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Every price on this site carries the same quiet caveat, repeated in restaurant after restaurant: prices vary by location because almost every fast-food restaurant you've ever eaten at is independently owned. It's easy to skim past that line. It's also the single biggest reason two branches of the same chain can charge noticeably different amounts for the identical item.
The mechanics are simple once you see them. A company like McDonald's or KFC owns the brand, the recipes, and the supply chain, but the actual restaurant is almost always run by a franchisee who pays for the right to operate under that name and then sets their own prices within loose corporate guidelines — covering their own rent, staff wages, and local competition. A McDonald's in a first-floor unit on a major shopping street pays dramatically more in rent than one at a motorway service station outside a small town, and that difference shows up on the receipt. During this round of research we saw a Big Mac quoted at CA$8.69 as a general Canadian figure and at $8.39 in one specific Toronto location — a small gap, but a real one, and entirely explained by which franchisee happens to own that particular restaurant.
This is also why delivery-app prices are consistently higher than walking in and ordering at the counter. Delivery platforms charge restaurants a commission on every order, and most franchisees pass some or all of that cost on through higher menu prices on the app itself — commonly 15 to 30% above in-store pricing, based on the sourcing we did for this site. A price quoted from Uber Eats or Deliveroo isn't wrong, exactly, but it's a different number than what you'd pay walking in, and conflating the two is a common way menu-price research goes wrong.
None of this means chain pricing is unknowable — it means it's a range, not a single number, and treating it that way is more honest than pretending otherwise. Every price on this site is a real, dated, sourced figure, but it should be read as representative of that chain in that country, not as a guarantee for the specific restaurant nearest to you. If you want the exact number for your own local branch, the chain's own app or website, filtered to your specific store, is always the more precise source — ours is built for comparison across countries and chains, not as a replacement for checking your own corner shop's board.