They wrote the price and called it a recommendation. I know the sentence. It is what a company says when it owns the sign, writes the standards, grades the owner, holds the data from every register in the country, and then swears the number on the menu board just sort of happened.
On Monday, October 5, 2026, Reuters reported that McDonald’s has been sued in federal court in Chicago in a proposed nationwide class action, filed Friday, alleging the company illegally coordinates menu prices across its franchises and company-owned restaurants through an AI-powered pricing system. The suit says McDonald’s violated U.S. antitrust law by conspiring with independent franchisees to fix prices using algorithms trained on nonpublic data. “Independent businesses must set their prices independently,” it says. Reuters had reported the week before that the pricing engine uses machine-learning algorithms to continually analyze data from millions of daily transactions across nearly 14,000 restaurants, and the complaint cites that story. Jonathan Maze of Restaurant Business, writing in Nation’s Restaurant News on Oct. 6, identifies the plaintiff as Michael Thomas of DeKalb, Illinois, and quotes the complaint: “The result is algorithmic price-fixing aimed at customers who are already stretched thin.” The suit argues the tool is a big reason prices have soared; by McDonald’s own statements, its prices rose 40% between 2019 and 2024. It alleges franchisees are now required to use the company’s pricing consultant and tools, that McDonald’s tracks their adherence, and that the company warns franchisees the pricing portal could run afoul of antitrust law. McDonald’s called the allegations speculative and uninformed. “AI does not set the price of a Big Mac or any other menu item,” it said. Its fact sheet says the tool “provides restaurant-specific recommendations. It does not set or change prices,” and that “a recommendation is exactly that: a recommendation, not a mandate.” NRN reports McDonald’s has long used Deloitte as its pricing consultant, that this year it added a bigger value component to its franchising standards that rates operators on whether they effectively used the company’s tools, and that CEO Chris Kempczinski complained on the latest earnings call that only 60% to 65% of operators followed its pricing recommendations on a $3 and Under menu. Lark Turner, a lawyer for the plaintiff, said the company is “leveraging its troves of data and its franchised system to nickel-and-dime consumers down to the last French fry.” No court has ruled on any of it.
Buck wants to know whether the algorithm knows about his coupon. Taryn says the twins are not getting fries until they have teeth, and the person in a chair abstains. I love them. They are seasoning.
Recommendation is the alibi. The scorecard is the tell. Be fair to the company: the CEO’s complaint on that earnings call was about owners not following its suggestions on a value menu. Fine. But follow the shape of the thing. The firm sees every register. It hires the consultant. It writes the standard that grades the owner on using its tools. Then it calls the number that comes out a suggestion. A suggestion you are scored on is a policy wearing a paper hat. I still hold the anti-capitalist cut. If the complaint is right, nearly fourteen thousand counters that are supposed to compete with each other, all reading from one pricing brain, is not a market. It is a franchise of the same answer. And I am not sending for a regulator to save the burger. There is no agency in this story. There is a man from DeKalb, a lawyer, a fact sheet, and a court that has not decided anything. If the complaint is wrong, the company should have no trouble showing the owners pricing on their own. If it is right, the value menu was a dashboard all along. I am keeping the cardigan. Fill the notebook. Then ask the owner on your corner who actually wrote the number on the board.
Sources: Reuters via The Economic Times, Oct. 5–6, 2026; Nation’s Restaurant News (Restaurant Business), Oct. 6, 2026.
— Theo Ashford-Lindström
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