It has always striked me as a rich people thing

Fastfoods marketing themselves as luxury brand is a relatively recent trend. A decade or so ago starbacks, mcd’s, etc. really were “cheap, fast, tasty”. Fast food used to be a convenience for when you were on road trips and couldn’t make your own food.

All these different fastfood brands built up such a large reputation around themselves that they practically became a part of our collective conscious. At some point they realised that instead of selling food, they could sell their brand. And that’s when it stopped being cheap, stopped being tasty, and generally became a “rich people” thing.