I'm totally willing to believe that I'm an out of touch yuppie. I've been living in the city way too long... heck, I'm one cinnamon soy latte away from getting an electric bike.

(Wait, if people upvote this, does that mean I AM an out of touch yuppie? Uh-oh.)

They're totally not similarly priced. A friend and I went to 5 Guys last year, and got pretty much the same order as we'd get at McDonald's or Wendy's (biggest burger, biggest fries, biggest drink meal), and not only was the food not better (though there was more of it), two orders of the largest size meal cost more than $20. It was insanely expensive.

S/he has a point. I spent four years in college in DC eating at various Five Guys in the DMV area and they were all great. (And it had nothing to do with price--I'd spend $8-10 every time I went there which was fairly often.) Then, I started venturing out after graduation to other places like NC and suddenly, you could tell the difference between Five Guys closer to their home vs. newer franchises that folks have open and begun to run like more familiarly crappy fast food chains. I sometimes think (and of course, I could be wrong) franchising seems to be the death of a good thing and it's funny how the founder says he was against it because of the very thing I'm finding has slipped--quality. (When people are involved and so crucial to a process, does quality always scale?)

I haven't had a decent Five Guys experience outside of the NoVA/MD area yet. It's always the worst things--the fries are often cold (I remember having to wait for them to be cooked fresh in NoVA), they'll mess your order up some other kind of way such as leaving something off your burger or forgetting a part of your order entirely (more common if you order lots of food at once), etc. The experience just isn't the same. No one I've taken there in my local area has been impressed unless they'd already eaten there in DC and just dealt with it--like I've stopped doing.

You must not have many good burger places where you live. 5 Guys burgers are good, but IMHO Freddies's (http://www.freddysfrozencustard.com/) and SmashBurger (http://www.smashburger.com/) are both way better than 5 Guys.