By Tim Higgins
CHICAGO -- I got a taste of the K-shaped menu McDonald's is building for the K-shaped economy.
The schism between low-cost items and new premium ones, such as the Big Arch, helps explain what fueled Chief Executive Chris Kempczinski's viral moment a few weeks ago. It was really about a much deeper issue than how he awkwardly nibbled his burger.
In this economy, who is the McDonald's customer?
The question was on my mind as I sat down here at a rare company-owned restaurant where the food giant is testing potential items for the U.S. Some of the new chicken offerings, in particular, would likely surprise a lot of people who've lost interest in the 85-year-old icon.
McSpicy Wings, for example, caught my eye. At $5.99 for four pieces, they were more than twice as expensive as the equivalent number of McNuggets on the local menu that day.
But they were totally unlike their corporate cousins. The plump, bone-in chicken pieces felt bigger than what I got at my last visit to a Buffalo Wild Wings. The hand-breaded crispness rivaled Raising Cane's. The spiciness had a kick that left my companions asking if I needed some milk. And the juiciness left me reaching for extra napkins. All that was missing was a McBeer and a TV to watch basketball.
Yet, during my visit, I was also hit up by a panhandler as if to perfectly underscore that there are two Americas showing up at the most American of American restaurants.
Kempczinski is trying to thread a narrow needle in appealing to both lower-income buyers struggling in an economy that no longer feels affordable and upper-income customers still spending and wanting elevated fare. The result: $1 product promotions and a recent McNuggets-and-caviar giveaway tied to Valentine's Day that had all of the hallmarks of a company trying to grab social-media influencers.
"When you have roughly 90% of the population that's coming into a McDonald's at least once a year, you've got to serve everybody -- young, old, rich, poor," he told me the next day at McDonald's headquarters, where the smell of freshly cooked french fries hung in the air.
In a video post on Instagram weeks earlier, one of many he's made in recent years, Kempczinski touted the U.S. arrival of the Big Arch. It is a burger aimed at customers looking for something more premium than normally found at the chain.
But the way he tepidly bit into the sandwich and talked about it as a "product" struck a nerve. The video racked up more than 16 million views on Instagram and spawned countless memes.
Many of the social-media posts that mocked Kempczinski carried themes that generally painted him as an out-of-touch, corporate bigwig who couldn't stomach his own burger -- something that could feel especially galling given the Big Arch can cost around $9.
It really shouldn't be surprising that Kempczinski can come off as a corporate stiff. That's what McDonald's needed in 2019 when he took over as CEO. His predecessor was ousted in a sex scandal and one of Kempczinski's first jobs was to eradicate a culture that some saw as a macho guys' club.
Kempczinski, an avid marathon runner who had joined the company just a few years earlier, hadn't been part of the late-night socializing of the previous regime. Instead, the Harvard Business School alum talks like a real-life LinkedIn post and obsesses over how many seconds it takes to serve customers.
He'd become the leader who would navigate McDonald's through the storms of the pandemic, an uncertain economy and now an era of influencers debating where his company ranks in the order of things.
Like Apple and Ford, the Golden Arches are woven into our culture, often becoming a proxy for where we are in public life on certain issues: wages, immigration, healthcare, geopolitics. The price of a McDonald's Big Mac, for example, has long been an unofficial gauge of comparing buying power between nations.
Today, that public eye is focused on affordability -- one of the top issues on people's minds, polls say, as inflation makes everything more expensive, from homes to healthcare. And burgers.
I talked to Kempczinski in a room where an old menu hung on the wall advertising 15-cent hamburgers and 10-cent root beers. We're a long way from anything costing a dime.
McDonald's isn't alone in this moment. Walmart, General Mills and others that have benefited from robust mass markets are now seeing a stark divide between lower- and middle-income consumers and higher-end customers.
Kempczinski is quick to acknowledge that during the pandemic McDonald's and others "got a little bit offsides on" affordability. He's been rushing to fix that issue, pushing franchisees, who set prices, to lower them, even as they face their own increased costs of doing business.
In the past two years McDonald's has been aggressive in rolling out deals, and it reported notable success in the final three months of last year. The newest deals, officially announced last week, hit later this month, focused on offering an under-$3 menu. This includes a McDouble burger for $2.50 for a limited time.
Now, those McSpicy Wings on the test menu that I tried look even pricier. And so does the Big Arch.
While that dichotomy can be confusing to some on TikTok, it fits together in Kempczinski's effort to drive as much traffic as possible to restaurants. He has two key levers for fueling such growth: marketing his meal deals and offering so-called menu innovations, such as the Big Arch. These will hopefully draw new people in who are looking to try something different, or regulars looking for a splurge.
To be clear, Kempczinski is aggressively pulling both levers in hope of offsetting operators' narrowing margins, an important measure of profitability and efficiency. "Ultimately you end up maybe making more from what we call penny profit ... more in absolute dollars, but maybe the percent margin had to shrink," Kempczinski said.
As for the new chicken-menu items I tried, when might they show up on the real menu? "It's all going to depend on how the customer reacts to it," Kempczinski said. "If the customer loves it, you'll see it pretty quickly."
Let's hope he makes a video eating those spicy wings.
Write to Tim Higgins at tim.higgins@wsj.com
Watch: McDonald's CEO Responds to the Viral Big Arch Backlash
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 08, 2026 05:30 ET (09:30 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Comments