Hello and welcome to Money Talks, a special extra podcast from Slate Money, where we have

conversations about money with brilliant people. I'm Emily Peck. I'm the co-host of Slate Money

and a national correspondent at Axios, and I'm here today with Heather Haddon. Hi, Heather.

Hey, thanks so much for having me.

I'm so excited to talk to you.

Heather covers restaurants for the Wall Street Journal,

and part of that involves covering the fast food industry,

which is, I realized as I was preparing for this show,

an industry that I am obsessed with.

I don't cover it.

And I hardly ever eat at fast food places, but I am very interested in fast food.

I think it says so much about so much of just everything, America.

So, Heather, I want to talk to you about a lot of what you're covering, just

like the current state of the industry, considering price pressures. I want to talk about

McDonald's and it's like return to the value meal. I want to understand what the hell

Starbucks is up to right now. And I hope we have time to maybe get into the reason we reached out to you in the

first place, which was Chick-fil-A and its intense drive-through strategy. Yes, they have a

crazy drive-thru strategy. Okay. So, yeah, that's all coming up on Slate Money Talks.

I don't even know where to start.

I guess I'll start, Heather, just by asking you to give us a like state of the fast food business.

We are talking in it's almost Thanksgiving.

Everyone right now is obsessed with cost of food specifically. So what's happening in fast food, which is supposed to be cheap, right? Yeah, fast food is supposed to be winning right now.

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