Jim Cramer Talks About 5 Consumer Stocks As Americans Push Back on High Prices

2. McDonald’s Corp (NYSE:MCD)

Number of Hedge Fund Investors: 63

Jim Cramer thinks McDonald’s Corp (NYSE:MCD) “failed the test” of surviving the current consumer pushback against inflation because burgers just “cost too much.” Cramer said McDonald’s Corp’s (NYSE:MCD) burgers don’t “come off as a bargain.”

Horizon Kinetics stated the following regarding McDonald’s Corporation (NYSE:MCD) in its fourth quarter 2023 investor letter:

“The next major development for the industrialized economies was the opening of “denied areas.” It’s not a familiar term today, but it would be found in books on geopolitics written before the collapse of the Soviet Union. It referred to the Soviet Union and China, and simply meant that businesses couldn’t expand there.

For instance, prior to 1990, it was inconceivable that someone would assert that McDonald’s Corporation (NYSE:MCD) was going to open a store in Moscow, or even Bucharest or Warsaw. But it ultimately happened. And then in Shanghai and other Chinese cities. So, in addition to the disinflationary commodity and labor impacts, the third miracle for Western economies was that all the major consumer brand companies that could only expand globally within the context of what we then called the free world, could now be truly global. Much expansion ensued, growth that could not otherwise have occurred…” (Click here to read the full text)