Amusingly the "Dominos Coupon pizza" has stayed constant through all this, whereas everything else around here has gone up - high enough that the difference between going to Culver's or going to the bar or an actual restaurant is basically nil again.
There IS a $5 "classic combo" that's large drink, one crispy taco, one beef burrito, chips, and a drink. Which is still way more than you can get anywhere else for $5 these days, if that's what you want to eat. While the rest of the menu is going to result in a more expensive meal than you'd get most other fast food. Although maybe I'm wrong about that, I think maybe my local McDonald's has some "combo meals" at like $13 even?!
This trend predates the current inflation.
Several major fast food chains appear to have worked out more effective price discrimination schemes that involve raising their menu prices to much higher than they used to be, then offering crazy discounts in their apps or via coupons.
It's always been possible to get significant discounts on fast food with coupons, but before they seemed to think they needed to keep their menu prices at least non-crazy or it'd hurt business. Something changed and a whole bunch of them decided they no longer needed to keep menu prices in the realm of sanity—10-to-1 this happened so fast and uniformly because one or more of the big-3 management consulting firms pushed new "best practices" across the whole industry in short order.
Now the menu prices are WTF high, but you can get 50-90%(!) discounts using the apps and coupons and eat fast food daily without ever paying anywhere near menu price.
We just stopped going to Taco Bell all together. It's kind of crazy. I can't find a reason to go there any longer. As a kid, they were so cheap[0], the running joke was that $20 worth of food there would kill a person. It was about properly priced -- despite being a fan of Taco Bell, their consistency between restaurants (better, today) was terrible in the 90s -- you'd get anywhere from 1/4-3/4 filled shells with random mixes of cheese-lettuce-GroundMeat ratio.
I took my kids there last weekend ... it was over $30.00 and I didn't eat. Fast food -- across the board -- has gone up. In my area, and I suspect most places, it's because they need to pay upwards of $18.00/hr to employ enough people to keep the store (and now restaurant) open. I expect a lot of automation is coming (and I hope like hell McDonald's fixes their terrible in-store ordering kiosk ... and that's one place where it's becoming increasingly expensive to avoid their app).
My grocery bill went from ~$100/trip to $250/trip if I don't do the majority of my shopping at ALDI. So I basically stopped grocery shopping anywhere other than ALDI[1] for anything ALDI carries. I only avoided it, before, because I have 4 options within 2 miles and ALDI is 6 miles away (I love ALDI).
I've started buying a lot of "the maintenance things[2]" at the dollar store (now $1.25, and the independent ones are now $1.00 - $5.00). You have to be careful with those because some items are a terrible deal there and some of the products are fscked up[3] but we've gotten lucky with a few trips -- consider that a 32oz bottle of the same shampoo was almost $8 at the other places and after purchasing a "test bottle" we bought out the rest and two other local stores in the chain. We do that when we find a good one and end up with enough to not have to think about it for a decade.
The saving grace, I guess, is that I haven't had a commute in two years and won't be getting having, again. I also replaced much of the rest of my driving with a OneWheel. I'm filling up my gas tank less than once a month when I was filling up more than once a week, before.
[0] At one point they were running $0.49 tacos -- mid-90s.
[1] While everything went up there, too, it went up less ... although the frozen pizzas that are a guilty pleasure of mine still land around $2.39 (they never go on sale for $1.99 any longer, though).
[2] Shampoo/Conditioner/Soap/etc, things like Band-Aids/Toothbrushes (they carry fancy manual toothbrushes which my kids use)
[3] I've gotten Shampoo from a well known brand that I've purchased at a grocery store which was "separated". I guess I could have called the 800 number; guessing it was counterfeit/meant for destruction and ended up back in the gray-market.