go from the other side (the car that was before me when I entered the split to order). However, another car is trailing it, probably 18 inches of space between them. I’m waiting for them to stop and let me in (typical zipper merge), but they just keep driving. Finally I honk my horn to let them know that I’m there and waiting and have as much right as they do (there is no yield) to get my food. Probably more because if they mess up the merge, who knows if they’ll get my order right? This is a drive-thru so you know it’s already a high risk even before you add this merge twist.

So I honk my horn and the other car stops. They roll down my window and they are a 70 year old couple (just a guess). I ask them if they were going to let me merge (in not the most polite tone). They called me a name back and finally told me to go ahead. So here’s the thing… am I the biggest jerk in the world for being angry at my elders? Do they get a free pass to be rude because they are older? In the end I decided that all things being equal, all people deserve to be treated equally. It doesn’t matter if you are old, young, blue, purple, or some third gender that scientists just discovered last week.

Story 3 – The Football Game
I went to the Oakland Raiders game with my wife yesterday. Longtime readers know that I’m a big Patriots fan, so I was putting myself in enemy territory in one of the dangerous stadiums in the US. There were signs and public announcements everywhere reminding fans of conduct rules. In fact they have a SMS number where you can just pre-type in your section and row, so if there’s a problem, you hit send and the police are there. I wish I were making that last sentence up.

If that last point wasn’t strong, my wife may have had the quote of the day, “I don’t have a lot of rules in life, but one of them is that if you have a jacket covered in skulls, you get to get on the escalator ahead of me. You know, generally speaking.”

Towards the end of the game, the 100 Oakland fans (starting down 21-0 before you get a first down and losing big in 3 hours of rain will eliminate most fans) gathered around the Patriots bench to taunt them with chants of 18-1 referring to the Patriots record last year. I really don’t understand this chant. Roughly translated I take it to mean, “You just had as many wins as any team in the National Football League in a season. Also you had a higher winning percentage than anyone has achieved in any of the four major sports in the US (outside of the other two teams that I think accomplished the same feat). On the other hand, my Oakland Raiders have managed to win 18 games in the 5 years – combined.” I wish I had video of it, so I could put it on Failblog.org.

A finally football thought: The Patriots could go 11-5 winning approximately 69% of the games they play this season and not make the playoffs. Another team, Denver Broncos or San Deigo Chargers, depending tie-brakers, could go 8-8, just 50% of their games, and make the playoffs. By the way winning 69% of your games would have made you the fourth best NBA team last year and the best baseball team by a mile. Sure a lot has to do with a small sample size of the NFL, but that’s amazing. If someone has some extra time on their hands, I would love to read the highest winning percentage a team has had and not made the playoffs in any sport. I don’t know how hockey does winning percentage with it’s ties (so I’ll leave that to a hockey fan).

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