I Want My Sausage Breakfast Burrito!
Investigating the economic rationale behind McDonald’s canceling All Day Breakfast.
After my morning workout, I had a mean, let me repeat, a M E A N, hankering for a sausage breakfast burrito from Mickey D’s. Now, there is some debate between myself and those I love dearly about whether the breakfast burrito is the best option on the menu. I have heard strong arguments made for the Egg McMuffin, although I think it objectively pales in comparison to the Sausage McGriddle. Let’s just take a moment to salivate at the mere 2D representations of these culinary delicacies (descending in tastiness):
If you are a food snob and can’t appreciate McDonald’s breakfast menu, you should unsubscribe from this Substack and avoid me in real life. Although people’s favorite items vary, all my friends and family love McDonald’s breakfast in general. Now, you might be thinking that this is a biased sample, and fair enough! However, McDonald’s confirmed Americans’ affinity for their breakfast when they rolled out all-day breakfast on October 6, 2015.
“All Day Breakfast [as] the number one request we hear from customers. In fact, more than 120,000 people tweeted McDonald’s asking for breakfast throughout the day in the past year alone. We’re excited to make this dream a reality this year.”
Clearly, my demand for McDonald’s breakfast is shared by many more people than merely my friends and family. And yet, if I were to go on a trek to my nearest McDonald’s and attempt to get breakfast past 11AM, it would be impossible. Why? When did this happen? What explains this Shakespearean tragedy?
McDonald’s betrayed its loyal customers on March, 2020, when they discontinued their All Day Breakfast. A short article from Yahoo!Life cites the explanation provided by McDonald’s official Twitter:

McDonald’s needed to ditch All Day Breakfast to cut costs, improve efficiency, and keep prices low. Fair enough. I would conjecture that, considering the panic around COVID-19 in March of 2020, fewer people were leaving their homes to consume any McDonald’s whatsoever. Americans working from home were no longer stopping for a delectable Mickey D’s sausage burrito while hauling their tuchuses to the office. In short, I blame the pandemic and its shift of consumer demand for McDonald’s leftwards.
But I refuse to despair. There’s reason for hope; in the same Tweet, McDonald’s stated that, “We're evaluating if and how we will bring All Day Breakfast back to our menus.” Now, this evaluation has been going on for well over two years, but, as the pandemic and working-from-home fade into the rear-view mirror, I foresee All Day Breakfast making a glorious return.