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On 1 November 2009, all three of the McDonald’s in Iceland closed, primarily due to the chain’s high cost of importing most of the chain’s meat and vegetables, by McDonald’s demands and standards, from the Eurozone.Īt the time, a Big Mac in Iceland cost 650 krona ($5.29), and the 20% price increase that would have been needed to stay in business would have increased that cost to 780 krona ($6.36).
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There is a lot of variance with the exclusively beef “Big Mac”: the Australian version of the Big Mac has 22% fewer Calories than the Canadian version, and is 8% lighter than the version sold in Mexico. The Chicken Maharaja Mac serves as a substitute for the Big Mac. In India - which is a predominantly Hindu country - beef burgers are not available at any McDonald’s outlets. Not all Big Mac burgers offered by the chain are exclusively beef.
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For these reasons, the index enables a comparison between many countries’ currencies. The Big Mac was chosen because it is available to a common specification in many countries around the world as local McDonald’s franchisees at least in theory have significant responsibility for negotiating input prices. In the Big Mac Index, the basket in question is a single Big Mac burger as sold by the McDonald’s fast food restaurant chain. One suggested method of predicting exchange rate movements is that the rate between two currencies should naturally adjust so that a sample basket of goods and services should cost the same in both currencies. The index also gave rise to the word burgernomics. The Big Mac index was introduced in The Economist in September 1986 by Pam Woodall as a semi-humorous illustration of PPP and has been published by that paper annually since then. It “seeks to make exchange-rate theory a bit more digestible”. The Big Mac Index is published by The Economist as an informal way of measuring the purchasing power parity (PPP) between two currencies and provides a test of the extent to which market exchange rates result in goods costing the same in different countries. McDonald’s prices around the world are an incredibly useful means to measuring purchasing power parity between countries but how much does a McDonald’s meal cost around the world for a South African.
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