McDonald's Abundance
Get 32.6 percent more "I'm Lovin' It" today compared to 1958.
The Wall Street Journal recently published an article titled: “When McDonald’s Was an Inexpensive Treat.” The author lamented that the new Big Arch offers “no dazzle in the experience.”
He fondly recalls a family vacation to Florida in 1958, when his family of five visited McDonald’s for the first time. Their entire meal—six hamburgers, four cheeseburgers, four orders of fries, and three milkshakes—cost just $2.66. With entry-level wages around $1.12 per hour, the 1958 time price comes to approximately two hours and 23 minutes.
Today, that same meal costs about $33.47. But wages have risen, too. With average hourly earnings at limited-service restaurants around $18.69, the time price is now just one hour and 48 minutes.
That’s a 24.6 percent decline in the time price.
In other words, for the same amount of time, a worker today can buy 32.6 percent more McDonald’s than in 1958.
McDonald’s isn’t a more expensive treat—it’s a more abundant one.
Here are the abundance factors for the four items:
In 1958, McDonald’s offered just nine items on the menu—five of them beverages. Walk into a McDonald’s today and you’ll find closer to 140 items, including combo meals and global variations.
McDonald’s began in 1940, when brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald opened a small drive-in in San Bernardino, California. In 1948, they shut it down, redesigned the entire operation, and reopened with a radically simplified menu of burgers, fries, and shakes. By focusing on speed, consistency, and efficiency, they reinvented food service—much like Henry Ford did with the moving assembly line in 1913.
At the time, hamburgers typically sold for 25 to 30 cents. The McDonald brothers cut that price roughly in half. Overnight, they didn’t just lower prices—they doubled hamburger abundance.
In 1954, milkshake machine salesman Ray Kroc visited the restaurant and immediately saw its potential. A year later, on April 15, 1955, he opened the first franchised McDonald’s in Des Plaines, Illinois and began scaling the model across the country and then the world.
Today, there are more than 41,800 McDonald’s locations in over 100 countries and territories. The United States alone has over 13,000 restaurants and the company plans to expand to 50,000 locations globally by 2027.
From nine menu items to 140. From one restaurant to tens of thousands. From a local innovation to a global system of food production.
This is what happens when knowledge compounds.
Our family spent three years in Saudi Arabia, and one of our simple pleasures was visiting the local McDonald’s for a taste of home.
Here is a video of McDonald’s ads over the years:
Please let me know in the comments if there is a product you would like to see analyzed in a future article.