The process of making a burger in McDonald’s is not exactly filled with creative flair. For a start, two-sided grills mean that there is no flipping involved. Staff then use squirt guns to dispense the right amount of sauce on to a bun toasted for just the right number of seconds.
But what to many looks like monotony is a ripe area for economic research. A new study uses McDonald’s to shed light on the US economy.
Orley Ashenfelter of Princeton University and Stepan Jurajda of Prague’s Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education — Economics Institute have surveyed the pay in McDonald’s’ restaurants (“McWages”) every year since 2016. This is just one employer, but an important one, in a fast-food sector that in 2023 employed around 4mn Americans. That year, average pay for entry-level “crew members” was a little over $13 an hour, compared with around $34 among all private-sector employees.