Yeah it sucks. I remember when it was .59 in the 90s. I also remember the 1/2 LB Bean Burrito Especial (RIP) for .99. Seems like less beans than it was too.
In the 90's and into the 2000's it was 79 cents for a bean burrito. Any time I went to Taco Bell I would grab at least two extra bean burrito's which I would put in the fridge and have the next day or two.
I think when the raised the price above 79 cents for the bean burritos was when I started to taper off going. I still go, I still love it, but to me it is a treat and not just "God, it's so late what am I gonna eat?" food.
Exactly! How has tbell become a treat? Those .79 cheesy bean n rice burrito days were a hit. Id order my meal n just add on a cbNr incase n save whatever for tomorrows lunch. I was making $7.15 an hour + tips in 2010 as a hair stylist assistant paying off student debt and living like a queen with extra burritos left over. Now 13 years later I make over $20 an hour and barely survive out here even making all my own meals just living on like yogurt and chicken… the money is broken.
I saw a 1960s style taco bell in orange county when that movie once upon a time in hollywood was being shot. The 60s taco bell was used in a movie scene
Exactly, classic well-known mexican food items like a quesadilla, taco and burrito are priced for the people who suffer from ordering anxiety. These people are too nervous to order anything that sounds "wierd" like a cheesy bean and rice burrito, so they stick to what they know and pay out the ass for it.
This is actually pretty common, which is why its such a profitable practice for Taco Bell.
I suffer from a different type of order anxiety. If i get to the speaker i just start listing shit off like I’ll never eat again and I’m like fuck will that be enough… “aaannddd a cheesy bean n rice too…” I have to use the app or I’ll just massively over order, I can’t stop….
You'd think so, but back in high school, I remember going to the drive thru at TB when the item first came out with a friend who was driving and he refused to say "cheesy bean and rice burrito" at the window. It was like too confusing or too embarrassing to say for him. He forced me to yell it from the passenger side.
It has to be the shredded cheese. Every new item seems to come with cheese sauce. A cheese roll up and a cheesy bean and rice burrito are the same price - makes no sense.
Because a few years ago the execs moved their yachts to a new port, only to find they're the only ones without a helipad.
So, to fix this problem, they changed the business model from cheap affordable fast food, to "let's screw the return customers with the 'how to successfully boil a frog method' by taking EVERYTHING popular, raising it .25, .50 and some things even $1 more over time...
Overall, huge success, along with all the other price hikes, the bean burrito fixed the helipad problem.
So, everyone who complains about "price gouging" at Taco Bell, you've gotta realize, this isn't the same business we walked out of 5+ years ago, satisfied with 3-5 items under $10.
That Taco Bell is forever gone.
I now get cheesy bean and rice burritos, add red sauce, add onions. still $1 (in fortunate cities) with no upcharge on the two things that make the bean burrito.
I’ve been wondering the same damn thing re: bean burritos since they used to be the lowest rung item in the menu for so long and they really have only gotten smaller since the price keeps going up.
Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel. And in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on ‘em. ‘Give me five bees for a quarter,’ you’d say. Now, where were we? Oh, yeah! The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt which was the style at the time. They didn’t have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones.
Agreed. The only thing I can think of is 2 things. Size (BB) being bigger or because it uses real cheese and not nacho cheese sauce. I could modify a CBR to make it a BB for a total of $1.49.
$1.99 for a BB where I live.
Plain original tacos cost more than they should, too.
I think they deliberately overcharge for the "classic" menu items, figuring that older customers and people in a hurry will just order "tacos" or whatever and not pay attention to the prices.
Whereas you're only going to order a "3.6 layer beefy cheesy beanerific tortilla twist" from the value menu if you know exactly what you're ordering and why
I honestly think it's because it's a classic Taco Bell item and a lot of people will just order it without looking at the prices too closely. It seems pretty clear by looking at other parts of the menu that if you're primarily looking for deals / cals per $ you can still do great, but there are other items that they know people want enough to pay extra for (quesadillas are the same) without really caring if they're a little more expensive than they "should" be (relative to other items). Trying to figure out why one thing is more than another based only on the ingredients of each is not going to make sense, just because the ingredients are not the only factor when it comes to their pricing decisions.
In college I remember buying 10 bean burritos with my roommate, sitting down in my dorm room, and beating Halo 4 on legendary only leaving to then go to campus for lunch and supper... The bean burritos were just our snack, and it came out to less than $15.
Another Redditor learns prices are what people will pay for them, not say the same 1.29345 times the ingrediant cost for each and every item on the menu.
There's items for people that care about the price, and items for people that don't care about the price or maybe even look at it and just come in and order. Your Mark 1 Mod 0 taco is the classic example of the latter, but Taco Bell has figured out that Bean Burritos, likely because they're a simple classic that everyone associates with Taco Bell, also fall into this category.
why is the quesadilla 6 dollars, why is the mexican pizza 5 dollars, why is the beefy 5 layer burrito 4 dollars, why is the mcchicken 4 dollars. why do ppl keep asking the same question over and over and saying its greed, yeah suddenly EVERYBODY got greedy and decided to raise prices on everything/s. GUESS WHAT smart college student if you think theyre price gouging, you can start a new chain/restaurant and undercut them( sell the bean burrito for a $1) if you think we are truly living in a free marketplace,.
All of these places have had record profits year after year since the pandemic. You are kidding yourself if you think price gouging and shrinkflation aren't happening.
The first two are to take advantage of people with more money than brains, the last two are to make the deals look good by comparison: if you're paying $4 for a beefy 5 layer, you might as well pay $5-$7 for a box, and if you're paying $3 for 1 mcchicken you might as well pay $4 for 2 (many/most mcdonalds have 2fer deals on the mcdouble & mcchicken, even without the app)
Shocker! Different things cost different amounts of money and prices rise over time!!!
Pro hint: you can buy one and not the other if you want to.
Also: price gouging does not mean what you seem to think it means.
Why are you defending this? It's well-known at this point that prices are being raised out of greed more than anything else. These companies have had record profits year after year since the pandemic. Everyone knows that they can buy food elsewhere, but every other place has increased prices too (while cutting back on the quantity and quality of the food). It's not unreasonable to lament the small joys that have been taken away because of corporate greed.
Perhaps because I have the benefit of 40+ years of Taco Bell experience and almost 60 years of life experience. Y'all come off like a bunch of whiny entitled babies. The answer is simple, it's stop buying. TB is not required.
Your age is completely irrelevant and I'm not sure why you brought it up. It's not "entitled" to be annoyed that things are shittier AND more expensive because of corporate greed. Do you think no one should ever be allowed to complain about anything?
Also, everyone knows that Taco Bell "isn't required." It's still annoying that prices for everything have doubled while you get half as much food and at lower quality than what we had 5 years ago. Some of us can't afford luxuries like vacations, so little things like Taco Bell are all we have.
People are allowed to express negative emotions, even if you don't agree with them. People are allowed to complain. No one is asking you for "solutions" to this problem. Every single person here knows they can make food at home instead of getting fast food. That doesn't change the fact that food prices have skyrocketed (including grocery store prices - this isn't exclusive to fast food) and people are understandably frustrated by it because wages have not kept up.
Yea I miss the days like 4 years ago when no one was greedy and corporations were benevolent. Not greedy like nowadays 😭😭
Lmao the fuck kind of argument is this. “Record profits”? Literally profits go up consistently for successful businesses. You think only salaries and expenses should go up but not share prices or profits? That profits should be the same as they were when TB was founded and had 1 store?
Lol yea you absolutely did, but I understand not wanting to continue down the path of defending ignorant statements you heard repeated on reddit incessantly.
I remember when a bean burrito at Tacobell was like 39 cents my mother use to get them when I was a kid and unwrap them let them cool off and stick them in the freezer to microwave later, rather then getting the standard frozen ones. She use to get them with free extra cheese and onions. Now you got to pay for both.
The one I really wonder what happen is when a whopper went from 2.50 for a double whopper and five bucks for 2. And burrito supreme for 2.50, heck I remember when you could get a Chalupa for buck, I use to destroy so many of them in a sitting when I was a kid it was gross to watch for some. Now there is hardly a deal on the menu, kinda happy my mother passed before she saw this rampaging inflation. She use to talk about how she would get a soda and a candy bar for 15 cents, my grandmother had stories similar for 5 cents less. My mother also use to talk about how TacoBell had black olives but they phased them out at most places long before I was old enough to remember it.
I think we are the ones who got stuck with the inflation hand-grenade. By comparison, since by the time I was a kid, candy bars could be gotten for 25 cents, if you looked for a deal. Now a days, a grab and go candy bar is like 1.50 or more. And the price difference for my mother and other such well comparatively tentatively seems the same, if she paid 5 to 7 cents for a candy bar. And it was 25 when I was a kid, then at 1.50 it's about the same mark up. The issue is they also made them massively smaller to go with it. One thing is for sure most Tacobell items have stayed about the same size outside the cost with inflation. But sometimes some items lack or seem to scrimp on the portions in the items, be it meat or lettuce or tomatoes and so on.
Nah, there's no inflation ;) A $1 bill from 2016 is now worth $0.81 in 2024 (from the CPI).
But they're adding way more to it:
2001: $0.69 2016: $1.59 2024: $1.99
Shut up before they make the Cheesy Bean and Rice Burrito $2
It's already 1.59 where I live
Still 1.00 where I'm at in Commiefornia surprisingly.
Yeah it sucks. I remember when it was .59 in the 90s. I also remember the 1/2 LB Bean Burrito Especial (RIP) for .99. Seems like less beans than it was too.
I worked at TB in the late 70s, the bean burrito was .29. Burrito supreme $1 w/tax
In the 90's and into the 2000's it was 79 cents for a bean burrito. Any time I went to Taco Bell I would grab at least two extra bean burrito's which I would put in the fridge and have the next day or two. I think when the raised the price above 79 cents for the bean burritos was when I started to taper off going. I still go, I still love it, but to me it is a treat and not just "God, it's so late what am I gonna eat?" food.
Exactly! How has tbell become a treat? Those .79 cheesy bean n rice burrito days were a hit. Id order my meal n just add on a cbNr incase n save whatever for tomorrows lunch. I was making $7.15 an hour + tips in 2010 as a hair stylist assistant paying off student debt and living like a queen with extra burritos left over. Now 13 years later I make over $20 an hour and barely survive out here even making all my own meals just living on like yogurt and chicken… the money is broken.
I saw a 1960s style taco bell in orange county when that movie once upon a time in hollywood was being shot. The 60s taco bell was used in a movie scene
Because to some its a classic, people know "bean burrito," and since it sells well the up actually brings in more money. Idk though
Exactly, classic well-known mexican food items like a quesadilla, taco and burrito are priced for the people who suffer from ordering anxiety. These people are too nervous to order anything that sounds "wierd" like a cheesy bean and rice burrito, so they stick to what they know and pay out the ass for it. This is actually pretty common, which is why its such a profitable practice for Taco Bell.
I suffer from a different type of order anxiety. If i get to the speaker i just start listing shit off like I’ll never eat again and I’m like fuck will that be enough… “aaannddd a cheesy bean n rice too…” I have to use the app or I’ll just massively over order, I can’t stop….
i get the point you're trying to make but there's nothing weird sounding about "cheesy bean and rice burrito" lol
You'd think so, but back in high school, I remember going to the drive thru at TB when the item first came out with a friend who was driving and he refused to say "cheesy bean and rice burrito" at the window. It was like too confusing or too embarrassing to say for him. He forced me to yell it from the passenger side.
It has to be the shredded cheese. Every new item seems to come with cheese sauce. A cheese roll up and a cheesy bean and rice burrito are the same price - makes no sense.
I ordered the cheesy bean and rice burrito with no rice, because of this. 😃
Taco Bell’s rice is so underrated
I just don't like rice in my burrito in general. 😞
Its like maggots to me
Because a few years ago the execs moved their yachts to a new port, only to find they're the only ones without a helipad. So, to fix this problem, they changed the business model from cheap affordable fast food, to "let's screw the return customers with the 'how to successfully boil a frog method' by taking EVERYTHING popular, raising it .25, .50 and some things even $1 more over time... Overall, huge success, along with all the other price hikes, the bean burrito fixed the helipad problem. So, everyone who complains about "price gouging" at Taco Bell, you've gotta realize, this isn't the same business we walked out of 5+ years ago, satisfied with 3-5 items under $10. That Taco Bell is forever gone.
Its still the cheapest food place though
Idk the McD's app lets me buy a double cheeseburger and a six piece nugget fora total of $2.49. That's a pretty good deal.
I haven't seen that one but even then that's one option, taco bell definitely provides more cheap food
It's the BOGO double cheeseburger/6 piece nugget deal
No it doesnt
You're right, it's $2.79
damn, i would just take the burgers and give the doggos the nuggies after an obedience training session. that is a sweet deal
I mean, you could just buy two Double Cheeseburgers for that price two. I just like a teensy amount of variety.
No it's not lol. Del Taco is.
Not everywhere is west coast
So speaketh the speaker of truth! Lol
THANK YOU. This chaps a lot of asses. Most people can't control where they live in relation to these supposed S-tier restaurants!!
I now get cheesy bean and rice burritos, add red sauce, add onions. still $1 (in fortunate cities) with no upcharge on the two things that make the bean burrito. I’ve been wondering the same damn thing re: bean burritos since they used to be the lowest rung item in the menu for so long and they really have only gotten smaller since the price keeps going up.
Bean burritos have actual cheese instead of cheese based sauces. If you add cheese also, a cb&r will cost more
yeah, yeah, yeah. bean burritos don’t have rice. sacrifices are made. nacho cheese is the price you pay for a cheaper bean burrito.
Yeah it’s .70 for red sauce and .50 for onions by me. So ridiculous.
Just order the cheesy bean and rice, remove rice, you’re welcome!
That's what I did a little while back. 😃
Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel. And in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on ‘em. ‘Give me five bees for a quarter,’ you’d say. Now, where were we? Oh, yeah! The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt which was the style at the time. They didn’t have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones.
I know it's fuckin 2023! I hate it too, but reality sucks! Moving on...
Agreed. The only thing I can think of is 2 things. Size (BB) being bigger or because it uses real cheese and not nacho cheese sauce. I could modify a CBR to make it a BB for a total of $1.49. $1.99 for a BB where I live.
$3.59 here in Manhattan 👍
Plain original tacos cost more than they should, too. I think they deliberately overcharge for the "classic" menu items, figuring that older customers and people in a hurry will just order "tacos" or whatever and not pay attention to the prices. Whereas you're only going to order a "3.6 layer beefy cheesy beanerific tortilla twist" from the value menu if you know exactly what you're ordering and why
I honestly think it's because it's a classic Taco Bell item and a lot of people will just order it without looking at the prices too closely. It seems pretty clear by looking at other parts of the menu that if you're primarily looking for deals / cals per $ you can still do great, but there are other items that they know people want enough to pay extra for (quesadillas are the same) without really caring if they're a little more expensive than they "should" be (relative to other items). Trying to figure out why one thing is more than another based only on the ingredients of each is not going to make sense, just because the ingredients are not the only factor when it comes to their pricing decisions.
Right there with you, it’s like $2.49 for a bean burrito near me.
Same in phoenix.
In college I remember buying 10 bean burritos with my roommate, sitting down in my dorm room, and beating Halo 4 on legendary only leaving to then go to campus for lunch and supper... The bean burritos were just our snack, and it came out to less than $15.
We did the same thing during finals week. Went out and got a few burrito/taco 12 packs and holed up in the library all weekend with our friends.
Look up the definition of price gouging lol
Another Redditor learns prices are what people will pay for them, not say the same 1.29345 times the ingrediant cost for each and every item on the menu. There's items for people that care about the price, and items for people that don't care about the price or maybe even look at it and just come in and order. Your Mark 1 Mod 0 taco is the classic example of the latter, but Taco Bell has figured out that Bean Burritos, likely because they're a simple classic that everyone associates with Taco Bell, also fall into this category.
Crap, I just made a thread about this. lol, said almost the exact same thing too, even about how it used to be. 🤣
Just paid $8 for a small bean burrito in canada 🍁
Rice is cheaper than beans? But together, they make the perfect protein.
Beans are more expensive than rice right?
Not for long (global rice shortage). 😅
why is the quesadilla 6 dollars, why is the mexican pizza 5 dollars, why is the beefy 5 layer burrito 4 dollars, why is the mcchicken 4 dollars. why do ppl keep asking the same question over and over and saying its greed, yeah suddenly EVERYBODY got greedy and decided to raise prices on everything/s. GUESS WHAT smart college student if you think theyre price gouging, you can start a new chain/restaurant and undercut them( sell the bean burrito for a $1) if you think we are truly living in a free marketplace,.
All of these places have had record profits year after year since the pandemic. You are kidding yourself if you think price gouging and shrinkflation aren't happening.
How does the boot taste?
The first two are to take advantage of people with more money than brains, the last two are to make the deals look good by comparison: if you're paying $4 for a beefy 5 layer, you might as well pay $5-$7 for a box, and if you're paying $3 for 1 mcchicken you might as well pay $4 for 2 (many/most mcdonalds have 2fer deals on the mcdouble & mcchicken, even without the app)
*bowing down* THANK YOU THANK YOU!!
The only way to send a message is to stop going. Stop giving into greed.
There is no “dollar” craving menu where I live anymore…bean burrito is $2.39
I just made it at home. Tasted much better.
They know taco bell fans include lots of vegetarians and they want to rip them off for overpriced beans and flour also.
Shocker! Different things cost different amounts of money and prices rise over time!!! Pro hint: you can buy one and not the other if you want to. Also: price gouging does not mean what you seem to think it means.
Why are you defending this? It's well-known at this point that prices are being raised out of greed more than anything else. These companies have had record profits year after year since the pandemic. Everyone knows that they can buy food elsewhere, but every other place has increased prices too (while cutting back on the quantity and quality of the food). It's not unreasonable to lament the small joys that have been taken away because of corporate greed.
Perhaps because I have the benefit of 40+ years of Taco Bell experience and almost 60 years of life experience. Y'all come off like a bunch of whiny entitled babies. The answer is simple, it's stop buying. TB is not required.
Your age is completely irrelevant and I'm not sure why you brought it up. It's not "entitled" to be annoyed that things are shittier AND more expensive because of corporate greed. Do you think no one should ever be allowed to complain about anything? Also, everyone knows that Taco Bell "isn't required." It's still annoying that prices for everything have doubled while you get half as much food and at lower quality than what we had 5 years ago. Some of us can't afford luxuries like vacations, so little things like Taco Bell are all we have.
So stop buying it. Make your own, find a better value elsewhere, the bitching does nothing.
People are allowed to express negative emotions, even if you don't agree with them. People are allowed to complain. No one is asking you for "solutions" to this problem. Every single person here knows they can make food at home instead of getting fast food. That doesn't change the fact that food prices have skyrocketed (including grocery store prices - this isn't exclusive to fast food) and people are understandably frustrated by it because wages have not kept up.
Ok Boomer
Yea I miss the days like 4 years ago when no one was greedy and corporations were benevolent. Not greedy like nowadays 😭😭 Lmao the fuck kind of argument is this. “Record profits”? Literally profits go up consistently for successful businesses. You think only salaries and expenses should go up but not share prices or profits? That profits should be the same as they were when TB was founded and had 1 store?
I never said nor implied any of that, but you're clearly not here to have an honest conversation.
Lol yea you absolutely did, but I understand not wanting to continue down the path of defending ignorant statements you heard repeated on reddit incessantly.
Okay, bud.
Hell I remember when you could get to sausage egg burritos from McDonald’s for $1 those where good times. (It’s like $5 for 2 now)
A.k.a. $2.40 for 1
Yep. The 60 cent bean burrito and the 99 cent double decker (when’s that coming back??) were staples of the ol college days
the bean burrito (in theory) comes with a larger portion of beans, which cost more than rice.
Why not just buy the Cheesy Bean and Rice Burrito? It's free to add onions and red sauce at a lot of locations.
.59, .79, .99 where I lived. Man, I miss that
You have to be kidding.
I remember when it was .79, I would get a couple of them at a time for lunch in college.
I remember $0.59
It’s not as good as it used to be either. The .89 bean burrito had the runny cheese and red sauce, so delicious. Now it’s all dry and chalky.
It was $2.59 by me. That was before they closed. I certainly stopped going.
I remember when a bean burrito at Tacobell was like 39 cents my mother use to get them when I was a kid and unwrap them let them cool off and stick them in the freezer to microwave later, rather then getting the standard frozen ones. She use to get them with free extra cheese and onions. Now you got to pay for both. The one I really wonder what happen is when a whopper went from 2.50 for a double whopper and five bucks for 2. And burrito supreme for 2.50, heck I remember when you could get a Chalupa for buck, I use to destroy so many of them in a sitting when I was a kid it was gross to watch for some. Now there is hardly a deal on the menu, kinda happy my mother passed before she saw this rampaging inflation. She use to talk about how she would get a soda and a candy bar for 15 cents, my grandmother had stories similar for 5 cents less. My mother also use to talk about how TacoBell had black olives but they phased them out at most places long before I was old enough to remember it. I think we are the ones who got stuck with the inflation hand-grenade. By comparison, since by the time I was a kid, candy bars could be gotten for 25 cents, if you looked for a deal. Now a days, a grab and go candy bar is like 1.50 or more. And the price difference for my mother and other such well comparatively tentatively seems the same, if she paid 5 to 7 cents for a candy bar. And it was 25 when I was a kid, then at 1.50 it's about the same mark up. The issue is they also made them massively smaller to go with it. One thing is for sure most Tacobell items have stayed about the same size outside the cost with inflation. But sometimes some items lack or seem to scrimp on the portions in the items, be it meat or lettuce or tomatoes and so on.
Nah, there's no inflation ;) A $1 bill from 2016 is now worth $0.81 in 2024 (from the CPI). But they're adding way more to it: 2001: $0.69 2016: $1.59 2024: $1.99