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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

> Real total food spending increased 11.4 percent in 2021 and 3.4 percent in 2022, driven by higher FAFH spending (up 19 percent in 2021 and 8 percent in 2022). Real FAH spending increased by 4 percent in 2021 but decreased by 2 percent in 2022.

FAH = food at home

FAFH = food away from home

So, eating out is killing our wallets. Not really a surprise considering "dollar menu" items at McDonalds now cost $6 and a halfway decent lunch is upwards of $17-20.

It's too hard to change habits in the short term, but I fully expect that over time people are going to start cooking more and cutting back on restaurant visits and the industry is going to take a huge hit because of it. Prices are simply out of control. Even more so considering the default tip expectation has crept up from 10% to now 20-25%.

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>So, eating out is killing our wallets. Not really a surprise considering "dollar menu" items at McDonalds now cost $6 and a halfway decent lunch is upwards of $17-20.

Yea, it's crazy what eating out costs, and what having that same food delivered costs. It's damn convenient though.

>It's too hard to change habits in the short term, but I fully expect that over time people are going to start cooking more and cutting back on restaurant visits and the industry is going to take a huge hit because of it. Prices are simply out of control. Even more so considering the default tip expectation has crept up from 10% to now 20-25%.

I just bought stuff to make chicken quesadillas. It cost about $9 and I'll probably make at least 8 of them and have some chicken and tortilla left over after that. I can afford to eat out, but it seems like a ripoff and I just don't like getting ripped off.

Towards the end of 2021, I began cooking at home and bringing my lunch to save money. My wife and I used to eat out a lot, and I would usually buy lunch. Cooking food resulted in close to 600-$700 in savings per month. Also, cooking for myself also resulted in me eating healthier (due to me being lazy and opting for simple dishes such as cooking chicken in butter and steaming vegetables) and I ended up losing close to 40lbs over the span of a few months.

> "dollar menu" items at McDonalds now cost $6

No need to exaggerate. It's called the "$1 $2 $3 Dollar Menu" now, and in my expensive urban area, the priciest item on it is $3.19 (McDouble).

It's definitely not an actual dollar like it was twenty years ago, but it's sure not $6 either.

That is meaningless when they can move items in and out of the menu as they please. The McChicken sandwich was a dollar menu staple ~10 years ago. I just checked the nearest McDonalds and it now costs $4.70.

All I said was don't exaggerate. The $6 is going too far.

McChicken is $3.19 on my $1 $2 $3 menu, and my location is an expensive one.

Some stuff has gone 3x. More stuff has gone 1.5x or 2x. Nothing at McD's has gone up 6x in the past twenty years.

His example of the McChicken increased from $1 to $4.70 in 10 years.

That's a 4.7x increase, which is close enough to 6x in colloquial conversation to convey the same point.

One detail here: Up 19 percent in 2021 - remember that any number from that year is comparing to the low baseline from the pandemic shutdowns in 2020, so the real effect isn't as big as it looks from that.

To see the real numbers, look at the annualized differential between 2019 and 2023.

Yes the percentages are wonky because of COVID but that doesn't change the fact that the absolute, inflation-adjusted number is the highest it has ever been.

Constant out-of-home dinning isn't sustainable anyway, unless you massively underpay the staff, which isn't possible when unemployment is low. Hope everyone knows how to cook, at least a little bit. I don't know that we're going back.

It should be sustainable/economical though, at least for 'basic' or staple foods.

There are a lot of efficiencies a burger joint, for instance, should be able to employ that a personal kitchen can't. It probably won't be cheaper, but it ought to be some fraction of minimum wage * the time investment of diy cooking[0]. Or at least on that order.

[0] ~minimum wage (plus payroll and etc.) being fair pay for burger flipping, and being that a professional kitchen can maintain a much higher throughput per person (e.g. a pro burger flipper in a real kitchen can probably make 10+ burgers in the time I would take to make one)

The restaurant model, sure, but I'd argue that in theory communal kitchens should be significantly more cost effective than everyone cooking for themselves in their own homes. Plenty of countries and cultures all around the world have made it work.

Liability costs make a big difference when comparing costs around the world.

I think a significant percentage of restaurants in US cities pay some staff in cash; the staff cannot legally work in the US. As long as people are willing to accept this as a way to earn money, this will remain sustainable.

I'm not so sure about this.

Cooking at home means going to the supermarket (or going online and ordering from the SM). If you have to cook for more than yourself, then you probably need to also put sometime into planning the meals for the week. And then of course there's the time to cook the meals. There's also cleanup. Also, let's not forget that there are plenty of people who never really learned to cook and now fear the kitchen.

Sure meals from the frozen section are an option but they're maybe only slightly less expensive than FAFH.

In any case, FAH takes time *and* effort. Perhaps not a lot of time + effort - and habit - but enough to make it easy to say, "F** it. Let's FAFH..."

If FAFH establishments start closing, local towns are going to turn into ghosts towns. FAFH is about the only thing left in a lot of cases; aside from web dispensaries.

People should have been FAH'ing long ago for health reasons and that obviously didn't workout at all.

Everything follows economics. If you can't cook but don't have the money to eat out you will learn to cook. If you don't have the time you will cut back on some other activity.

Good point. And that raises the question: Where are consumers spending less?

> Cooking at home means going to the supermarket (or going online and ordering from the SM). If you have to cook for more than yourself, then you probably need to also put sometime into planning the meals for the week. And then of course there's the time to cook the meals. There's also cleanup. Also, let's not forget that there are plenty of people who never really learned to cook and now fear the kitchen.

There's a sort of gut instinct that going out is easier. After all, the sitting and ordering is a lot more passive than the prepping and cooking.

But time wise, it seems like getting in a car, driving, finding parking, walking, waiting for a table, and then the slow drawn out steps of getting drinks, appetizers and a meal over a long period of time, before repeating all the travel again... adds up to even more time!

But going out...

1) It's less friction and any give point. Driving is easy when the reward is a meal. Driving is not so easy then the "reward" is the supermarket.

2) Is an event. It's exciting. It's an adventure. Again, compare than to the supermarket and cooking a meal.

At the objective level, your analysis is spot on. I do agree. I tend to not eat out or order out. But aside from myself - and yourself? - that's not how human decision-making and human behavior works.

The majority's decisions are driven by the quest for comfort.

My wife and I both work full time jobs. It's easy to do meal planning when one member of the family doesn't work - but when everyone [has to] work - planning a meal every night of the week is nearly impossible.

Currently we're trying to eat at home 3 nights a week, and even that's hard. We don't want to eat the same thing for multiple days. If neither of us has time to cook, then a lot of time the ingredients are perishable and get thrown out (so now instead of spending money to go out, we're spending money on food to cook AND going out - it's a gamble).

I would even add, that I think, as a society we should move to towards eating out and delivery being the norm - It's like anything else, I specialize in Programming, my wife specializes in Medicine. When we order food - they specialize in that. It's way more efficient than us having to do it.

I never eat out. I can tell you that food bought from grocery stores and farmers markets has gone up in price by 1/3 to 1/2 from Dec 2019. And some foods disappeared never to return during the start of the pandemic.

Eating at home is going to save you money compared to eating out. But eating at home costs have gone up a shocking amount as well.

> It's too hard to change habits in the short term

I don’t see how. Written and video recipes available for free online. Instant pot and a couple other items cost $100?

Time and effort are the remaining ingredients.

Time, food variety, and cleanup. Most people don't want the majority of their food to come from an instant pot and they don't want to think about things like grocery shopping. There's a level of skill and management involved in making your own food even if you are talking about extremely simple recipes, and it becomes invisible once you get used to it, but I suspect some people don't have those skills or habits built up. I might be overestimating the difficulty because of ADHD, but I do think it's something that can be difficult even for neurotypical people if they're not used to it.

And of course, habits are also just... habitual. If it's a habit to get to 9PM at night and think, "crud I need food, let me just order something quickly", that habit will still be difficult to break even if everything else is easy.

It's of course doable -- I basically never eat out or order food, I cook everything. But I understand why people don't. Cooking is something I have to plan around. It's annoying to want to make something and then look in the fridge and realize I forgot to buy an ingredient. And I only cook for myself, I don't have to manage a full family and kids.

But it is of course way cheaper and (depending on how you approach it) can be much healthier.

> but I do think it's something that can be difficult even for neurotypical people if they're not used to it.

Based on the percent of people who were able to do it before there were fast food restaurants everywhere, I think people will manage to figure it out.

The only reason they have not is due to lack of incentive (sufficiently cheap food at restaurants).

Yes, that is exactly what OP said:

Nobody is saying people can't cook. They're saying it'll take a little while for people who aren't used to cooking to change their habits and pick up some planning/organizing/cooking skills again that they might have lost. And they're saying that price (a lack of sufficiently cheap food at restaurants) will be the driving force behind that change.

Oh, I interpreted it as it takes time to learn. Which, I was trying to say that the habit can be quick and easy to break, people just need the incentive.

For example, if restaurant or prepared food prices went up 5x today, basically everyone (with space and appliance to cook) has the capability to buy a pan, spatula, bowl, fork, eggs, salt, pepper, and start making scrambled eggs for dinner.

And then they would watch a YouTube video and try lentils, and rice, and etc. And in a few weeks they would have a bunch of dishes under their belt.

Sure, I buy that with enough incentive that change could happen much faster. There isn't any kind of vendor lock-in with restaurants, and I do think that cooking is much more accessible today than it used to be, even though there's probably less effort spent teaching people how to do it.

Another thing to keep in mind here is that it takes time for people to work out specific budget changes as well. Not everyone tracks their finances aggressively, and it's not surprising to me if restaurant prices go up that it would take maybe a year or two for people to start looking at their budgets and thinking, "hey, I could cut a lot here."

A 5X price increase overnight is something that would be impossible for people not to notice, but I suspect anything that's an impulse buy where the price goes up slowly to be somewhat lagging with people's reactions to those prices, and then similarly lagging with them taking the time to implement changes as a result. See also stuff like streaming services, where someone might keep a streaming service after a price increase even though they wouldn't have signed up at that price. Both inertia and just general lack-of-insight into those price increases can slow down consumer reaction.

> Based on the percent of people who were able to do it before there were fast food restaurants everywhere, I think people will manage to figure it out.

A good lot of the people from that time are dead and they become fewer every day. Meanwhile, their children, who grew up since then, have radically different baseline expectations about what a meal should taste like, how big it should be, how filling it should be, how convenient it should be, etc

It’s very different to recall the habits of a received culture than it is to adopt a new culture that is completely alien.

In some post-apocalypse, of course people will figure this stuff out, but expecting that to happen just because of incidental market relationships in an otherwise healthy economy is a fantasy.

It takes the passion of a wellness geek or absolute desperation to throw away all your preconceptions about how you’ve related to food your whole life. It doesn’t just happen because prices crept up a little here or sank a little there.

I disagree. After a few missed meals, people will be willing to try all different kinds of food, even if they have to put a pot or pan on the stove. That’s just biology.

But, see, almost nobody eats out 100% of the time. So they're going to the grocery store anyway.

It feels like grocery and fuel prices have gone way up, more than other goods; I imagine demand is fairly inelastic.

I can think of at least one reason “FAFH” would grow when comparing 2021 to 2020 and 2022 to 2021.

> I fully expect that over time people are going to start cooking more and cutting back on restaurant visits and the industry is going to take a huge hit because of it.

We can hope, but it seems unlikely to me that it would go quite like that. I'm pretty sure that once people are used to budgeting a larger share of their income on food, processed food companies and their retailers will happily soak up whatever gets trimmed from restaurant spending. There might be a net savings for those early to transition, but if it becomes a cultural trend, supermarket prices will just creep up to match the customary food budget.

Restaurants may lose, but food manufacturers and supermarkets will likely claw back the difference before they let it go back to families.

> I'm pretty sure that once people are used to budgeting a larger share of their income on food...

I think you're wrong starting here. People aren't used to budgeting a larger share of their income on food. They're blowing their budgets, and it's going to stop fairly soon, because they can't actually afford it.

> processed food companies and their retailers will happily soak up whatever gets trimmed from restaurant spending.

If consumers let them, yes. If I'm right (and the GP), consumers won't let them.

> There might be a net savings for those early to transition, but if it becomes a cultural trend, supermarket prices will just creep up to match the customary food budget.

This assumes that there's no competition in supermarkets, and that they are free to raise their prices independently of their costs.

> Restaurants may lose, but food manufacturers and supermarkets will likely claw back the difference before they let it go back to families.

This assumes the same. And, "before they let it go"? You have a very exaggerated sense of how much power and control they have.

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