A Big Mac is the same burger in Houston as it is in Anchorage, but the price on the menu is not. Drive Thru Index, a website that records the pickup price at every restaurant of the major fast food brands each day, found the Big Mac selling for between $3.99 and $9.50 across 13,736 US McDonald's restaurants on 2 October 2026. The typical restaurant charged $5.99. The cheapest Big Macs were at five restaurants around Houston, Texas, and the most expensive was at Anchorage airport in Alaska.
McDonald's is not alone. On the same day a Burger King Whopper ranged from $3.99 to $10.19 across 6,228 restaurants, with a typical price of $6.29, and a Wendy's Dave's Single ranged from $3.99 to $9.99 across 5,403 restaurants, with a typical price of $5.99. Comparing a fixed basket of items at each restaurant, KFC showed the widest gap between its cheapest and most expensive US locations, at 186%, while Shake Shack showed the narrowest, at 21%.
Location explains part of the spread. McDonald's restaurants in Alaska charge 40% more than those on the mainland, and restaurants in Hawaii charge 22% more. McDonald's restaurants at airports charge 9% more than the brand's typical location. The channel matters as well: ordering the same McDonald's items for delivery costs 28% more than collecting them, and Burger King shows the same 28% difference.
The contrast with other markets is striking. In Australia, 97% of McDonald's restaurants charge within 10% of the typical Big Mac price. In the US, only 53% do. Much of that difference comes down to how pricing decisions are made: across many US franchise systems, individual franchisees set their own menu prices, which lets each location respond to its own rent, wages, competition and customers.
Pricing has also become more visible to customers. Ordering apps show every restaurant's price in the same place, and the industry's experiments with data-driven pricing have drawn public attention, most notably when Wendy's comments about dynamic pricing in early 2024 led to a backlash and a clarification from the company. With independent sites now publishing location-by-location prices every day, a menu price is no longer a decision customers see in only one restaurant.
For franchise systems, the question is not whether locations should be able to price differently, but how the brand keeps that flexibility under control. Gorilla Dash's Food module builds menus at organisation level, gives each menu item a default price, and lets the franchisor decide whether each location can set its own price for items on a menu. Items a location leaves alone keep the organisation price, so head office can see which locations have changed what. When every restaurant's price is public, the gap between a brand's cheapest and most expensive location becomes part of how customers see the brand.
To see what restaurants charge in your area, take a look at https://drivethruindex.com