What's this page all about?
Accurib Forecast is all about predicting when McDonald's will re-introduce the McRib. Fans of the McRib have had a long, troubled past with the McRib's spotty appearances on the menu.
Some have argued vociferously that the McRib become a standard item, as it rightfully deserves, and are perplexed as to why arguably the most popular item on the McDonald's menu is also it's flakiest.
But it seems that for those who care to look, the McRib's inconsistency is far less unintentional, and far darker than you might imagine...
Origins of a Conspiracy
More than a decade hence, whispers of a darker purpose for the McRib began cropping up on small blogs across the internet that the McRib's seemingly "random" appearances and disappearances were not random at all.
Nor were they simply another case in a long history of McDonald's subliminally toying with their customer's emotions (do you remember happy meals and what was the deal with Ronald McDonald!?).
"Arbitrage is a risk-free way of making money by exploiting the difference between the price of a given good on two different markets — it’s the proverbial free lunch you were told doesn’t exist. In this equation, the undervalued good in question is hog meat, and McDonald’s exploits the value differential between pork’s cash price on the commodities market and in the Quick-Service Restaurant market. If you ignore the fact that this is, by definition, not arbitrage because the McRib is a value-added product, and that there is risk all over the place, this can lead to some interesting conclusions. (If you don’t want to do something so reckless, then stop here.)"
— Willy Stately, The Awl 2011
Clearly, something far more disturbing and sinister was taking place. Was McDonald's exploitative attempt at "market arbitrage" the real explanation for what was going on behind the scenes? Could the McRib be a massive cover-up of McDonald's repeated and failed attempts to corner the entire pork futures market?
A careful study of the re-introductions of the McRib over the past decades shows that the theory has more than a little merit. And as you'll quickly realize on this site, the McRib's appearances do seem to line up almost exactly with a 3-month weighted-average decrease in pork futures.
Our Solution
When I came across this information several years ago, I knew I had to act. This site, a work in progress, allows you to quickly see through the various machinations of the McDonald's corporate cover-up, and determine, for yourself, using our advanced, machine-learning backed algorithms, whether the McRib is likely to be reintroduced at any given moment.
Here, you can see that hog future prices fluctuate quite a bit, month-to-month: