McCheapest Place to Grab a McDonald's Big Mac: A Nationwide Comparison

With the McCheapest Map, customers can now track the "McCheapest Place" for their all-time favorite McDonald's Big Mac across the United States.

Sacha Fournier, a marketing specialist from the U.K., created the site McCheapest.com to monitor the varying costs of McDonald's Big Mac across the U.S. This effort was spurred by his surprise at the differing prices of the iconic sandwich in New York City.

It is an interactive map identifying locations nationwide serving the cheapest and most expensive Big Mac.

McCheapest Place for McDonald's Big Mac

McCheapest says that Oklahoma has the cheapest Big Macs in the whole country. Macs at the Stigler restaurant cost $3.49 each, almost unheard of. As a point of comparison, a regular old double cheeseburger costs $4.59 at the Mickey D's near me in Michigan.

In Connecticut, the least expensive McDonald's Big Mac can be bought at two restaurants in Milford: the one on Boston Post Road and the one on Bridgeport Avenue.

A Big Mac costs $4.99 at the McDonald's on West Main Street and the one on Branford Road in North Branford.

On the other hand, the tracking tool revealed that the most expensive Big Mac is at Golden Arches in Lee, Massachusetts, along the I-90 Turnpike.

People were upset about the restaurant's outrageously high prices. The Big Mac meal was said to cost almost $19. On the McCheapest map, it says that Big Macs here cost a whopping $8.09. If there was ever a time and place to try the cheaper Big Mac trick, this is it.

Furthermore, Prices change from place to place because most McDonald's are chains. It's even normal for cities to have more than one McDonald's, and each one will usually have different prices. The franchise owner decides the costs, and maps like McCheapest show how much they vary from place to place.

According to The Takeout, Fournier made a program to scrape the location-specific prices from the McDonald's app because the company doesn't show prices on its website.

About McCheapest Map

In an interview with Fourier in February 2023, he wondered if the price varies between two stores and how much it differs across the entire nation.

As a former data analyst, he began working on a program that answered the question. The McCheapest Map has a custom scraping tool that connects to the McDonald's app. The app is open 24 hours a day, adding Big Macs to its cart to find the pre-tax price and showing the results on a map at McCheapest.com.

Fournier said he wasn't expecting such a massive difference in prices. Besides that, he added that the Lee McDonald's is only 400 feet across the highway from another McDonald's rest stop where Big Macs are only $6.69 each.

Meanwhile, McCheapest.com was not confirmed by McDonald's as being accurate. However, the prices on Fournier's site match the Big Mac prices shown in the McDonald's app. Fournier did say on Reddit that there is a delay between when prices change at each local McDonald's and when they show up on his site.