The fast food landscape: McDonald's is raising wages, will more fast food chains follow?

This week McDonald's announced plans to raise wages by around 10% for more than 36,000 workers who work in its company-owned restaurants (not franchises).

This is a big deal for McDonald's, which has more locations than any other fast food outlet except Subway and Starbucks, and it comes just after rival Chipotle announced a hike in its wages last week.

As the biggest fast food chain, what McDonald's does has a big impact on the rest of the fast food industry — which reportedly employs more than 4 million people across the United States alone.

Thanks to data from QSR magazine, we were able to plot average revenue-per-restaurant against the number of restaurant units, for each of the different chains. McDonald's pulls in $2.9m a year per restaurant. Chick-fil-A does a whopping $4.5m. Starbucks, Taco Bell and Burger King do around $1.5m per restaurant per year. The average Subway does just $410k a year. Some fast food restaurants would be able to afford higher wages for its employees more easily than others.