I never understood how can eating at McDonald's be cheaper than cooking your own meals.
I'm not from US, but checking US grocery shops, you can eat meals made of chicken breast, bread and vegetables well below 5$ per person, well below 20$ in total for a family of 4.
Yet every time I see those discussions, fast food is always presented as a cheaper option?
When you are a single person, the math changes. It can be cheaper or even break even to eat out every day. Especially if you lack the ability to eat and/or store the minimum package amount before it goes bad. This was a massive issue in my youth before I could save up buy stuff to make things last longer in the freezer while still tasting good. It was literally break even to cook vs eat out. Thus it was actually more expensive to eat out because we have to factor the time I spent cooking and I ruined food a lot as I learned how to make and store well what I liked.
As someone with a family now, it could never work. Even without just being better at cooking and preserving food, I can buy bulkier items that have a lower cost per unit.
I guess if I were truly destitute as a young adult, I would have cooked, but I wasn't. I wanted to have s nice salad wrap and/or hot meals fancier than beans and rice.
Well, you see, the entire wink-wink, nudge-nudge premise of America was this: everything is cheap, but you don't have the best safety net in the world. This sort of worked, for a while, especially because we actually DID have an okay social safety net here and there for people: Medicare/Medicaid, SNAP, Social Security, ACA, etc. Now, though, these programs are being gutted, AND ALSO the Big Macs are expensive. So now, the people who run this country (like the people who own McDonald's) are giving us neither our bread nor our circuses, and that makes the F150 class very angry...
But sure, I guess there's no cost of living crisis, actually, because you have the perfect shopping list. I'll inform the nation.
I'm not sure where you're getting numbers but I can't buy just chicken breast for two people for less than $5 at my grocery store unless I buy in bulk. And I do not have the space to store it.
I literally see chicken breast at walmart at 2.57$/lb, that's well below 5$ per two servings.
Add some simple mashed potatoes and you're still below 5$ to feed two people in one meal.
You can also eat bens, rice, lentils, eggs, add some cheese. There's countless simple, cheap, non processed food around.
The reality is that it's "more convenient", or at least it was, because if you had to choose between spending 3$ for a complete meal you still had to cook, and some 5/6$ McDonald's processed tasty food, you'd go with #2.
But stating that it's cheaper because of "scale economy" is just false, it isn't and never was to eat out. Let alone the impact of eating such junk food.
Cool. My local grocery store chicken is between $5-6/lb today. $2 if I buy a whole chicken and butcher it myself.
Whatever prices you're seeing are not my reality, living in a major urban area in the United States. Maybe if I bought at the Walmart in Iowa next to a factory farm I could buy it for $2.50/lb, but I can't.
Simple conomy of scale. McDonald's buy chicken in bulk from vendors, and get a better deal than Safeway/wherever you shop does, they get industrial bulk handing deals and yeah they have to pay for employees to cook the food, but that's amortized over all the other customers. So it can be cheaper, the same way that it's cheaper to get oil out of the ground, refine it, do a bunch of chemistry to it, form it into plastic knives and forks, make a box for it, decorate that box, put the cutlery into the box, ship that box halfway around the world, put it in a store, and all of that's still cheaper than getting someone to wash a metal fork for you to eat dinner with.
What blew my mind is when someone explained to me the cultural difference with some places in south east Asia. In the US, eating out at restaurants is what rich people do. But in certain places in south east Asia, having a kitchen, having appliances like a fridge, having electricity for them, having dining space, having the time to go to the market to haggle with vendors, all of that adds up so it's the rich that can afford to eat at home, and everyon else eats out. So it's location dependent.
I'm not from US, but checking US grocery shops, you can eat meals made of chicken breast, bread and vegetables well below 5$ per person, well below 20$ in total for a family of 4.
Yet every time I see those discussions, fast food is always presented as a cheaper option?