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If you guessed chocolate, you'd be wrong. Just why is a Big Mac so expensive in Switzerland? The answer just may lie in one of the things Switzerland is best known for. While the Big Mac can't provide a magical explanation of how the entire world economy works, it does provide a good foundation to begin investigating what's happening in a country's economy, as it has become a regular purchased commodity around the globe.
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I can hear The Hamburglar boarding the next plane to Kiev as we speak. On the other side of the spectrum, a Big Mac in Ukraine only costs $1.67. On the expensive side of things, a Big Mac will run you $6.82 in Switzerland.
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In the middle of the spectrum, we have the home of the Big Mac, the USA, where one of these iconic burgers costs USD $5.30. The latest data from the Big Mac Index provides ample proof of that. Basically, the theory behind PPP is that, over time, the price of a given “basket” of similar goods in any two countries will tend to equalize - in this case that "basket" is a burger- and the more equalized the basket price is, the more parity between countries.
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The Big Mac Index was originally cooked up (yes, pun intended) as a generally good-natured way of comparing the Purchasing-Power Parity (PPP) of different countries. At least that was the idea The Economist magazine had when they introduced the Big Mac Index in 1986 to convey country-by-country consumer purchasing power. “The wage increase in 2015 - to be a $1 above the local minimum wage - was applicable to the local wages on July 1, 2015, but was not a policy thereafter,” the fast food chain said in a statement.Yes, you read that right: The mighty Big Mac can tell us a lot about a country's economy. As a result, the company said, they would make an average of $10 an hour.īut three years later, Fight for 15 accused McDonald’s of lying to workers and released pay stubs showing that workers in eight different cities were making between 40 and 70 cents above their local minimum. In April 2015, McDonald’s announced that it would implement a wage increase for 90,000 workers at its 1,500 company-owned restaurants in the U.S the chain said that as of 1 July of that year, employees would earn at least $1 more than the local minimum wage. We contacted McDonald’s seeking comment, but the restaurant chain has yet to respond. Web sites like and, which aggregate companies’ salary information, reported that the average salary for a McDonald’s employee is around $9 per hour. Department of Labor, 29 states currently have minimum wages higher than the federal standard of $7.25 an hour. For its part, the Australian government’s Fair Work Ombudsman states that the minimum wage there is $18.29 Australian, equivalent to $13.64 American dollars.Īccording to the U.S. However, a French government states on its web site that the country’s minimum wage is 9.88 Euro, equivalent to $11.71 U.S. The group also based its findings on a Wikipedia page listing minimum wages in 193 countries. Fight for 15, which has campaigned for the company to both institute a minimum wage of $15 per hour across the board and allow workers to unionize, also noted that it based its Big Mac prices on the “Big Mac index,” a currency-comparison guide published by The Economist compiling average prices for the burger at McDonald’s locations in various countries to “make exchange-rate theory more digestible” for readers.