One time they said that fast food was cheaper than grocery food.
It was so wrong, that I never listened to NPR since.
It was so wrong, that I never listened to NPR since.
I don't know how to come up with good metrics for measuring that but I think currently all such articles are seriously bad because most don't even list their set of implicit assumptions concerning the costs that they are bothering to measure.
If you think all of that is too boring to tolerate, then scrounge up a can opener and the possibilities explode.
There never seems to be any good way to share my thoughts and get meaningful engagement. I was not suggesting fast food is cheap.
I blog about food somewhat frequently. It has no traction and likely never will have traction, much less engagement.
Sometimes I say a thing on hn and it gets some kind of useful engagement.
I understand your inference given the context, but you are replying to stuff I didn't comment on at all.
I wouldn't stop listening over that.
Fast food bulk-buys, prepares at industrial scale, and automates as much as possible. It's going to be hard to fight against that level of volume discounting.
Anyway, as long as we're throwing random cost factors into the air, fast food has much bigger labor, utilities, and real estate costs that their food prices have to cover. And individuals can do pretty well buying bulk if they put in the effort. But we talked about effort already. It's definitely not going to be simple if you want to fully quantify all the tradeoffs, but if you just count dollars, well, there's a pretty wide spread of effort levels where you can beat fast food.
Example: A quarter lb with cheese at McD
Average price at a US McDonald's, $6.65: https://www.fastfoodmenuprices.com/how-much-mcdonalds-quarte...
Average price according to USDA for home cooked: $2.17 https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery...
Fast food is typically much more expensive than home cooked from scratch and people have very confused ideas about this.
The economics all look great- about 10-30% cheaper for raw costs- except that the articles also include costs to prepare the meal (time cost, resource cost of fuel) and cleanup (time cost and often more garbage/cleanup).
also, the article that were published were mostly published about a decade ago, when the prices for fast food were a lot lower. This changed in the past few years as fast food prices went up a lot, even more than inflation on basic goods.
I typically don't include citations because nobody is here on hacker news to argue about the finer details of academic studies that carefully control for all the factors, and most of us don't have the time and inclination to read the studies in details to see where the problem lie. Instead, we build generalized models of the world that incorporate a great deal of different data and use those to explain our observations to others. My own model is based on 30+ years of shopping and preparing my own food at home, as well as working in fast food (MCDonald's), talking to franchise owners (always an interesting perspective into how McDonald's works), and regular restaurants.
Note: I live in California, a state with a different economic distribution than any other state in the country (with New York and Texas being the closest comparable states in terms of wealth distribution, relative prices of groceries and fast food, amounts of transportation required to obtain food, etc). Some people I know hunt for their own food- they enjoy the sport and it produces enough meat for a family to eat in a year! Obviously, that's a case where fast food isn't really cheaper.
My local McD's: $6.39 My local Safeway (not a budget option, no sales, you can do better than all of this): 1 1/4 lb beef patty $1.69, 1 slice cheddar cheese $0.37, 1 hamburger buns $0.22 = $2.28, misc condiments are negligible but let's say $0.25 total = $2.53
That's less than half the cost. The time and resources cost of frying that patty in a skillet and throwing it on a bun with cheese and ketchup comes nowhere close to doubling that, it's not even close.
That's what I mean by "fully loaded"- when economists compare things like this, they don't just take the published dollar costs in a single location and compare them. They made a best-effort good-faith attempt at considering all the other costs which lead to a consumer making a decision.
Also, fast food prices shot up in the past few years, faster than grocery prices. Most of the articles about this were written about 10-15 years ago.
I understand what you are trying to say about "fully loaded cost". It's also wrong. The fully loaded cost is still much lower for home vs fast. Unless you insist that you really desire specifically something like deep fried french fries, a specific cooking method that is extremely scalable and well suited to restaurant production and very inconvenient at home. But it is emphatically not true that a meal of similar ingredients/macro nutrition (burger and potato) is in general ever cheaper in fast food form.
If you want to promote the myth that fast food is cheaper, you should cite any other source than that you vaguely remember there being articles 10-15 years ago.
Something is wrong, then, because I have to go all the way back to my place to put it on a bun and put things on it and eat it. I don't have to make that commute with fast food.
You two aren't arguing about which is cheaper; you're arguing about which externalities you're willing to ignore.
However, I really don't think that's the general case people are thinking of when trying to argue that it makes some kind of economic sense for people to eat a fast food diet. The average person does go home at some point, especially so for families.
Or more specifically, it's the claim "I can't go to the grocery store and make this meal for less than a fast food meal", that is absurd.
Love this! So many arguments boil down to exactly this!
Talking with friends in my kitchen while cooking (and drinking!) is "free" time.
Hamburgers for a family of five with a counter-top mise en place...
Place five buns opened up on a large cutting board (1 minute tops). Squirt your bottled condiments on the buns (1 minute tops). Hand-rip your lettuce, five servings, place on buns (3 minutes tops). Slice tomato rounds for each burger (3 minutes I guess if your knife skills are really bad). Take ground beef and hand-form five patties (5 minutes tops). Cook all five patties at once in a large pan or whatever you use (10 minutes tops - smash them if you want them well done or done fast). Spatula out the patties onto the buns and you've got burgers.
Shouldn't take more than 20 or so minutes really and I even left the cooking part for last so as to not complicate things. What you should really be doing is cooking the burgers WHILE you set up the buns. Personally I could go from all those ingredients sitting visibly in a fridge to five burgers ready to serve in about 10 minutes.
Maybe what we have here with you and with many others in America is just a lack of food knowledge. Home food culture used to be all there was before fast food. Those traditions are lost and everyone's skill in preparing meals at home as atrophied over decades.
I mean I get that there's no more Nana in the kitchen makin the sauce and both parents work but there's so many easy, quick meals that can be made for very cheap if people simply acquired the knowledge and practiced. You don't wanna eat those fast food patties anyways they're probably like half fake with fraudulent filler material or whatever. It's hard to even recreate that lab-researched frankenfood.
This is exactly what's happening. This is why I find it so upsetting to hear a source like NPR mindlessly repeating the myth that fast food is cheaper. People have gotten totally out of touch with basic home economics type stuff and the food industry is all too happy for them to stay in the dark.
Cooking at home is just stupendously cheaper. I don't understand how anyone can claim otherwise. I made the switch 3 years ago and the impact on budget was phenomenal.
You don't clean as you go? Your area should be clean before and after your work.
But maybe my proficiency comes from starting at a Chinese restaurant at the tender age of 15, back in the 1990s.
I often eschew eating out because it takes too long.
> What about cleanup?
Put it on the floor and let the dog lick it clean.
Are those menu costs or paid costs?
McDonald's has moved to a model where you get the app and it has valuable coupons that take like 30% off the price that renew every day. Which is part of why the menu costs have gone up.
But the exact same thing applies to the grocery prices I quoted. I gave the non-sale prices from my area's more expensive grocery store, that's what I consider the starting point, you can definitely do better.
Not to dispute your point that grocery stores also have a lot of coupons and promotions and it’s definitely cheaper than fast food (also grocery store food has even cheaper options like beans, rice, canned goods etc that may not be equivalent to a fast food meal but are vastly cheaper and may not take any real time or effort to prepare).
So because a contractor makes 500 an hour every burger they make costs 500 dollars. Yeah that sounds plausible. They should be maximalising their economic output and leaving menial labor to others.
I've worked fast food and grocery stores - the only time a grocery store is more expensive is when you go 100% brand name goods, and even then the price difference in total is a couple bucks.
look at the website Efficiency Is Everything. Your 'factually verified' has been debunked in like 100 different fast food studies.
Does it "cost more" based on calories/dollar, or weight of food, or cooked-meals-per-dollar? (I'm not asking for an answer, thats what everyone below your comment has been arguing about I assume). Are cigarettes "just as addictive" as heroin? Well, it depends on how you measure/define _____. I keep seeing effort wasted in arguments that all point back to the "well, it depends on how you measure it", but to me, the arguments never actually get anywhere and nobody seems to realize that they are playing with movable goalposts.
In reality, these ragebait articles are written by young people (guessing young men) who have no experience cooking for a family.
$4 for 2lb ground beef
$3 for 10lb russett potatoes
$4 for four apples
$4 for a 52oz jug of OJ
$18 total for ~8 "Happy Meal equivalents", or $2.25 per meal, so less than the actual Happy Meal, but you need 1. $20 cash to buy the supplies and 2. the time/equipment/knowledge to prepare the meals.
Yes, the headlines are rage-bait, but fast food is still ridiculously inexpensive. Yes, you ca reproduce the fast food at home, or live on rice+beans, for less. But add some quality protein and a pile of fresh veg and the price goes up.
The rest of your numbers are similarly off: - you are giving each happy meal 1.25 lbs of potato!? - apple serving size is 1.2 ozs - An average apple is 8-10 ozs, 4 apples = 26 happy meals minimum.
You realize how expensive fast food is if you are at all used to cooking at home from scratch all the time.
But cooking from scratch all the time has a time cost, too. Many families are time poor as well as money poor so there's a balancing act to be done.
For the burger example: buying pre-formed burger patties is still massively cheaper. Throwing a pre-formed burger patty from your fridge in a pan and putting it on a bun with a slice of cheese will take you ten minutes. Microwave small potatoes while you fry. You are done. There is no prep, you have made 1 easily washed pan and bowl for potatoes and your plate.
Is it the exact same thing taste-wise as your fast food meal? No, the potatoes aren't fried, sorry. Does it hit all the macro nutrients for far cheaper, and probably less time than even going to the fast food place? Yes.
Tots > Fries
So $1.30 if you buy the food yourself and make it all at home from scratch. Add $.70 for a cheap toy and you have a happy meal (McDonald's buys toys in bulk - you can't get toys for that price unless you are buying thousands)
Above prices are what I'd pay at my local higher priced grocery store online - I can get better deals at other stores but they don't have a good online prices to look up.
Most of the toys these days are cards, but you don't need to buy in that much bulk: https://www.orientaltrading.com/toys-games-and-novelties/nov...
The first one has 144 mini skateboards for 20 cents each.
Right, because people who don't have money/time to cook real food are definitely doing that. Besides, deep frying is not the only way to cook potatoes.
To your second point: This is where exact apples to apples comparison breaks down. The sane home cook skips deep frying at home and associated hassles unless it's a special occasion. Microwave the potatoes or boil. Fast, minimal cleanup, and now it isn't junk food either.
It takes me about 7 minutes to fry a hamburger patty on my Griddle (to rare!), ignoring the heat-up time and clean-up time. The actual cooking is quite fast. On the other hand, I can end up waiting an hour in line at In-and-Out. So while I agree that it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, the economics articles I've seen that compare bsed on fully loaded costs (to the best that they can) seem to conclude that fast food can be about 10-20% cheaper than grocery.
well, akshually... https://www.fda.gov/food/process-contaminants-food/acrylamid...
however the main concern with fried potatoes is cardiovascular, not cancerogenic.
The story of frying and cardio is still ongoing; I've seen several full reversals in the public health field over the past 30 years. It's really painful being a quantitative physical biologist watching the press around papers that when carefully inspected provide little to no evidence supporting their position.
If you're feeding one person, I don't know that it's that much cheaper to get stuff from the grocery store compared to just eating Taco Bell every day. If you're feeding 5-6 people, it's absolutely cheaper; I can make two large pizzas at home to feed 6 people for like $8.
Also, where are you finding $3 Happy Meals in the US?
[1] Probably not literally true, but more or less how I think about it.
For example, I don’t buy milk anymore since I do not remember the last time I have finished a carton. I keep some powdered stuff around because I sometimes use it for cooking, but I don’t buy liquid milk anymore. If I did need liquid milk, I would probably end up buying the smallest quantity of milk available to minimize waste, but they would probably be a much higher per-ounce cost.
That’s what I mean about it scaling logarithmically. If you can buy a higher quantity the prices get much cheaper.
My point was that there’s some items that would either lead to waste, or they gotta buy such a small quantity of it that the rate is bad.
Not anymore. I just checked, a hamburger happy meal at the McD's nearest to my house (i.e. not an abnormally expensive location such as an airport) is $4.49. Extra $0.20 to add cheese. This is for a 1/10 lb hamburger (!). As others have pointed out, I think it's very possible to acquire the ingredients for this for less than that, assuming you can buy enough for 3-4 at once.
I don’t think you can make that assumption. For someone living alone, that burger from McD’s may well be cheaper than the equivalent made from supermarket ingredients. When I used to live alone, I stopped buying salad ingredients because they would usually go off in the fridge before I used them all. It was cheaper to eat out.
Frozen pizzas can be had for as low as like $3.50 if you get them on sale, and since they keep forever in the freezer there's no reason not to stock up at that point...
I lived not-quite-exclusively on frozen pizza when I lived alone for about a year. It wasn't healthy for me, but it was pretty cheap living, at least in the short term.
So yeah, usually I’d buy salad ingredients, make one salad (or veggie sandwich or something). Then a week later I would take a look in the fridge and notice my ingredients had gone bad. I did this several times before I gave up.
It’s still pretty cheap if you get whatever’s the best option from the deals and freebies they offer in the app, rather than buying whatever you want off the menu.
Yes, I used their app. I have kids so I know happy meals used to be crazy cheap. They've gone up substantially in price in the past 3 years.
We used to get McDonald's once in a while as a quick, cheap meal that our kids liked. At some point within the past year or so I realized that it's not actually cheap anymore - I think they've raised their prices more than many competitors. IMO, they are now roughly at the same prices as some much more appealing options, so we don't really go there anymore.
I see a lot of single-happy-meal deals, but few for multiple, so that’s kinda been our go-to instead. Gotta go with what the app wants you to get. I much preferred when the menu prices were just pretty-good all the time…
As noted elsewhere, I’m an empty nester. Cooking for two adults, both of whom are athletic and celiac, so my perception of what’s cheap is WAY skewed. We eat lots of fish, chicken, and fresh produce.
It often is. I can get a burger and fries at McDonalds for far less than the cost in ingredients to make it myself.
Can a particular fast food meal be cheaper than some similar grocery store meal? Yes.
Is a fast food meal cheaper that the maximum cheapness calories per dollar than everything you can get at a grocery store? No.
Will people who hear it hear the second or the first?
Definitely unambiguously the first unless they're the ones trying to "well acshually" it. At the point of the second you're not even talking about burgers - the maximum cheapness calories per dollar is a five gallon jug of corn syrup or something.
It boggles my mind anyone can think that fast food is cheaper than grocery store food for the dollar. Its basically on the level of flat earthers to me.
Buy a big package of hamburger buns and put it in the freezer if you must; it'll be fine for a while there. Thaw as you go when you want a burger: bread thaws in no time. Buy a large package of ground beef, super cheap, and segment it, re-wrap it, freeze it in amounts you know you will use when it is thawed. Want a burg? Water-thaw the meat, air-thaw the bun. Pickles are pickles and are always ready. Pre-made condiments last forever. Pull from your evolving collection of veggies OR make sure you swiped some toms and lettuce or whatever on your way home along with other ingredients for further meals because that's called planning ahead.
There, cheapest burgers you can possibly have, and better than fankenfood. It's just... organization.
But, in no case would I say it costs more than $3.50 to make a quarter pounder with cheese at home. I'm also assuming the ingredients McDonald's uses are not better than even the cheapest ingredients for sale at an okay grocery store, so I'm just giving them that advantage to make it possible to compare.
The current price of a quarter pounder with cheese at McDonald's looks to be $6.22[1]. So, let's call it twice as expensive.
I didn't even bother estimating the cost of making french fries after that, since there's no way they make up the difference.
[1]https://mcdonaldsprices.com/mcdonalds-prices/
I do not, for the record, doubt that some menu items at McDonald's cost less for them to produce and sell than the equivalent would cost to make at home. I would be VERY surprised if it cost less in the long run to buy all your meals at McDonald's versus making food yourself at home. Even buying ingredients in bulk, McDonald's does have a lot of overhead to pay for and profit to make.