McDonald's has a pretty shitty loyalty program anyway. They have a very limited selection of stuff you can even spend the points on and you can't both use points and a daily deal at the same time.
I agree it’s shitty, but you can definitely use points and a deal in the same order. I do it all the time. You cannot do 2 deals or 2 point redemptions in the same order.
There's a pizza place near my house that does wood-fired NY pizza, two giant slices plus a soda, for $7.50.
I dunno how they're making those prices work, but that's the only junk food meal I'm buying these days. I'd pay more for less food of worse quality at any fast food place.
Because good food is cheap to make, especially when buying in bulk like restaurants. Pizza is super cheap to make from scratch, especially when you factor in restaurants buying in bulk. I make pizza from scratch pretty often, the dough is negligible cost wise (bread flour, water, salt, and yeast), the sauce is semi-expensive to make only because I use the fancy san-marzano tomatoes and make almost a gallon of amazing sauce for $18 (mainly the cost of the tomatoes) - for sauce good enough to get from a restaurant you could easily make a lot more for a lot less. The toppings vary in cost obviously, but those are easy to pass the cost on to the consumer.
Soda is also negligible cost wise, the syrup for a very large cup of soda is maybe a few cents for the restaurant, soda has one of the highest markups of any food items.
In my high-falutin' local grocery store, 2-liter bottles of soda are $2.89, which is ridiculous enough. It's interesting that they often have 2-for-1 sales while at the poor people grocery store the soda is over $3 and never goes on sale. At drug stores it's even more absurd, well over $4 per 2-liter bottle - I just cannot believe people shop at those places at all, especially when they're literally next door to a much cheaper grocery store.