May the best deal win – The Fast Food Lunch Wars of 2024 begin
In the last calendar year, Domino’s Australia has sold over five million of its My Domino’s Box, a Bento-box style lunch option that offers up one mini pizza, and two sides for $7.
Despite masquerading as a pizza chain, perhaps to lure any Ninja Turtles in the vicinity, Domino’s actually has a wide-ranging menu akin to a regional RSL. So these side options in the $7 box include churros, Dutch pancakes, meatballs, Hickory wings, popcorn chicken, garlic breads, and numerous other treats both sweet and savoury – 4,400 different combinations are possible in the My Domino’s Box, the company claims – meaning you could be mixing up lunch options every single day and not have to repeat until mid-2036.
Strangely enough, one man’s quest to embark on a 12-year lunch voyage isn’t the aspect Domino’s are focusing on with their marketing – rather they’re zooming in on the $7 price point, which is proving a pepperoni-covered beacon for Aussies in the midst of an inflation so rapid the Goodyear blimp is getting jealous.
Clearly McDonald’s Australia was paying attention to Domino’s’ success when it launched its own $6.95 McSmart meal last month, with an advertising blitz centred around what a mighty good deal two burgers, chips and a Coke for $7 is. Which it is.
Couple this with McDonald’s other recent nostalgia-drenched campaign, where they re-aired old ‘Big Mac Chant’ adverts (two all-beef patties, special sauce etc.) from decades past, and it’s almost like they want you to think of McDonald’s as an affordable fast food chain again.
Imagine.
That’s not a given for Macca’s. Even the McDonald’s Loose Change menu incited outrage earlier this year, when it included an $8.95 item, highlighting the disconnect of what we think about when we think about McDonald’s, and the stark 2024 reality where ten bucks is considered loose change, and a dollar coin can’t get you anything. Well, maybe a soft serve?
Or maybe not? Have you bought a soft serve lately? Aside from being the most refreshing way you can imbibe pig fat (actually a myth: but a fun one), a Macca’s Soft Serve will set you back $1.15 at some Australian McDonald’s outlets. As a NewsWire story from last November grimly informed us, this is a 283% mark-up since the halcyon 30c cone days of 2012.
McDonald’s were once kings of the cheap and cheerful, but as fast food started to get a bad name (thanks in large part to discredited documentary Super Size Me), and forehead-vein-popping TV chefs tricked us into thinking meals needed to involve exotic ingredients – or, alternatively, to have ingredients sourced from within plowing distance of the place the meal is consumed – McDonald’s tried to distance itself from the reputation it had spent half a century and untold billions in marketing to build.
As people became snobbish about food, and concerned about their arteries, McDonald’s tried to keep up with what they thought the public wanted.
In 2014, down the road from where I lived at the time, they morphed what was once a dank McCafe opposite a hospital where swearing is the most-spoken local language, into a trendy new eatery called The Corner.
Only, The Corner was a McDonald’s, with “salads featuring Moroccan roast chicken breast, chipotle pulled pork, brown rice, pumpkin, lentil and eggplant salads, sandwiches, and barista-made quality coffee,” as a spokesperson told Business Insider at the time. A chicken nugget could die of loneliness in such a place.
The first sign of McDonald’s wish to slide naturally into the upper classes was the apple slices in the Happy Meals. Then, in 2014, Macca’s started boasting that they now make their burgers to order, aka ‘fresh’, instead of just letting them pile up in a sweaty mess for when customers inevitably wanted them. Fresher by a matter of degrees, and slower to the point of completely missing the point of going to a Macca’s.
McCafe’s, once the coffee stop of choice for the No-Doz’d trucker and No-Doz’d student alike, started boasting of coffee beans grown on the side of a Himalayan hill, and all was lost. McDonald’s became your friend who went to Paris for a month and came back with an accent, a beret, and a penchant for Pinot noir.
Granted, McDonald’s wasn’t the only fast food place trying to dress Grimace up in a three-piece suit, so to speak. And it wasn’t just happening in Australia.
Burger King UK introduced a range of ‘Gourmet Kings’ burgers like The Angus Rösti Double, which boasts “fresh arugula” and “oak smoked cheddar”, and a A$22.40 price tag. That’s just for the burger – and the prestige of dining from a gourmet menu, of course.
2014 was also when Pizza Hut launched the Flavour of Now range, its “biggest brand evolution ever”, according to a company blog delightfully called Hut Life. Pizza Hut introduced new flavours such as Peruvian cherry peppers, toasted asiago, and honey sriracha, the newfound classiness only undercut slightly by menu items like Get Curried Away and Cock-a-Doodle Bacon (which isn’t remotely punny).
Domino’s Australia was offering up “slow-cooked beef brisket from Western Australia, crispy BBQ Peking duck from Victoria’s Wimmera region, farm fresh Aussie rocket, vintage Tasmanian cheddar, and award-winning parmesan cheese lovingly made in the NSW Hastings Valley,” with CEO Nick Knight saying chef-ish things like “we have worked closely with some of Australia’s best producers to source amazing ingredients.”
But, in 2024, people can’t afford food. Suddenly, fast food wants to be fast food again. Which is to say, cheap, plentiful, value-for-money food. $7-a-meal-type-food.
Even in Dubai, where the children get gold bars in their Happy Meals, McDonald’s recently ran the ‘after-dinner dinner’ campaign, basically telling rich diners to fill up on chips and nuggets on the way home from their snooty restaurant dates, casting a McDonald’s stop as the saviour “when fine dining leaves you with an empty wallet and an empty stomach.”
Look who else has come to play in the $7 box?
That’s a lunch-sized offering if ever I’ve seen one. With three dollars left from that ‘loose change’ tenner to play the pinball machines – if those old fast food ads I’ve been watching are any indication of post-fast-food activities.
$8.95 clearly didn’t pass the loose change pub test, as McDonald’s found out earlier this year. $7 seems to be where we have landed, as a value-conscious lunch option for the modern 2024 Australian. No frills, no bills, just four gold coins.
May the Seven Dollar Fast Food Lunch Wars of 2024 commence. May this start a slide back towards reasonable pricing, and the death of truffle oil fries for $39, or whatever the next fast food craze was slated to be. In the cold winter of the coming recession, may chip fat warm us and save the economy.
May we all emerge from the Fast Food Lunch Wars of 2024 with heavier wallets, fully bellies, and the firm belief that medical science will one day be able to undo the damage of 4,440 mini pizzas over a 12-year run. Not to mention all those garlic breads.
Enjoy your weekend.
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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Loved reading this, well done
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Another nice piece of Nathan. IIRC just after the GFC the fast food outlets were pushing dollar deals – a small burger or something else that could be bought for a gold coin.
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