Big-mac-data Alternatives

big-mac-data reviews and mentions

• Weak rules allow ultra-processed foods like Lunchables on school menus
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Mar 2024

  >A McDonald’s in France costs twice as much where a coffee costs less than half as much.

  Source? According to The Economist's big mac index data[1] the price of a big mac in the euro area and the US is within the same ballpark (~10% difference max) regardless of how you measure it. If anything big macs are cheaper in the euro area than in the US.

  [1] https://github.com/TheEconomist/big-mac-data/blob/master/out...

• A site that tracks the price of a Big Mac in every US McDonald's
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Jan 2024

  If you read the article that you posted and the methodology, they document exactly how they calculate the big mac index and how they choose the price.

  https://github.com/TheEconomist/big-mac-data#methodology-cha...

• Oregon Decriminalized Hard Drugs
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Aug 2023

  - The minimum wage in 1986 was $3.35[1] according to the US Department of Labor.

  You could afford at most two Big Macs in 1986, not seven. Also you can definitely afford one big mac with an hour of minimum wage today (minimum wage: $7.25, big mac: $5.36).

  0 - https://github.com/TheEconomist/big-mac-data/blob/master/sou...

  1 - https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/minimum-wage/history/chart

• Prices at the supermarket keep rising. So do corporate profits
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Mar 2023

  >CPI is also a broken measure due to its inability to measure wealth inequality (sampling median purchasers only)

  And that's fine, because the CPI's job is to measure how prices have changed (ie. inflation), not wealth inequality. Just because a given metric doesn't support your pet cause doesn't mean it's "broken". It's like complaining GDP is a broken metric because it doesn't measure how oppressed minorities are.

  > Real inflation has likely been ~33% higher than reported for decades (the Big Mac index is probably the true gold standard).

  I tried to confirm this and the results were far from conclusive. The big mac index data can be obtained from github[1] and gives a 129.9% increase between april 2000 (earliest data available) and july 2022 (latest data available). To compare this against the CPI data, I checked on FRED and the "Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: Food Away from Home in U.S. City Average"[2] component of the CPI gives a 87.0% for the same time period. If you take those numbers and convert them to annualized rates, you will indeed find a 33.3% difference between them. Looks like your claim is confirmed, right? But not so fast. The CPI category listed above actually breaks down into more detailed categories, including "Limited service meals and snacks", which presumably the big mac falls into. That data isn't available on FRED but can be found on BLS's data viewer[3] and gives you a 105.8% increase for the same time period. If you convert that to an annualized rate the difference between that and the big mac index drops to 15%. I suspect if we try harder we can eliminate more of the discrepancy. For instance, the "Limited service meals and snacks" index was probably computed from a basket of items, not just big macs. Items that have fatter margins (eg. fries or drinks) might have inflated slower than big macs, thereby dragging the growth of the basket down and explaining the difference.

  [1] https://github.com/TheEconomist/big-mac-data/

  [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SEFV

  [3] https://beta.bls.gov/dataViewer/view

• Dönerpreisumfrage 2023 Q1
  1 project | /r/Finanzen | 26 Jan 2023
• The Big Mac index: A Big Mac costs 10 bolívares in Venezuela and US$5.15 in the United States. The implied exchange rate is 1.94. The difference between this and the actual exchange rate, 5.67, suggests the Venezuelan bolívar is 65.8% undervalued
  1 project | /r/vzla | 26 Jul 2022

  Read more about the Big Mac index in “Dollar-euro parity may be justified. But the yen looks cheap as chips”. You can also download the data or read the methodology behind the Big Mac index here.

• How many Big Macs you could by insted of EVE sub?
  1 project | /r/Eve | 25 May 2022
• Big Macs and the sobering reality of cost of living pay rises
  1 project | /r/UKPersonalFinance | 18 Apr 2022
• McDonald’s opening in Russia vs. McDonald’s closing in Russia
  1 project | /r/PublicFreakout | 9 Mar 2022

  Source: https://github.com/theeconomist/big-mac-data/releases/tag/2022-01

• The Big Mac index: February 2022
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Feb 2022

  > States and is famously used in the Economist's Big Mac Index to measure inflation.

  And a link to the Economist article (https://www.economist.com/big-mac-index) where they further link to their methodology: https://github.com/TheEconomist/big-mac-data

  So this is the price of a big mac average for the world, I think. The USA average (I found this resource: https://www.zippia.com/advice/how-much-big-mac-costs-states/ - Nov 2021) is $4.40.

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