Millions of American families are hitting the road to start summer vacation, and ordering food on the run tends to be par for the course. It couldn’t come at a better time. Fast food joints are in the midst of a budget-meal war, offering promotions to lure customers back to their restaurants despite inflation woes and a minimum-wage increase in California and other states.

Starting June 25, McDonald’s will offer a month-long deal featuring a combo meal —either a McChicken, a McDouble or four-piece chicken nuggets, small fries and a small drink — for $5.

After McDonald’s announcement last month, other fast food restaurants followed suit. Wendy’s announced its $3 limited-time breakfast combo meal and Burger King trumpeted that it planned to bring back its $5 Your Way Meal.

In addition, fast food mobile apps continue to offer deep discounts.

App relief

Earlier this week, a Big Mac with medium fries and medium drink cost $11.79 before tax at a McDonald’s in Santa Ana. That same meal ordered via a mobile app for pickup at the same location cost $6.50 before tax, a savings of $5.29.

But the prices and deals tend to vary depending on the user.

Diners have taken to complaining on Reddit about the McDonald’s mobile app. Some say the deals decrease with use. Others say their friends or partners were getting a better deal on the app than they were getting. A few mentioned that they could find better deals by just walking in and ordering at their local McDonald’s.

The plethora of promotional deals come after diners blasted fast food companies on social media earlier this year for rising prices.

In response, Joe Erlinger, president of McDonald’s USA, said in an open letter last month that the average price of McDonald’s menu items is up an estimated 40% since 2019.

“Recently, we have seen viral social posts and poorly sourced reports that McDonald’s has raised prices significantly beyond inflationary rates. This is inaccurate,” Erlinger wrote.

“The average price of a Big Mac in the U.S. was $4.39 in 2019,” he said. “Despite a global pandemic and historic rises in supply chain costs, wages and other inflationary pressures in the years that followed, the average cost is now $5.29. That’s an increase of 21% (not 100%),” as unsubstantiated claims allege on social media.

Quick-service restaurants said the increases were in response to rising inflation and labor costs — partly due to hikes in minimum wage not just in California but throughout the country.

It’s true that quick-service restaurants such as McDonalds have had to contend with increased costs, but they are by no means hurting, said Shubhranshu Singh, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University who specializes in quick-service marketing.

“They are not struggling,” Singh said. “Inflation is going up. Wage rates are going up. But profit for McDonald’s is also going up.”

Global comparable sales for McDonald’s grew nearly 2% in the first quarter of the year, according to the latest statistics made available by the company. The fast-food giant described this profit increase as having “benefited from average check growth driven by strategic menu price increases.”

Price-weary diners have taken notice and become fed up with the price hikes, choosing to eat less fast food and protesting on social media that their go-to budget meals were no longer wallet-friendly, Singh said.

Several diners took aim at McDonald’s, griping on TikTok about the company charging more for food that’s supposed to be affordable.

“This is $3 worth of food,” said a customer who held up a hash brown. “Something doesn’t seem right here.”

“McDonald’s has gotten too cocky,” said another customer. “Y’all not supposed to be expensive.”

One diner called it “absurd” that she’d paid $4.59 for a medium order of french fries.

And then there was the uproar over a McDonald’s location in Connecticut charging $18 for a Big Mac combo meal. The photo sparked a nationwide debate on soaring fast-food prices.

Making choices

Most McDonald’s in the United States are independently franchised, so prices vary depending on where one visits.

Increased fast food prices ultimately led to slower-than-expected sales at various quick-service restaurants, such as McDonald’s, Starbucks and Pizza Hut.

“Consumers are always making choices,” said restaurant analyst Sara Senatore at Bank of America. “When the value proposition starts to diminish, consumers will make other choices.”

Up until fairly recently, consumers were willing to pay more for quick-service food. When fast food prices started to soar in 2022, consumers just went along because prices everywhere had surged due to inflation, Senatore said.

But now inflation has lessened. Grocery prices have fallen and budget-conscious consumers may no longer see fast food as the clear-cut affordable choice, she said.

Enter the value meals.

Fast food workers rally in favor of a proposed minimum wage increase outside Los Angeles City Hall in 2022. The approved increase went into effect on April 1 and was considered a victory for organized labor.

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

Budget meals aren’t new. In the 1980s, McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Burger King engaged in a series of advertising campaigns known as the Burger Wars competing for customers in the then-flourishing fast food market.

“The hope is that the consumer will go there and maybe buy something additional to the value meal and then want to return even when there is no deal,” Singh said.

But the promotions, analysts warned, can’t last forever.

“It’s not sustainable,” Singh said. “I don’t expect any of these deals to stay.”

The year 2023 was especially cruel to regional banks in California. Repeated interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve exposed the poor bets and hubris of regional highfliers like Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic. Those banks capsized, which sparked bank runs, which wiped shareholders out.

One regional bank, however, smoothly sailed on: East West Bank, helmed for more than 30 years by Dominic Ng, who champions the durable power of steady growth. “We’re prudent and cautious, but very entrepreneurial,” he said from his office at East West headquarters in Pasadena. “The way you win in banking is not through shortcuts. It’s a long game.”

The result has been accolades: No. 1 best-performing bank in its size category last year from S&P Global Market Intelligence and No. 1 performing bank in 2023 by trade publication Bank Director. The diversity of its board of directors — Latino, Asian, Black, female and LGBTQ+ all represented — has also won acclaim.

Steady profits enabled East West to become one of Los Angeles’ top civic benefactors. Ng has been especially active with the United Way of Greater Los Angeles for more than 25 years and is credited with championing a strategic change in direction to more effectively serve the city’s desperately poor, while persuading more of the city’s richest residents to pitch in.

“His leadership has transformed the bank, transformed philanthropy and what business leadership looks like in L.A.,” said Elise Buik, the United Way chapter’s chief executive.

Born to Chinese parents in Hong Kong in 1959, the youngest of six children, Ng has been chief executive of East West Bank since 1992 and expanded on the bank’s original mission of financing Chinese immigrants who in the 1970s found it difficult to qualify for loans through the usual channels. It’s now the largest publicly traded independent bank based in Southern California, serving an economically and ethnically diverse clientele. On the world stage, Ng serves as co-chair of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Business Advisory Council.

Ng, 65, worries about the future of philanthropy in Los Angeles. He longs for the “good old days” when business chiefs didn’t think twice about pitching in to help the city’s less fortunate.

“Today, the pressure is on for [immediate] return to shareholders,” and people running companies have to respond to shareholders who seem to “care less every year” about civic responsibility.

More young, monied tech and finance hotshots would do well to take some cues from business leaders like Ng.

Cancer-fighting robots. AI-powered baby monitors. The future of American shipbuilding.

These are the kinds of startup ideas that get Mark Suster out of bed in the morning, into his Tesla, and down to the Santa Monica offices of Upfront, the venture capital firm he joined 16 years ago.

“There’s that old saying — the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed,” Suster said. “My job lets me see where the world’s going five years before the general population.”

Discover the changemakers who are shaping every cultural corner of Los Angeles. This week we bring you The Money, a collection of bankers, political bundlers, philanthropists and others whose deep pockets give them their juice. Come back each Sunday for another installment.

But Suster, 56, didn’t become the face of the L.A. venture capital scene thanks to his day-to-day investing. He got there by throwing a party called the Upfront Summit.

Every year, Suster’s splashy tech conference takes over an iconic L.A. location. One year, it’s at the Rose Bowl. Another year, it’s at a retreat center high in the Santa Monica Mountains. There are zip lines, hot air balloons, and, among the talks with tech founders about software and product development, fireside chats with celebrities, politicians and authors (Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and Novak Djokovic graced the stage this year).

The razzle-dazzle is part of the draw, and Suster clearly relishes his role as emcee (“I was a theater kid — I still love going to the theater,” he said.)

But the real appeal comes down to cash. Suster’s strategic move was to invite not just venture capital investors, but the people who invest in venture capital investors. Called limited partners, these are the managers of pensions, sovereign wealth funds and other giant pools of money that want to tap into the tech market. By making sure they’re on the guest list, Suster has made the summit one of the easiest places in America for fellow venture capitalists to raise a new fund.

The summit loses Upfront money. When Suster started it in 2012, it cost around $300,000. In 2022, costs hit $2.3 million, Suster said, with a handful of sponsors chipping in to cut the losses. But throwing the premiere professional party in California comes with intangible benefits, like bringing in deals that would otherwise leave out Upfront and other L.A. funds and founders.

The 2024 party was a little scaled back, now that higher interest rates have throttled the fire hose of money that went into venture capital during the last decade. But Suster says that he welcomes the less frothy environment. “I’m having a lot more fun now,” he said, investing in founders “looking to build real businesses.”