McDonald’s Profits Are Up 31% Since the Pandemic, NPR Tells Us It Is a Victim of Inflation

Photo by Eshak Angell

I am not joking. A piece on All Things Considered carries the headline on NPR’s website “McDonald’s is losing customers to inflation.” The gist of the piece is that the economy is so bad that people can no longer afford to eat at McDonald’s. Now the company is being forced to lower its prices.

Incredibly, the piece never once mentions the company’s profits. They went from $11.18 billion in the year ending in December 2019, before the pandemic, to $14.69 billion in the year ending in March, an increase of more than 31 percent. That compares to an overall inflation rate of 21 percent over this period.

Rather than being a victim of inflation, McDonald’s was a cause of inflation. The company took advantage of the high demand and supply chain shortages to jack up its profit margins. Now, apparently competitive conditions in the fast-food industry are returning to something like their pre-pandemic state, and the company is being forced to accept more normal profit margins.

Instead of reporting this as a positive development for consumers, NPR presents it as yet one more bad economy story. It would be nice if we could get some reporting from the real world instead of having reporters who insist on writing pieces from the “bad economy storybook” even when they have no connection to reality.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.