Reinventing the McRipoff: Groundwork Analysis Exposes McDonald’s Doublespeak on AI Pricing

Reinventing the McRipoff: Groundwork Analysis Exposes McDonald’s Doublespeak on AI Pricing

McDonald’s tells customers AI doesn’t set prices while boasting to investors that its pricing tools can “limit customer resistance” and “personalize with even greater precision.”

Last week, a Reuters investigation revealed that McDonald’s uses an AI-powered pricing engine to generate and push franchisees to adopt “the optimal price” for every menu item at every one of its nearly 14,000 U.S. restaurants based on how much each store’s customer base is willing to pay. According to Reuters, some store owners report being “pressured” into accepting the AI pricing recommendations from McDonald’s HQ. In response, McDonald’s insisted that “AI does not set the price of a Big Mac,” but the company’s executives have spent years telling Wall Street the opposite.

In 2023, a McDonald’s executive told investors that the company’s proprietary pricing tools let it “price at a level that the consumer will accept,” and previewed that the company would use customer data and machine learning to “personalize with even greater precision.” In August, CEO Chris Kempczinski told investors that the company is “well-positioned to capitalize on the new opportunities afforded by artificial intelligence” and the company’s troves of customer data from its loyalty program and pricing engine. All of this translates to higher prices on Happy Meals for American families, based on what McDonalds’ bots think they can and should pay.

Lindsay Owens, author of Gouged: The End of a Fair Price—And What That Means for Your Wallet and President and CEO of Groundwork Collaborative, issued the following statement: 

“McDonald’s has spent years building a machine to figure out exactly how much you’ll pay for a Big Mac and charge you not a penny less – and bragging to Wall Street about it. Now, it’s trying to pull a fast one on customers, claiming that its AI-powered pricing engine merely ‘recommends’ prices – while simultaneously strongarming franchisees into deploying their pricing schemes. Americans don’t need AI pricing systems sizing them up to supersize their drive-thru bill. McDonald’s should pull the plug on its pricing engine and 86 the McRipoff.”

BACKGROUND

While McDonald’s claims that “AI does not set McDonald’s menu prices. Franchises do.” Yet corporate executives have bragged to investors about the company’s AI-powered pricing tools and the adoption rates of their pricing recommendations.

• On an August earnings call, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski, told investors that the firm will be “well-positioned to capitalize on the new opportunities afforded by artificial intelligence” now that all of its data is “soon to be pooled into a global data lake,” including its loyalty program and pricing engine.
• The company’s pricing engine, according to global chief marketing officer Morgan Flatley, is “an industry-leading tool that provides franchisees with pricing recommendations down to the restaurant and item level” that is “informed by millions of transactions and a broad range of market data.”
• In October 2022 and December 2023, McDonald’s executives told investors that franchisees’ implementation of pricing recommendations was “very strong” and “high.” In August 2026, Kempczinski told investors that “pricing non-compliance” is part of franchisee reviews, which determine growth and eligibility.
• In December 2025, McDonald’s announced updated franchising standards. At the time, Andrew Gregory, McDonald’s senior vice president of global franchising, wrote in a memo to franchisees that the company will “holistically assess” franchisees’ pricing decisions.
• Recent Reuters reporting claims that the franchising standards require franchisees to be “constructively engaging with McDonald’s approved Pricing Consultant and Tools” and that the company records when franchisees deviate from recommendations. Some franchisees have said that they have been pressured to adopt pricing recommendations by McDonald’s corporate headquarters.

McDonald’s claims its pricing recommendations do not “set prices based on an individual customer’s willingness to pay,” yet McDonald’s executives have boasted about the company’s ability to “limit customer resistance” to price hikes and “personalize with even greater precision.” 

• In December 2023, Jill McDonald, president of international operated markets, told investors that the company had spent “the last several years” building “a talented internal team, along with a suite of proprietary pricing tools.”
  • McDonald went on to say that “some [customers] are more price-sensitive than others, and there has long been an opportunity for McDonald’s to get more targeted in its pricing.”
  • At the time, the company was “evaluating the pricing opportunity at an individual restaurant and menu item level, optimizing price and limiting customer resistance.” McDonald bragged to investors that the company’s pricing tools unlock its “ability to price at a level that the consumer will accept.”
  • She continued that as the company gathers loyalty data, it will “leverage machine learning at scale and get even smarter with [its] pricing methodology.” This highly engineered pricing, McDonald said will enable the company “to personalize with even greater precision” and make discounts “less broad-based and more personalized.”
• In 2019, McDonald’s acquired a 10% stake in Plexure, a technology firm that runs McDonald’s online ordering app. Plexure is said to have “a revolutionary approach to product pricing, leveraging detailed customer data to offer unique pricing strategies tailored to individual customers.”
  • Plexure allows McDonald’s to track and analyze consumer spending habits and adjust pricing based on the information it collects. As an example, the app can detect that customers are most likely to visit McDonald’s on payday, allowing the fast food chain to withhold discounts knowing the customer is more likely to spend without a coupon.

McDonald’s privacy statement details the troves of customer data the company uses to train its AI models, like its pricing tools. 

• The Global Customer Privacy Statement notes that information collected includes: “products and services [customers] like or times [customers] prefer to visit,” and “age or gender.” It also lists “to train algorithms and AI models” as one of the purposes for collecting such data.
• The MyMcDonald’s Rewards privacy notice states that the program collects “inferences drawn from any of the above categories of information to create a profile about a consumer reflecting the consumer’s preferences, characteristics, psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities, or aptitudes.” This data feeds into the same “data lake” that informs the company’s pricing engine.
• When a WIRED reporter recently requested the profile McDonald’s had amassed on him, he received a 515-page dossier containing his purchase history, every promotional offer sent to him, a record of every Monopoly game code he had scanned, product rankings of what he was most likely to buy, as well as predictions about when, where, and how frequently he was likely to visit a McDonald’s restaurant.

McDonald’s is not alone in its pursuit to squeeze every single cent out of customers via high-tech schemes.

• Last month, Walmart’s CEO John Furner issued an open letter to shoppers following Groundwork’s President and CEO Lindsay Owens’ revelation that the company has filed patents designed to track consumers and hike prices based on their personal data. Despite bragging to the contrary on earnings calls with investors, Furner backtracked to claim the company prices “the product, not the person.” Owens called Furner’s scramble what it was – a desperate attempt to clean up “his spill on aisle four.”
• In December 2025, Owens and Groundwork helped lead an investigation into Instacart, which revealed that the grocery delivery company was charging different shoppers different prices for the same item from the same store at the same time, in what the company later claimed were “pricing experiments” conducted on unsuspecting consumers. The bombshell revelation spurred an FTC probe, tanked Instacart’s stock, and the ensuing public backlash forced Instacart to shut down its pricing lab.