In July, McDonald’s reported a decline in same-store sales for the first time in nearly four years, a drop attributed to tightened consumer spending following prolonged periods of high inflation. In response, the fast-food giant introduced a $5 summer deal in June, designed to offer an affordable option for customers struggling amid inflation and high interest rates.

The limited-time meal deal, which includes a choice of a McDouble, McChicken sandwich or a 4-piece Chicken McNuggets, along with a small fry and soft drink, has been well-received by customers. And now that customers continue to grapple with economic strain, McDonald’s extended the offering until December. (Related: Bidenomics: Big Mac extra value meal now costs $10 more than it did during Trump’s era.)

“We’re committed to keeping our prices as affordable as possible,” Joe Erlinger, president of McDonald’s USA, said in September.

McDonald’s is also releasing app-exclusive promotions, including a fried chicken sandwich for $2. Kempczinski is also looking at ways to do a complete “reset” or overhaul of its value offerings, noting that the number of $1, $2 and $3 menu offerings has shrunk in recent years amid rising food and operating costs.

In line with this, Kempczinski also noted that chicken, a food way cheaper than beef, could play a key role in offering more affordable meal options.

“It’s easier to deliver value on chicken products than it is on beef products,” he explained, adding that beef prices are currently more than twice those of chicken on a per-pound basis.

“We’re starting to talk about 2025, and my message to our teams has been: ‘We need to be preparing for another challenging year,'” Kempczinski said. “We need to be making sure that we’ve got a really strong value proposition in all of our markets.”

Harris will continue Bidenomics despite its negative consequences if elected president

In an article for  Zero Hedge, Tyler Durden wrote that economic conditions for low-income consumers are expected to worsen through the end of the year, particularly due to potential increases in energy prices.

“Economic conditions for the working poor will only get more challenging through the end of the year. MCD reports third-quarter earnings on Oct. 29. The lingering problem for consumers is an energy price shock at the pump could materialize if Israel begins bombing Iran’s crude oil export facilities. Consumers need to buckle up,” Durden wrote.

Rep. Randy Weber (R-TX) noted that “Harris would not have changed a damn thing” from the policies of the Biden administration.

“If you think four more years of Harris won’t mean the same high gas prices, inflation, open borders and crime, I’ve got oceanfront property in Oklahoma to sell you! Kamala Harris admitted she wouldn’t change a thing from Biden’s disastrous policies,” Weber posted on X, along with a clip of Harris’ guesting on ABC’s “The View” on Oct. 8.

In other words, there will be no respite for these economic strains if Harris wins in November.

Follow Collapse.news for similar stories. Watch this clip from Fox Business as former U.S. International Trade Commission Chief Peter Morici discusses how President Joe Biden’s management of the American economy has been “a failure.”

This video is from the News Clips channel on Brighteon.com.

More related stories:

• BIDENOMICS claims another victim: Retail store chain Bob’s Stores to close down all locations by July 14.
• BIDENOMICS: UPS cuts 12,000 jobs due to decreased shipping volume, tense union negotiations.
• Bidenomics in shambles: Microsoft cuts 1,900 jobs in gaming market.
• Inflation comes roaring back as Bidenomics harms American households.
• Major Burger King franchisee files for BANKRUPTCY as fast-food industry faces doom of “Bidenomics.”

Sources include:

• ZeroHedge.com
• Bloomberg.com
• Brighteon.com

Only the most affluent can afford to live there and many of them are choosing to leave. Recent trends over the past two years have seen an indisputable exodus from a city that is known for its lifestyle options. It was once considered a privilege to live there. Today, it’s such a burden that the people are trying to escape.

As Gemini AI details, New York City continues to break records for rent prices:

As of September 2024, the average rent in New York City is $3,869 per month, which is 147% higher than the national average. The average rent for different apartment sizes is:

• Studio: $3,145 per month for an average of 444 sq ft
• One bedroom: $3,869 per month for an average of 597 sq ft
• Two bedroom: $5,268 per month for an average of 791 sq ft
• Three bedroom: $6,509 per month for an average of 1,009 sq ft

In June 2024, the median rent in Manhattan was $4,667 per month, which was a record high.

Unfortunately, many are unable to leave without giving up their careers. The city is still one of the world’s hubs for all things finance and those who work for companies embedded in New York City keep the outrageously priced apartments in high demand.

According to NY Post:

The hunt for a New York City apartment has gone from frustrating to downright feral.

This summer, renters are battling it out like never before, all for a shot at a roof over their heads in a city where landlords are calling the shots and jacking up prices to astronomical levels.

Take Aurielle Catron, a 29-year-old security engineer who braved the NYC jungle in search of a two-bedroom in Bushwick. After a brutal month-long search and 52 viewings, Catron landed a rent-stabilized fourth-floor walk-up for $3,200 a month.

It wasn’t her dream pad — it’s missing a laundry room and elevator — but after losing a bidding war that saw a $2,800 unit shoot up to $3,600, she was just relieved to have a place to call home.

“Most restaurants lose money, and there’s a reason for that. It’s a hard business with low margins and trends that are hard to navigate,” Jonathan Carson, the co-CEO of market strategy company Stretto, told The Epoch Times.

“When you add higher prices and a continually and increasingly overburdened consumer balance sheet, I think it makes the industry prime for restructuring,” he said.

Carson, who handles business reorganizations, said his company is aware of at least 17 national restaurant chains that have filed for bankruptcy in 2024.

Among the higher profile restaurant casualties this year which have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection this year are Roti, Buca di Beppo, Tijuana Flats, Sticky’s finger Joint, and Red Lobster.

Consumer Habits Have Changed

Laura Adams, a money expert and award-winning author who also hosts the weekly Money Girl podcast, told The Epoch Times that changes in consumer habits such as cooking at home and ordering home delivery have especially plagued the fast-casual tier of the restaurant industry.

“Consumers who dine at lower-end restaurants are the ones who will stop dining out first, and they’ll be the last ones to return because of unaffordability,” she said. “I think people have become used to ordering out, eating casually at home, and wearing casual clothes while watching Netflix.”

One of the changes in the restaurant industry that exploded during the pandemic was home-delivery services like Uber Eats, Grubhub, and DoorDash. The delivery companies, though, take large commissions from restaurants already struggling to make a profit.

Doordash orders can take as much as a 30 percent commission from restaurants.

“Doordash is a double-edged sword. It gives you the opportunity to get more food to more people, but it takes a pretty sizeable chunk off the bottom line,” said Justin Winslow, president and CEO of the Michigan Restaurant and Lodging Association.

“In third-party delivery, you have a real prisoner’s dilemma. You either shun the opportunity and limit your top-line gross sales, or you accept it and realize your ability to profit from those customers is harder than those inside your restaurant,” he told The Epoch Times.

Doordash is now the top restaurant-delivery app in the United States. At the end of 2023, DoorDash had 550,000 partner restaurants and grocery stores using its platform. However, the company is still looking for its first quarter of profitability.

In a written response to The Epoch Times, DoorDash’s corporate communications group wrote: “Our mission at DoorDash is to grow and empower local economies, and we’ve built tools that help restaurants expand their business and reach more people in their community.”

A Variety of Issues

Adams said that to survive, restaurants must offer something unique to make consumers leave their homes to experience it.

“I think if companies can’t differentiate themselves, they’re going to have a hard time. Maybe a restaurant like Red Lobster gets transformed, but it’s sad to see such a well-known brand wither away. When you see folks cutting back on dining out, you need to offer something unique,” she said.

The reason behind many Chapter 11 restaurant-restructuring filings this year needs to be discussed more, according to Carson, who has more than 20 years of bankruptcy experience.

He believes many of the filings have much to do with getting out of rent agreements. “You can walk away from a lease with Chapter 11 bankruptcies. The company can take the liability off their PNL [profit and loss],” he said. “But you do still have some casualties along the way.”

As tough as the restaurant economic and consumer market is today, Winslow says the restaurants in his organization are still reeling from the response to the pandemic that ended two years ago.

“The long tail of COVID is still impacting this industry more than any others. We did a poll in June, and I wasn’t prepared for how severe the fallout has been, with 60 of our members losing foot traffic in the last year and only 25 seeing an increase in top-line sales,” Winslow said.

“Forty of them are currently not profitable, and two out of every five of our restaurants are at risk for closure in the near future.”

Asked if she would advise anyone to open a restaurant today in this economic environment, Adams said, “I would say it is one of the most difficult businesses you can choose to run, and I would make sure you have the expertise and a record of success before you do it.”

As you will see below, even the mainstream media hates her economic plan.

Right now, 59 percent of Americans believe that we are already in a recession.  Most of us detest what has happened to the economy, and so Harris should not be talking about this if she plans to win.  Unfortunately for her, that is precisely what she has been doing.  For example, she uttered a soundbite during one recent speech that will be played millions of times between now and election day…

“A loaf of bread costs 50% more today than before the pandemic. Ground beef is up almost 50%.”

Why would she say something like this?

Does she actually want people not to vote for her?

Now that the government has created the cost of living crisis, Harris plans to fix it by imposing price controls.

Needless to say, that idea went over like a dud…

Harris announced Wednesday that she would institute a “federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries” as president in an attempt to stop “big corporations” from taking advantage of consumers, and outlets like the Washington Post, CNN, and Newsweek published reports shredding the idea.

“Whether the Harris proposal wins over voters remains to be seen, but if sound economic analysis still matters, it won’t,” the liberal-leaning Washington Post editorial board wrote on Friday.

The Washington Post editorial board actually compared her plan to the failed price controls that President Nixon imposed in the 1970s…

The Post’s editorial board took Harris to task on the idea, stating it’s not even clear what her plan is. “Ms. Harris says she’ll target companies that make ‘excessive’ profits, whatever that means.” It also expressed relief that the plan was getting pummeled out of the gate.

“Thankfully, this gambit by Ms. Harris has been met with almost instant skepticism, with many critics citing President Richard M. Nixon’s failed price controls from the 1970s.”

In a different piece, a Washington Post columnist named Catherine Rampell stated that it is “hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is”…

It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is. It is, in all but name, a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food. Supply and demand would no longer determine prices or profit levels. Some far-off Washington bureaucrats would. The FTC would be able to tell, say, a Kroger in Ohio the acceptable price it can charge for milk.

At best this would lead to shortages, black markets and hoarding, among other distortions seen previous times countries tried to limit price growth by fiat. (There’s a reason narrower “price gouging” laws that exist in some U.S. states are rarely invoked.) At worst, it might accidentally raise prices.

And to close out her article, Rampell actually suggested that Harris is acting like a “communist”…

If your opponent claims you’re a “communist,” maybe don’t start with an economic agenda that can (accurately) be labeled as federal price controls.

This is the Washington Post! I can’t remember the last time the Washington Post criticized a Democratic candidate for president this harshly

Harris is not a serious candidate, and so she should stop trying to be one. Just smile and wave at the cameras.

A lot of voters will like that. There is no way that Harris is going to win over voters with her ideas, because her ideas are terrible.

On Saturday, Elon Musk retweeted an outstanding post by Robert Sterling that summarizes what widespread price controls would do to our food industry.  Because Sterling’s social media post is so good, I have reproduced the entire thing below…

1. The government announces that grocery retailers aren’t allowed to raise prices.

2. Grocery stores, which operate on 1-2% net margins, can’t survive if their suppliers raise prices. So the government announces that food producers (Kraft Heinz, ConAgra, Tyson, Hormel, et. al.) also aren’t allowed to raise prices.

3. Not all grocery stores are created equal. Stores in lower-income areas make less money than those in higher-income areas, as the former disproportionately sell lower-margin prepackaged foods (“center of the store”) instead of higher-margin fresh products like meat (“perimeter of the store”). Because stores in lower-income areas aren’t able to cover overhead (remember, even if their wholesale costs are fixed, their labor, utilities, insurance, and other operating expenses aren’t fixed… yet), grocery chains start to shut them down. Food deserts in rural areas and in low-income urban areas alike become worse.

4. Meanwhile, margins for food producers are also quickly eroding. Their primary costs (ingredients, energy, and labor) aren’t fixed, and their shrinking gross profits leave less cash flow available to cover overhead, maintain facilities, and reinvest in additional production capacity.

5. Grocery chains, which have finite shelf space, start to repurpose their stores (those they didn’t have to shut down, I should say) to sell more non-price-controlled items—everything from nutrition supplements to kitchenware to apparel—and less price-controlled food products. Your local Kroger or Safeway starts to look and feel more like a Walmart.

6. Food producers stop making products with lower margins. Grocery chain start competing with each other to secure inventory. Since they can’t compete by offering stronger prices (remember, producers aren’t allowed to raise prices here, and, even if they could, grocery chains no longer have the gross profit to bear price increases), they compete on things like payment terms.

7. Small grocery chains start to shut down entirely, or get sold to larger chains like Kroger. In addition to not being able to cover fixed costs, a major reason for this is because they can no longer reliably secure delivery of products, due to producers prioritizing sales to larger customers, which are able to leverage their stronger balance sheets to offer superior payment terms.

8. Smaller food producers—which typically sell via distributors, rather than directly to grocery chains—start to go out of business. Because these producers have an additional step their value chains, and because they have lower volumes over which to spread their fixed costs, their cost structure is inherently disadvantaged compared to major food producers. When grocery stores aren’t able to raise prices, cutting product costs becomes all the more important, and deprioritizing purchases from smaller producers is an easy way to do so.

9. As supply chains break down, lines start to form outside grocery stores every morning. Cities assign police officers to patrol store parking lots, and food producers draft contingency plans to assign armed escorts to delivery trucks.

10. The federal government announces a program to issue block grants for states to purchase and operate shuttered grocery stores. The USDA also seizes closed-down production facilities.

11. The government announces that prices for all key food costs—corn, wheat, cattle, energy, etc.—are also now fixed, to stop “profiteers” from gouging the now-government-operated food industry.

12. Shockingly, the government struggles to operate one of the most complex industries on the planet. The entire food supply chain starts imploding.

13. Communism, mass starvation, and the end of America quickly ensue.

I couldn’t have said it any better myself.

Harris also wants to distort the housing market with all sorts of crazy government interference.  The following comes from CNN…

• Up to $25,000 in down-payment support for first-time homebuyers.
• To provide a $10,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers.
• Tax incentives for builders that build starter homes sold to first-time buyers.
• An expansion of a tax incentive for building affordable rental housing.
• A new $40 billion innovation fund to spur innovative housing construction.
• To repurpose some federal land for affordable housing.
• A ban on algorithm-driven price-setting tools for landlords to set rents.
• To remove tax benefits for investors who buy large numbers of single-family rental homes.

All of that sounds expensive.

Harris also wants to cut taxes for lower-income workers and families with children…

Harris’ campaign said Friday morning that she’s in favor of permanently expanding the Child Tax Credit to up to $3,600 per child and cutting taxes for lower-income workers without children by $1,500. Families with newborns would be eligible for a $6,000 tax credit under the Harris plan.

This is one thing that Harris is being widely praised for, because everybody likes lower taxes. Copying Donald Trump’s idea, Harris is proposing that there should be no tax on tips. She is also promising to pay off student loan debt and some medical bills.

Basically, she is promising lots and lots of freebies. But how in the world is she going to pay for all of this? We are already 35 trillion dollars in debt.

Needless to say, Harris never intends to actually implement most of this stuff. Back in 2021, the Biden administration promised to construct 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations. So far, the grand total that they have actually built is just eight…

As WaPo reported, Biden-Harris has long vowed to build 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations in the United States by 2030.

In 2021, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act included $7.5 billion to build 500,000 public charging stations for electric vehicles (EVs) nationwide. This was an effort to encourage people to switch to clean energy, as they wrote rules to force them to switch.

As Reason reported in December, not one charger funded by the program had yet come online. Six months later, the number of functional charging stations ticked to eight.

Politicians make all sorts of promises. But delivering on them is another matter entirely.

Are U.S. voters buying what Kamala Harris is selling?

According to the latest numbers from Rasmussen, Donald Trump still has a narrow lead…

Former President Donald Trump continues to lead Vice President Kamala Harris, although the Democrat has slightly narrowed the margin.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that, in a two-way matchup, 49% of Likely U.S. Voters would vote for Trump, while 45% would vote for Harris. Three percent (3%) say they’d vote for some other candidate and two percent (2%) are undecided. These findings are just slightly changed from a week ago, when Trump led by five points, with 49% to Harris’s 44%.

This has already been such a chaotic election season, and I am expecting much more chaos during the months ahead.

It appears that this is a race that is going to go down to the wire, and at this point both sides are fully expecting to win.

If Kamala Harris ultimately loses, it is going to feel like the end of the world for many on the left, and we will witness a temper tantrum of absolutely epic proportions.

Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.