Fast food restaurant Wendy’s begins offering a $3 breakfast combo meal this week, as the chain seeks to confront declining traffic across the industry and battle rivals like McDonald’s, which unveiled a $5 lunch meal deal earlier this month.
The Wendy’s combo will include seasoned potatoes, and a choice of English muffin breakfast sandwiches, according to CNBC.
The McDonald’s promotion, meanwhile, includes a McDouble or McChicken sandwich, a small order of fries, a soft drink, and a four-piece McNuggets, and is expected to run for about a month beginning 25 June.
Coca-Cola, McDonald’s beverage supplier, is expected to chip in $4.6m to subsidize costs incurred from the promotion, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Last month, McDonald’s announced it had lost its affordability lead in certain markets, and suggested that franchisees, who make up the majority of the chain’s restaurants, had now returned to prepandemic levels of profitability and could afford to offer nationally-set meal deals.
Both brands are confronting a challenging economic landscape for fast food.
The price of dining outside the home has been rising nearly four times faster than dining at home over the last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Traffic at fast food restaurants in particular is down 3.5% in the first quarter of this year, compared with 2023, as the cost of eating out has risen by 33 per cent since 2019.
Wendy’s, for its part, has suggested it might use a recent $20m investment in digital menu boards to experiment with dynamic pricing beginning in 2025.
