How many Big Macs are sold in the United States each year?

How to get close to this number

Decompose by restaurant. There are on the order of ten thousand outlets in the country, each open long hours every day of the year. Ask how many of one signature item a busy restaurant sells in a day, multiply by outlets and by 365, and the total lands in the hundreds of millions. Decomposing a national total into per-location-per-day is the most reliable technique for any chain question.

The per-second figure in the explanation is the sanity check, and it is the one that makes the number believable rather than absurd. Seventeen a second sounds enormous until you remember it is spread across thousands of kitchens in every time zone of a large country. Converting a huge annual total into a per-second rate is a good habit, because it turns an unimaginable number into one you can judge.

The Big Mac Index mentioned in the explanation is a genuinely useful idea: because the sandwich is near-identical everywhere, its local price is a rough measure of what a currency actually buys. It was invented as a light-hearted illustration of purchasing power parity and ended up being cited in serious economics. Note that corporate sales figures like this one are company statements reported in the trade press, not audited disclosures.