Not really, if you consider the time and effort needed to prepare a meal at home. Starting from shopping at a kitchen market, transporting the goods to home, cutting, prepping, the cooking and finally cleaning up afterwards...
Unless you have several hours of free time each day, preparing ones own meal is not something everyone looks forward to...
That leaves us wondering why economies of scale haven't beaten out your costs? A place like McDonalds should be able to buy food considerably cheaper than you can, hire people at a fraction of the cost of your time to prep for yourself, etc. While I understand why you may not want to eat McDonalds food constantly, from a price perspective you shouldn't be able to compete.
Have you forgotten some of your costs? It's easy to ignore the opportunity cost of owning the means of production, for instance, despite being a substantial cost, especially in high-cost cities. I have calculated in the past that simply having land allocated for the averaged-sized kitchen in SF costs about the same as a meal out at a nice restaurant 365 days a year, every year. That's even before getting into the cost of building the kitchen structure, furnishing it will the tools needed to prepare food, etc.
If you still believe that your methods are cheaper than a restaurant, what prevents it from working at scale to allow restaurants to offer food just as cheaply?
> I don't always have the time
This is an interesting statement. "I don't have time" means that you value doing one activity over another. If cooking isn't your top choice when faced with options, then perhaps you have undervalued your time spent in the kitchen when calculating your costs?
My setup costs are pretty much next to none, I pay a rent for fully furnished apartment with kitchen, pots and pans, tableware and everything included. Actually it would be a shame not to use them, those would be wasted expenses.
My cooking habits are opportunistic, if I'm at home, with no plans, I'll cook a meal and enjoy the process of doing so. A lot of the times I'm simply not home, so I don't even have the opportunity to cook.
Having explored some investment opportunities in the restaurant industry in the past, I don't see the markups being that large. Competition is fierce enough that there isn't a lot of room to go overboard with the margins. Even McDonalds makes the vast majority of their profits from being in the real-estate business[1], rather than the food business.
> Actually it would be a shame not to use them, those would be wasted expenses.
That I agree with, but the cost of the kitchen is still baked into your rent/utilities. You cannot simply ignore the cost because you happen to already be paying it. It is a very real cost that affects how much it costs to cook at home.
> A lot of the times I'm simply not home
Which, I would argue, is also a cost that should be considered as part of cooking at home. Time to get home, cost of travel to get home, giving up the opportunity of whatever else you may be doing, are all costs involved in cooking at home when you are away from home. And it seems that you have found eating out to be the cheaper option under these circumstances.
[1] http://blog.wallstreetsurvivor.com/2015/10/08/mcdonalds-beyo...
Maybe a lot of the traditional home cooking stuff isn't as good as what you'd get from takeout. A subtle form of inflation. For really cheap stuff the early blog posts of Jack Monroe are a good read; https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/oct/02/jack-mo...
Home cooking benefits from amortisation. Cooking more servings is often only a little more labour, up to the size of your kitchen. You don't need to shop daily either.
I do my own cooking and it rarely takes more than half an hour of actual work, plus up to half an hour (longer for weekend roasts) of semi-unattended cooking time.
Do people really need to spend several hours a day cooking? I don't think so. Simpler meals, simpler prep, putting something in the oven and setting a timer. Totally doable in much less "active" time. Maybe people are just not spending enough time at home.