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It’s no secret that RocketNews24 writers are big fans of McDonald’s Japan, with its selection of artery-clogging novelty menu items providing endless amusement and article fodder at price ranges that even an Internet “journalist” can afford day after day.

Every once in a while, though, we find it necessary to dish the dirt on McDonald’s Japan so that our readers don’t think we’re on the Golden Arches’ payroll. So, fortuitously, an anonymous Netizen recently leaked McDonald’s Japan’s base costs for its most popular menu items and we have to admit, we found the dangerously low – sometimes single digit – yen values to be alarming and disturbing at the same time.

Since the graph itself is entirely in Japanese, we’ll save it for the end of the post, but here’s the breakdown:

Hamburger

Menu Price: 100 yen (US$1), Base Cost: 45 yen ($0.45)

Cheese Burger

Menu Price: 100 yen, Base Cost: 54 yen

Teriyaki Makku Burger

Menu Price: 260 yen, Base Cost: 78 yen

French Fries

Menu Price: 240 yen, Base Cost: 10 – 20 yen

Apple Pie

Menu Price: 100 yen, Base Cost: 35 yen

Cola

Menu Price: 100 yen, Base Cost: less than 5 yen

Chicken Nuggets

Menu Price: 250 yen, Base Cost: 25 yen

Coffee

Menu Price: 100 yen, Base Cost: 2.5 yen

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The major takeaways here are that Ronald makes the biggest killing off of the french fries, which are marked up by up to 24 times base cost, that cheese is surprisingly expensive at 10 yen a slice, and, paying attention to the little blip just under the entry for cola yields an interesting fact: the base cost may actually be closer to 0 yen, since Coca Cola apparently provides syrup to Micky D’s free of charge.

You might initially be angered by the insane markups that McDonald’s is getting away with, but thinking about it deeper might also make you cringe when you consider just how cheap this food is. Forty-five yen to make a hamburger? We know they’re buying in tremendous bulk and using some type of “filler,” but at a base cost like that we have to assume that filler is either sawdust or the ground-up, petrified nightmares of children.

How about 5 yen per chicken nugget? There’s got to be some type of nefarious Breaking Bad-style chemistry going on at the McDonald’s nugget factory.

All told, the numbers aren’t that surprising; Cheap food is a major reason McDonald’s is a worldwide household name, and the most a reasonable person expects from a Mickey D’s visit is a filling meal of questionable provenance and a salt-induced endorphin rush.

Still, we can’t help but feel a creeping sense of dread and revulsion looking at these numbers, so we’re going to go ahead and file this one under “things we wish we didn’t know.”

▼ Here is the original leaked list.

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Source: Byoukan Sunday
Photos: RocketNews24