The next time you find yourself paying way more than what’s warranted for McDonald’s decidedly mid-tier burgers, you may have more to blame than just faceless executives.
According an investigation by Reuters, the fast food chain is using AI models to determine its menu prices across the US, with the system creating an estimate of how much each store’s customers are willing to pay. (Its alarming degree of data collection on its patrons has recently spent some time in the spotlight.)
Per the reporting, McDonald’s machine learning algorithms continually analyze millions of daily transactions and generate an “optimal price” for each menu item at all of its nearly 14,000 restaurants. Three franchisees told Reuters that the AI pricing engine has widened existing price differences between restaurants, even as close as between neighborhood to neighborhood.
In Reuters‘ testing, it found one store in Fresno, California selling Big Macs for $5.69, while another restaurant just two miles away sold them for $6.89, a 21 percent price hike.
