Sonic Drive-In said Monday it will be launching a value menu — joining rivals McDonalds, Burger King and Taco Bell in an industrywide bid to lure back inflation-battered customers.
The 71-year-old burger chain — owned by Inspire Brands, which also operates Arbys, Baskin Robbins, Buffalo Wild Wings and Dunkin will offer burgers, snacks, desserts and brand-new wraps on a permanent Fun.99 menu whose items cost $1.99 each.
The value menu will include a quarter-pound double cheeseburger, Chili Cheese Coney hot dog, tater tots and all 12 of the Sonic Shake flavors in a 16 oz. cup.
The $1.99 menu will also introduce two new items: a bacon ranch queso wrap and a southwest crunch queso wrap.
Now more than ever, guests are focused on affordable food options, CMO Ryan Dickerson said in a statement. At SONIC, we wanted to do something different something fun so we focused on variety.
The Oklahoma-based fast-food chain also offers discounts to app users, like half-price cheeseburgers on Tuesday nights.
Sonic said its value menu is here to stay.
McDonalds, Burger King and Taco Bell have all recently introduced temporary value deals McDonalds and Burger King each introduced a $5 meal deal last month, while Taco Bell launched a $7 Luxe Cravings Box.
McDonald’s — which came under fire after some locations were charging as much as $18 for a Big Mac meal and $7.29 for an Egg McMuffin — also offers Free Fries Friday, a free medium fry with a $1 minimum purchase on Fridays, through the end of the year.
In April, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski admitted on an earnings call that it is clear that broad-based consumer pressures persist around the world.
Consumers continue[d] to be even more discriminating with every dollar that they spend as they faced elevated prices in their day-to-day spending, he added.
The value meal war is a result of customer cutbacks as inflation persists and food prices rise.
In February, around a quarter of low-income consumers, or those earning less than $50,000 per year, said they were eating less fast food and around half said they were making fewer trips to restaurants, according to polling by consulting firm Revenue Management Solutions.
Quick-service restaurant traffic was down 2.1% in May as compared to the same time last year, according to Revenue Management Solutions. Meanwhile, the average price at quick-service restaurants was up 3% in May compared to the same period last year, according to the firm.
Burger King and Taco Bell did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The UK economy will grow more than previously thought, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which has upgraded its latest forecast.
It also said the Bank of England should “continue to ease monetary policy gradually”, indicating it expected further reductions in interest rates.
But it warned trade tensions linked to US tariff plans will reduce UK economic growth next year.
The Washington-based UN financial agency said the UK economy will expand 1.2% this year and “gain momentum next year”.
The upgrade in forecasts, however, is slight, up from an expected 1.1% announced in April as the world reeled from the global trade war sparked by US President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
That April figure was a 0.5% downgrade from the projected 1.6% growth for 2025 the IMF foresaw in January and the 1.5% forecast issued in October.
It means the IMF expects the UK economy to grow less this year than it forecast in October and January.
This anticipated lower growth is largely due to tariffs – taxes on goods imported to the United States – and the uncertainty caused by shifting trade policy in the US, the world’s largest economy.
While many tariffs have been paused until 8 July, it’s unclear if deals will be in place by then and if pauses may be extended.
The effect of this has been quantified as a 0.3 percentage points lower growth by 2026 in the UK, the IMF said.
The organisation held its prediction that the UK economy will grow by 1.4% in 2026.
“The forecast assumes that global trade tensions lower the level of UK GDP by 0.3% by 2026, due to persistent uncertainty, slower activity in UK trading partners, and the direct impact of remaining US tariffs on the UK,” it said.
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Trump’s tariffs: What you need to know
It comes despite the UK having agreed a deal with the Trump administration to circumvent the 25% tariffs on cars and metals.
The IMF also cautioned that “weak productivity continues to weigh on medium-term growth prospects”.
Lower productivity has been an issue since the global financial crash of 2008-2009, but has been caused by “chronic under-investment”, low private sector research and development, limited access to finance for businesses to expand, skill gaps, and a “deterioration in health outcomes”, it said.
Interest rates
Interest rates “should” continue to come down, making borrowing cheaper, though the IMF acknowledged rate-setters at the Bank of England now have a “more complex” job due to the recent rise in inflation and “fragile” growth.
The author of the report on the UK, Luc Eyraud, said the IMF expected the Bank to cut interest rates by 0.25 percentage points every three months until they reach a level of around 3%, down from the current 4.25%.
Praise was given to the UK government as the IMF said “fiscal plans strike a good balance between supporting growth and safeguarding fiscal sustainability”.
“After a slowdown in the second half of 2024, an economic recovery is under way,” the IMF said.
Global factors – “weaker export performance in the challenging global environment” – are blamed for the slowdown last year.
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“The UK was the fastest growing economy in the G7 for the first three months of this year and today the IMF has upgraded our growth forecast,” she said.
“We’re getting results for working people through our plan for change – with three new trade deals protecting jobs, boosting investment and cutting prices, a pay rise for three million workers through the national living wage, and wages beating inflation by £1,000 over the past year.”
The government is considering getting rid of the two-child benefit cap first brought in by the Conservatives.
The policy has caused considerable consternation within the Labour Party, with a growing number of MPs calling to scrap it and ministers so far refusing to.
We look at what the cap is and the controversy over it.
What is the two-child benefit cap?
Since 2017, parents have only been able to claim child tax credit and universal credit for their first two children, if they were born after April 2017.
An exception is made for children born as a result of rape.
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Child benefit reform ‘not off the table’
Who introduced it?
Then work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith first proposed the policy in 2012 under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government.
It was not until 2015 that then chancellor George Osborne announced a cap would be introduced from the 2017/2018 financial year.
The coalition said it made the system fairer for taxpayers and ensured households on benefits faced the same financial choices around having children as those not on benefits.
Image: David Cameron’s government introduced the cap, though he was out of office by the time it came in
What is Labour’s position on the cap?
The party has long been divided over the issue, with Sir Keir Starmer ruling out scrapping the cap in 2023.
He then said Labour wanted to remove it, but only when fiscal conditions allowed.
Following Labour’s landslide victory last July, the prime minister refused to bow to pressure within his party, and suspended seven MPs for six months for voting with the SNP to scrap the cap.
The publication of Labour’s child poverty strategy was delayed from the spring to autumn, fuelling speculation the government wants to use the next budget to scrap the cap.
Then the education secretary told Sky News on 27 May lifting the cap is “not off the table” – and “it’s certainly something that we’re considering”.
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Why did Labour delay their child poverty strategy?
How many children does the cap affect?
Government figures show one in nine children (1.6m) are impacted by the two-child limit.
In the first three months Labour were in power, 10,000 children were pulled into poverty by the cap, the Child Poverty Action Group found.
In May, it said another 109 children are pulled into poverty each day by the limit, adding to the 4.5 million already in poverty.
The Resolution Foundation said the cap would increase the number of children in poverty to 4.8 million by the next election in 2029-30.
Torsten Bell, the foundation’s former chief executive and now a Labour Treasury minister, said scrapping the cap would lift 470,000 children out of poverty.
Image: Torsten Bell has warned against keeping the cap. Pic: Dimitris Legakis/Athena Pictures/Shutterstock
How much would lifting the cap cost the taxpayer?
The cap means for every subsequent child after the first two, families cannot claim benefits worth £3,455 a year, according to the Institute for Government.
It estimates removing the limit would cost the government about £3.4bn a year – equal to roughly 3% of the total working-age benefit budget.
It is also approximately the same cost as freezing fuel duties for the next parliament.
Research has found the indirect fiscal impacts of lifting the cap could be higher, as some data shows investing in young children can pay for itself by causing better outcomes for them later in life.
Elon Musk listens as reporters ask U.S. President Donald Trump and South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa questions during a press availability in the Oval Office at the White House on May 21, 2025 in Washington, DC.
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Tesla shares gained about 5% on Tuesday after CEO Elon Musk over the weekend reiterated his intent to home in on his businesses ahead of the latest SpaceX rocket launch.
The billionaire wrote in a post to his social media platform X that he needs to be “super focused” on X, artificial intelligence company xAI and Tesla as they launch “critical technologies” on the heels of a temporary outage.
“As evidenced by the uptime issues this week, major operational improvements need to be made,” he wrote, adding that he would return to “spending 24/7” at work. “The failover redundancy should have worked, but did not.”
An outage over the weekend briefly shuttered the social media platform formerly known as Twitter for thousands of users, according to DownDetector. Earlier in the week, the platform suffered a data center outage. X has suffered a series of outages since Musk purchased the platform in 2022.
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Musk has previously indicated plans to step away from his political work and prioritize his businesses.
During Tesla’s April earnings call he said that he would “significantly” reduce his time running President Donald Trump‘s Department of Government Efficiency.
In the last election cycle, Musk devoted time and billions of dollars to political causes and toward electing Trump in 2024. However, a story over the weekend from the Washington Post, citing sources familiar with the matter, said that Musk has grown disillusioned with politics and wants to return to managing his businesses.
Last week, Musk said in an interview at the Qatar Economic Forum that he planned to spend “a lot less” on campaign donations going forward.
The comments from Musk precede SpaceX’s Starship rocket Tuesday evening. Pressure is on for the company after two Starship rockets exploded in January and March.
Ahead of the launch, Musk announced an all hands livestream on X at 1 p.m.
Tesla is still facing fallout from Musk’s political foray, with protests at showrooms and other brand damage.
In April, Tesla sold 7,261 cars in Europe, down 49% from last year, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association.