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.<\/p>\n
On Monday, October 5, 2026, Reuters reported that McDonald\u2019s 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\u2019s violated U.S. antitrust law by conspiring with independent franchisees to fix prices using algorithms trained on nonpublic data. \u201cIndependent businesses must set their prices independently,\u201d 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\u2019s Restaurant News on Oct. 6, identifies the plaintiff as Michael Thomas of DeKalb, Illinois, and quotes the complaint: \u201cThe result is algorithmic price-fixing aimed at customers who are already stretched thin.\u201d The suit argues the tool is a big reason prices have soared; by McDonald\u2019s own statements, its prices rose 40% between 2019 and 2024. It alleges franchisees are now required to use the company\u2019s pricing consultant and tools, that McDonald\u2019s tracks their adherence, and that the company warns franchisees the pricing portal could run afoul of antitrust law. McDonald\u2019s called the allegations speculative and uninformed. \u201cAI does not set the price of a Big Mac or any other menu item,\u201d it said. Its fact sheet says the tool \u201cprovides restaurant-specific recommendations. It does not set or change prices,\u201d and that \u201ca recommendation is exactly that: a recommendation, not a mandate.\u201d NRN reports McDonald\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201cleveraging its troves of data and its franchised system to nickel-and-dime consumers down to the last French fry.\u201d No court has ruled on any of it.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Recommendation is the alibi. The scorecard is the tell. Be fair to the company: the CEO\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Sources:<\/strong> Reuters via The Economic Times, Oct. 5\u20136, 2026<\/a>; Nation\u2019s Restaurant News (Restaurant Business), Oct. 6, 2026<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014 Theo Ashford-Lindstr\u00f6m<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A proposed nationwide class action in Chicago federal court accuses McDonald\u2019s of algorithmic price-fixing with a pricing engine built on nonpublic transaction data. McDonald\u2019s calls the claims speculative and says franchisees set their own prices.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":328,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-commentary","category-news"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/theo-mcdonalds-recommendation-1006am.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}