Dominos with coupon is now cheaper than frozen pizza around here.
I only really eat chicken, so my dog counts as an interested party with regards to meals. It doesn't take much effort (eg don't sauce her food, nothing fried, lots of rice and veggies in the rice cooker) and she is always thrilled for the variety.
I wish I could buy them one by one or two by two ... four seems like such an odd number of buns. What about families of 1,2,3 and 5.
Some places even let you buy the "restaurant" or "catering" frozen bread/buns that are pre-cooked but not fully baked. So they're risen, half-baked and frozen, ready to be "baked" from frozen by the final restaurant/caterer. That's how restaurants do it, they don't all bake or buy fresh-bread every day.
The biggest problem with hamburgers is the bread which I can't seem to get in packs of one or two. Lettuce and tomatoes you can use for any meal but if you buy 4 buns you either eat hamburger half the week or throw them away.
I've taken to using buns for sandwiches (extra buns around an egg is a decent breakfast).
So I found a local butcher who makes a 'steakhouse' grind (chuck, brisket, short ribs) for about $7/lb. Two slices of cheddar are about a buck for non-Kraft cheese, buns and condiments are about another buck. Takes me about 9 minutes to cook at home, and I have a custom, super fresh and hot burger that tastes better than anything I've every had at a restaurant. Now I do miss out on fries, but eh, chips will do as a replacement. At the end of the day, I have a burger and chips for about $5, plus leftover stuff for other sandwiches. Throw in a decent beer, and I'm still cheaper than the microbrewery. And no driving required.
Of course, I have to do the difficult part of cooking. /s
Hit up the salad bar for this stuff if your grocery store of choice has one. It's usually measured by weight, and it is much cheaper and less wasteful.
He was thinking of buying a box of lobster tails a few months back. Wholesale price was $800 for the box. He ended up passing.
Just think, wholesale prices are out of control, how can a restaurant not raise prices to stay in business?
Ah, the in-app coupons. Honestly, these are kind of a requirement nowadays if you want any fast food for a decent price.
Go look on your phone for the price of that same Domino's pizza without the coupon: for me, that same pizza would be $21.24 before sales tax. The coupon is a 62.5% discount!
When the had the "$3 off pickup" coupons for a while that stacked ($10 minimum), you could extend it to a 69.5% discount.
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Earlier this week I coupon stacked and got a McDonald's double cheeseburger, a large diet soda, a Wendy's Crispy Chicken Sandwich (+Tomato, +Pickles) and a Wendy's large fry for a total of $2.88 across both transactions, sales tax included. 1300 calories that served as both my lunch AND dinner. I couldn't make equivalent food at home for that price, despite sale shopping.
Without coupons, and deal stacking? $9.54, which means I got a 70% discount.
If I bought all that in just one of the stores (instead of going to two, since they're next to each other), it'd likely be closer to $11.
It's basically their regular price. Unlike something like McDonald's which requires the app, precise location permissions, and limits coupon frequency.
As my personal benchmark, I use one of the more 'solid' local chains, that IMO captures most of the essence of a 'Corner Shop' pizza. i.e. the oven probably isn't wood fired, but it's going to be better ingredients and IMO better quality product than a major chain. (1)
In any case, their 2 Large 2 Topping 'coupon' has gone up from 20 to 25$ over the last year. A 25% increase, which is pretty notable to me.
I've also seen my local mexican chain raise their prices, but by a lower mark. My 6-pack of enchiladas has both gone up in price (from 10 to 11.50, a 15% increase) and is no longer quite large enough to minmax over 3 meals (2 at a time used to fill me up. not anymore.)
(1) - To give you an example of a 'corner shop' pizza, or at least what it means to me. Imagine a place where the staff is friendly but smokes weed outside the store half the time. The local residents don't really care however, because the pizza comes out even better those days. It's one of those places you don't brag about going to, yet gets all the compliments if you bring it to a party.
If I had to distinguish Taco bell from, say, McDonalds, I would say that Taco bell has the advantage of being filling but not putting you in a food coma.
One of it's biggest unsung heroes is the bean burrito; It avoids most questions about the meat and has been a popular option among folks who wanted to avoid meat in their diets. It's... almost healthy. Almost.
Taco Bell would be if a large corporation operated a bunch of kebab shops, but used the absolute cheapest ingredients possible (with said ingredients largely being precooked and prepackaged such that anyone with so much as basic motor skills can slap a kebab together in 15 seconds), "Europeanized" it until there's only superficial resemblance to a kebab at best, and then sold it for similarly cheap prices from drive-thru fast food restaurants.