
We contacted McDonald’s seeking comment, but the restaurant chain has yet to respond. Web sites like and, which aggregate companies’ salary information, reported that the average salary for a McDonald’s employee is around $9 per hour. Department of Labor, 29 states currently have minimum wages higher than the federal standard of $7.25 an hour. For its part, the Australian government’s Fair Work Ombudsman states that the minimum wage there is $18.29 Australian, equivalent to $13.64 American dollars.Īccording to the U.S. However, a French government states on its web site that the country’s minimum wage is 9.88 Euro, equivalent to $11.71 U.S. The group also based its findings on a Wikipedia page listing minimum wages in 193 countries.
#HOW MUCH DOES A BIG MAC COST AROUND THE WORLD MAC#
The commodity bundle used might be small, but it is delicious and represents and atavistic desire to consume heated dead things supplied by others in a standardised commodity form.Fight for 15, which has campaigned for the company to both institute a minimum wage of $15 per hour across the board and allow workers to unionize, also noted that it based its Big Mac prices on the “Big Mac index,” a currency-comparison guide published by The Economist compiling average prices for the burger at McDonald’s locations in various countries to “make exchange-rate theory more digestible” for readers.

Momentary labour power values can be computed in PPP and then compared against inflation, %GDP or %GDP/cap. Building on this PPP labour power regularisation of national or sub-national socially average labour, it allows a useful time series. It offers recomputation of prices on the firm foundation of the human desire to stuff itself with dairy and meat grease regularly. The Big Mac index produces “social labour power” by allowing an equation of the varying elements of labour power costs internationally.

The Big Mac decomposes potential labour power to actually exerted labour in a standard form.īig Macs regularise the value composition of the wage, ie the cost of reproducing labour, and thus allow an attempt to equate prices in terms of local standards of living, safety, hours of labour and intensity of labour. The making of the Big Mac is standardised with a standard set of mechanisation and labour discipline in the factory. The local prices of Big Macs reflect the social value of satiation (ie socially constructed wage for standard, or average, labour power). Humans like to eat fatty proteins, sugars and carbohydrates.īig Macs are a standardised commodity internationally.īig Macs rapidly satiate household daily Big Mac effective consumption desires. So why is the index taken at face value by anyone? How does it measure anything except the cost of producing a burger in different countries? There are even significant differences within the same country - a Big Mac in central London will cost you more than a Big Mac in a highway restaurant. But why would a Big Mac cost the same in all countries? Labor costs vary widely between different countries and so do costs such as real estate. The Big Mac Index is published by The Economist as an informal way of measuring the purchasing power parity (PPP) between two currencies and provides a test of the extent to which market exchange rates result in goods costing the same in different countries.Įssentially the index is trying to say that if a Big Mac is more expensive in Switzerland compared to India, then the Indian rupee is undervalued or conversely that the Swiss franc is overvalued.

The Big Mac index is frequently mentioned in media, but I could never understand how it makes any sense.
