Have restaurants like Taco Bell gotten crazy expensive for what you get or am I crazy?

Its more expensive, tastes worse, is prepared worse, and uses worse ingredients. The fuck is happening?

They're testing how hard they can squeeze their customer base and still profit. Prices will continue to increase as long as people pay.

Fast food is ridiculous now. Everything around here is almost twice what it cost 5-6 years ago. Might as well go to an actually good restaurant for that.

Fast food has been hit hard by the enshitification. More expensive and doesn't even taste good anymore because they use even shittier ingredients than they used to. The only reason people still bother is typically lack of time to cook.

You can make most fast food items at home if you have the time. It will be cheaper and taste better.

Everything is artificially inflated by 1.7x to 2.4x ever since covid. The inflation you are seeing is not real inflation but rather manufactured by those in high-up positions at most fortune-500 companies.

Interestingly; Taco Bell has some of the cheapest fast food you can get with their luxe box line, but that more speaks to how bad everything else has gotten post-covid and during this term.

It's not just you. The price has gone up, but the quality has likely gone down.

Wait until you learn in certain parts of the world they're eating authentic tacos for only 70 cent

Yeah the prices are getting out of control. It can be cheaper to eat at a fast casual restaurant.

I went to a Taco Bell recently and was wowed by how high the price was. Last time I went was during 2020.

Is there anything that hasn’t gone up in price recently?

I ate there a month ago after years of not going.

You're correct, however, I think they use the insane price on individual items to make their combo boxes, or whatever they're called, seem like a better deal.

4 burgers and fries at AnW is close to over $100 now. Just not worth it anymore

Not just you, corpo fastfood like mcdonalds, kfc and whatever have been more expensive (and worse quality) than local non-chain street/fastfood for years.

This year a mcdonalds opened in my small-ish town, and I can't fathom why anybody would buy there. There's a better restaurant for every single item on the menu, with better quality for cheaper/same price. The only thing it has going for it is the drive thru.

Edit: This is in Poland

When the price of fast food goes up too fast, it’s an indicator of impending financial collapse.

Yep, price is up, quality is down, fast food seems more of an expensive novelty now than whatever it was supposed to be. Stopped going unless I was on a road trip or with friends. Frozen food with an air fryer (got the fryer secondhand for the cost of a McD meal) satisfies the craving, but for much less money.

Fast food has priced itself mostly out of my household. Probably better for our health, but we spend far more time cooking now.

Used to get it probably twice a week for convenience. Now it's down to about once or twice a month, during the handful of occasional evenings where we have absolutely zero extra time to cook.

Inflation in the West is correlated to de-dollarization happening worldwide

The 5-layer burrito is delicious and it's only $5. It's a bargain, even with the extra meat option.

For paying people more in some markets and adjusting the prices to be about the same everywhere. So the way a business works is, they have certain profits they have to make to appease the shareholders, and this has to improve year after year. It doesn't always, but to do so is the goal. So when things like regulation and etc. raise their costs, they raise their prices so their profit still increases.

Honestly, Taco Bell used to be cheap. Now it's not. It hasn't been cheap for a long time. But yes, all fast food places have gotten crazy expensive.

Sit-down restaurants have gone up, too. But not as much. So if you want a burger, a sit-down place might not be cheaper, but it might be a better value.

Fast food has kind of always been a scam though. You're paying for the convenience. So in the west market, Hardee's (which is called Carl's Jr. out there) marketed a burger about 20-25 years ago called the "Six Dollar Burger." They argued that their burger was the equivalent of what you'd pay six dollars for at a sit-down restaurant. What they assumed their customers were too stupid to understand was, that "six dollar burger" at a sit-down restaurant came with fries and cheese and was still bigger. By adding fries, the $4 burger got real close to that $6 price. The combo was more. So they were banking on people not being smart. Naturally, it worked. (Hardee's just called it the Thickburger. They've since discontinued the whole line. Hardee's and Carl's Jr. no longer make thick burgers anymore. They've honestly been trash ever since. And most burgers in fast food start at six bucks now.