TheWe just published our Fast-Food Price Index, a simple country-by-country comparison of what a McDonald's Big Mac costs around the world, built entirely from the same verified menu data already published on each country's McDonald's page.
The idea isn't new — The Economist's Big Mac Index has used the same burger as an informal way to compare purchasing power across countries since 1986, precisely because McDonald's operates in so many markets with a broadly consistent product. We're borrowing that logic for a much narrower purpose: giving readers of TheManued a quick, honest snapshot of how the countries we cover compare, using our own sourced numbers rather than a separate survey.
A few things make this trickier than it looks, and we've tried to be upfront about each one on the index page itself. Not every country sells a standalone Big Mac — in some markets the only price we could confirm is for a meal or menu bundle that includes fries and a drink, which isn't quite the same comparison, so we label those rows rather than blend them in silently. And converting everything to a single reference currency for comparison means picking exchange rates, which move constantly — we use an approximate, clearly-dated snapshot for orientation, not a live feed, and we say so directly rather than imply a precision we don't have.
We plan to treat this as a living page, not a one-off post: as we add more countries and re-verify existing prices, the index will update along with them. If you spot a country where our source is clearly out of date, that's exactly the kind of feedback that helps us prioritise what to re-check next.