Spending by McDonald’s low-income diners fell 2.4% year-over-year in the chain’s most recent quarter, consumer analytics company Numerator said on Tuesday, marking the first quarterly decline with that cohort in the past year and amounting to roughly $310 million in lost sales. The timing is awkward: rivals including Burger King are moving in the opposite direction.
What the Numerator data shows about McDonald’s low-income diners
Numerator defines low-income guests as those from households earning $40,000 or less a year. Over the same period that McDonald’s recorded its 2.4% decline with that group, Burger King posted a 0.3% gain. The gap is modest in percentage terms but directionally pointed: one chain is winning ground the other is ceding.
The data lands alongside a broader softness in McDonald’s US performance. Marketplace reported that the chain’s second-quarter US comparable sales grew just 0.8%, roughly a third of what it posted a year ago. Part of the structural problem, according to Marketplace, dates to the inflation surge of 2022, when lower-income customers cut back on eating out and, by many measures, still have not returned. That long tail of absent lower-income traffic makes the latest Numerator figures harder to dismiss as a single-quarter blip.
McDonald’s also replaced the head of its US operations, Marketplace reported, a move that signals internal recognition that the current commercial approach is not producing the results the business needs.
Value execution and the K-shaped economy
On an earnings call earlier this month, CEO Chris Kempczinski pointed to the chain’s latest value menu, which focuses on items priced at $3 or less, as a work in progress. “Although we’ve restored our overall value and affordability leadership, our restaurant-level results show that execution was inconsistent across the system,” Kempczinski said. The admission matters because McDonald’s has historically relied on price-conscious diners as a core constituency, drawing them in with offers such as its buy-one-get-one discount on sandwiches including the Big Mac. Uneven rollout of the new value menu undermines that proposition precisely where the chain is most exposed.
The competitive context is pressing. Rivals ranging from Burger King to casual dining chain Chili’s have reported stronger results while deploying their own value menus and promotional deals. Some McDonald’s customers have told Business Insider they are now eating more frequently at other chains or preparing more meals at home, citing higher costs.
The pattern reflects what analysts describe as a K-shaped economy: higher-income households continue to spend, while lower-income households remain under sustained pressure. For a chain whose appeal to budget-conscious customers has long been a differentiating factor, that dynamic creates an asymmetric drag. Competitors with comparable or lower price points are proving capable of capturing the value-seeking traffic that McDonald’s is not retaining.
Where McDonald’s low-income diners are still showing up
Not every data point from Numerator cuts against the chain. The fried apple pie, an older menu item that McDonald’s brought back to mark America’s 250th birthday this summer, has been purchased by 11.7% of US households, Numerator found. The figure suggests that targeted, limited-time offers can still generate broad household reach, even as the chain’s core value positioning struggles to land consistently at the restaurant level.
The immediate test is whether the $3-or-less value menu can be executed more uniformly across franchised locations ahead of the next quarterly reporting period, with Kempczinski having already flagged inconsistent delivery as the central operational problem to solve.