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Comment by delichon | Hacker News Reader

You can remove "fast-" from the headline and the first sentence is still true, but it's hard not to justify the expense of eating at all. I tend to go multiple years between eating at a restaurant of any kind, and buy my food in grocery stores. But I still feel the sticker shock. Eggs, beef, fish are particularly outrageous, but the large price increases are everywhere. It's cliche to notice how much a few bags of groceries costs now but when I'm walking out of the store with two small bags for $200+, I notice.

So when you abandon fast food and change to preparing your own, it will help but less than you might hope.

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> but when I'm walking out of the store with two small bags for $200+, I notice.

I do all of the shopping and cooking for my family. I understand your general point, but I’m having a very difficult time understanding how you could get to a $200 bill with “two small bags”. I don’t think I could get there without loading up on expensive steaks and seafood.

I normally purchase a lot of vegetables and fruits and some meat. There’s no way I could get to $200 total with a number of bags I could carry in my hands, even in a HCOL area.

I'm carnivore. Medium priced meats: chuck roasts, beef shank, salmon, chicken thighs. Butter, eggs. Huge supermarket chain in a small town. That market basket has particularly inflated. I buy most meat in bulk and I'm back to buying at the grocery after half a year of eating a single cow and a lamb, so a lot of it hit me at once.

> I'm carnivore

This is your issue. You’re an omnivore, and it sounds like you’re overemphasizing meat. Buying primarily plant-based items will greatly cut down your grocery bill, and hopefully introduce you to some delicious new recipes on the process.

I’d recommend checking out Greek, Italian, Indian, Japanese, and Ethiopian recipes for some extraordinarily flavorful and filling vegetable-heavy meals that are relatively cheap. With Japanese, focus on buying tofu rather than meat since its cost should be generally cheaper.

I was omnivore for fifty years plus, vegetarian for several years, and even raw vegan for a while. But gastro issues made me go low residue and diabetes made me go low carb. Carnivore is what's left. Though I've been coerced into it, it has increased my healthspan a good bit.

Tofu is on the low side of carbs and fiber for plant food, but I believe that the fat and protein profiles and nutrient availability are better from meat.

The point is cost of his diet has gone up, which happens with meats - immigration has permenantly driven up up cost of many offcuts because now they're used in more recipes now. But still pretty telling when "medium" cuts prices are going through the roof. There's still "economical" carnivore diets considering how much industry is subsidized, not as economical as just hammering beans, but if one eats a lot of meat, one notices.

>So when you abandon fast food and change to preparing your own, it will help some but less than you might hope.

While true, there are many people who cannot do this because they work 16+ hours per day. And if they have children it is even more difficult.

To me, this points to the fact people in the US are not being paid a "living" wage. I even heard Walmart will help new employees apply for food stamps, that is sick because we are subsidizing the owners of Walmart and their stockholders.

1. who are these people working 16+ hours a day?

2. let's say these 16+ hours workers were the only ones justified eating ready meals, would the industry survive?

If you pay a “living” wage, prices of goods will go up, and soon it will no longer be a “living” wage.

That depends on what "living wage" actually means.

What you describe is one of my concerns with UBI, but the devil is very much in the detail.

I don't think there's a linear scaling — unless you think somehow wages are the only expense for companies like Walmart.

There is also land and capital, of course, but it is not very often that the landlords don't also want a raise when labor starts making more money. That is their living, after all. For all intents and purposes there is only labor.

Granted, you can often play political games with labor, such as only raising the wages of workers in the USA, while leaving the labor making the plastic trinkets in who knows what third-world country to continue to struggle. In that sense, it doesn't necessarily happen linearly. Not really achieving the goal of a "living" wage then, though.

This entire discussion is about the price of goods going up even though people aren't being paid a living wage, so I'm not sure what argument you're making.

I don't see how going to a fast food place saves you time: it takes significant time going to the fast food place, waiting in line, driving home. And at home you can multi-task--while waiting for the food to cook you can put the laundry in the washing machine, sweep the floor...large numbers of household tasks.

The actual situation. I have just picked up my child from wherever they are and I'm bring them home. I can either spend upwards of an hour cooking or I can stop at a fast food restaurant in the drive through and get food immediately with no effort on my part physical or mental.

Who is waiting while food cooks? When I cook I am attending to the food the entire time. Perhaps if you are a heavy oven user you get time to do other things, but otherwise, no.

And laundry lol. To barely keep up with the laundry, I have to do a load a day and the on the weekend I do several loads. It wasn't like this before I had a kid, but everything grt dirt faster and more often with a child around.

Being a parent who works is _exhausting_. You're always weighing money vs time investment. In many cases it's just easier to buy food you don't have to make or think about then have to do the whole rigamole of planning and buying groceries and then cooking the food yourself. If you're like me and you order a head via an app, you don't even have to wait the few minutes fast food takes. It's right there for you and you carry on your way. I can now spend my mental energy on something else.

> Who is waiting while food cooks? When I cook I am attending to the food the entire time. Perhaps if you are a heavy oven user you get time to do other things, but otherwise, no.

Long long ago I had a neighbour who cooked ONE day per month and froze everything. He printed out a menu card for himself with 3 and 4 course meals. He used a table cloth with the fine silver utensils and fancy plates. He would sit himself down, look at the menu, pick something then move the food from the freezer to the microwave. It looked like a high end restaurant. His argument was that he hated cooking and didn't want to spend any time on it.

The house had a shared kitchen. The one day he cooked was hilarious. He cooked for 40-50 people (inc guests), made various kinds of soup, all kinds of meat, pastas, curries, deserts etc

He one time pondered buying a rice cooker to make better rice but decided it was to much like cooking.

The food went in plastic bags in containers, when frozen he would pull it out of the container to save space and avoid having to wash the containers.

I also know people who eat together. They have no further relationship. They take turns cooking. Small groups like 3 or 4 but also larger ones like 6 or 8 people. You do need space for that ofc.

If you really attend to the food for an hour it is probably a more nutritious and more sophisticated meal than the fast food? How much money are you saving in that hour?

Parenting is just hard work. I'm afraid it includes teaching how to cook.

By the time I pick my kids up from preK and kinder, it’s 5:00pm. Swinging by the drive though, I can have the kids in chairs eating by 5:20. Cooking a dead simple meal like spaghetti, we’re not eating until closer to 5:45, because of overhead in getting everyone in the house and situated to where I can focus on cooking while they play. It’s even worse if they have bad days, we’re eating closer to 6:00pm.

Nothing wrong with eating later, in fact we prefer it because fast food is kinda crap and I don’t really like them eating processed foods. But it definitely saves time, not to mention on the cleanup side too.

And no, can’t really multitask during the weekdays because the timing is so tight. I can do dishes as I go but that’s the limit because the kids start screaming at each other that their feet are touching or whatever the drama of the day is…

Yes and saving that time means there's more time to go to the park or the store on the way home, etc. without having to get everybody ready to go out again.

Also my kids are picky eaters (autism) so it's not like we only have to make one delicious and nutritious meal for everybody. It's more like two or three different meals, or my wife and I have to settle for buttered noodles or what have you. Eating out lets us get a different meal for each person and there's still a chance of the adults being able to eat something delicious and/or nutritious. Or we can get take-out for the kids and make our own dinner or vice-versa.

Dont forget to tip your grocery store shelf stocker.

In a wealthy first world country, it's very difficult to pay a living wage while also keeping prices low. Prices of things we buy are very sensitive to labor costs, so low income earners find themselves on a treadmill where their wage increases get eaten up quickly by cost increases.

The solution would be something like wage crush from the top. The mass of this change wouldn't come from billionaires or the 1%, they are a drop in the bucket compared to the 50-90%.

There are tons of "average" people who got absolutely stacked in the last 5 years. Especially here on HN. They won't raise their hand, it's pretty taboo in this environment, but consumer spending and unrelenting housing prices make it very clear which social classes are fucked and which ones are richer than ever. And it's not billionaires and everyone else.

> In a wealthy first world country, it's very difficult to pay a living wage while also keeping prices low.

Is this true? I have repeatedly come across people saying tipping in North America is insane since in most of the rest of the world it isn’t required because restaurants pay living wages to start, and the pricing is on par or less than in North America.

You have to look at exchange rates and relative incomes if you’re comparing US to Europe. (And a service fee is often tacked on in the UK for table service so it’s not unique to the U.)

Essentially any personal service is pretty expensive even for someone of above or even well above average income. Non-dedicated services such as Uber or a car to the airport are certainly more manageable than a private driver just as a restaurant is more manageable than a personal chef.

But anything along these lines is still relatively expensive.

> While true, there are many people who cannot do this because they work 16+ hours per day. And if they have children it is even more difficult.

Whenever I read these comments I feel like people either grew up in an alternate reality than I did, or they get their perception of poor people from the hyperbole on Reddit.

People who grew up in poverty and work two full time jobs aren’t the ones feeding their families with fast food for 2-3 meals per day. They’re the ones who are experts at cheap cooking, crockpot meals, and cheap meals at home.

Reading comments like this that hit a checklist of cliche bullet points (being “forced” to feed your family with fast food, parent who works 16+ hour days, using Walmart as the canonical American job, mentioning the anecdote about Walmart instructing people about how to apply for assistance) I suspect the experience is more of a conglomeration of talking points from politicians and Reddit rather than real experience.

People who work 16 hours a day were never eating fast food. They were cooking fast and cheap meals at home

> I tend to go multiple years between eating at a restaurant of any kind

Man, not to derail from the topic, but it never ceases to amaze me how varied our lifestyles can be. My wife and I have always loved going out to eat at restaurants, it would be a strange week where we didn't go out at least once.

Going years between restaurants, including fast food, is pretty extreme. But if I leave out travel, eating even takeout is a maybe a twice a month sort of thing. I could certainly afford to do so more often but I mostly can’t be bothered and there aren’t a lot of great options around where I live and plenty of options to prepare a 20 minute meal at home.

When I grew up in the 80s in a typical middle class suburban family, restaurants were a real rare treat. Like something you did maybe once a year or so on birthdays or very special occasions. I've got to believe this whole "restaurant for lunch every day and for dinner twice a week" practice is relatively recent, and maybe limited to cities, at least in the USA (not sure about other countries).

As for my family, we've basically stopped going. It's just gotten ridiculous. The various hidden service charges, and tipping which has gotten way out of control (like really? you expect 25% for bringing me a microwaved Sysco meal?). $100 used to get you an amazing meal/experience for two, like something worthy of an Anniversary. Today, after all the taxes, tips, and fees, you can easily drop that for a mediocre Olive Garden "experience".

I've gone years without watching a movie.

The mainstream just hasn't caught up to the varied choices the world offers to individuals now, and that makes the bell curve seem a lot more flat than it actually is.

And what percentage of the US population has read a book in the past year? In the past 3 years? And what percentage can’t imagine not having access to live TV in some manner?

I’m sure a lot of people have behaviors that are totally alien to a large group.

We could expand that to other activities that I imagine a large segment of the population has never gone to.

Not all food. Bananas are the same price they've always been, for example. Store brands have inflated less than name brands. Mom and Pop restaurants have inflated a lot less than chains and can now be cheaper than McDonald's.

In Canada bananas were $0.33/lb for the longest time. In the last two years they have gone to $0.69 - $0.89/lb.

It's been at least a decade since I've seen 33 cent bananas.

> the large price increases are everywhere

That was the case for a while, but hasn't been for quite a while in the US. Food at home has been one of the factors bringing down the inflation rate for more than a year. The most recent data release shows only a 1.2% increase in the last year. It's true that food at home has risen by 25% since the start of the pandemic, but that was driven by what happened in 2021 and 2022.

Inflation on food away from home has come down quite a bit as well, but its inflation rate is still above 4%. At "limited service" food establishments (fast food), the inflation rate is well above 5%.

One can make nutritious under $4/meal on organic WholeFood prices when sticking to raw materials, i.e. not prepared foods. Those with access to a yard in the right climates can improve on that with some garden beds (herbs & leafy greens have a good return). So I think that really depends on what you're purchasing at the store.

Fast food chains have the benefit of scale but they still have margins to make. That food is rarely healthy so you're also increasing your long term healthcare costs by going that route.

I believe that a major issue here is that many of the younger people in the US haven't gained the skills to cook for themselves. With those skills comes efficiency and the ability to reduce waste. For those working low wage jobs (of which I was for about a decade), time spent on cooking has a higher value than say a knowledge worker who can pick up some contract work on upwork.

I feel we've grown far too used to cheap food in the US. Particularly meat which relies on consolidation into large operations that require antibiotic use, cheap labor in poor conditions, and questionable practices in processing and livestock welfare. So yeah, perhaps that happy meal should cost more?

> One can make nutritious under $4/meal on organic WholeFood prices when sticking to raw materials, i.e. not prepared foods. Those with access to a yard in the right climates can improve on that with some garden beds (herbs & leafy greens have a good return)

I agree that cooking can be done cheaply, but I never recommend gardening as a way to get cheaper food. I say this as someone who gardens a lot and enjoys it.

Gardening is fun if you enjoy it, but it’s not a realistic option for lowering food prices. It’s definitely not a solution to high food prices. It’s a hobby.

But you’re right: Even shopping at Whole Foods in a HCOL area it’s trivially easy to prepare reasonably priced meals. I don’t understand what some of these commenters are buying with claims of $200 for “two small bags” of groceries. I don’t think I could accomplish that without loading up on expensive beef, cheeses, and seafood.

> Gardening is fun if you enjoy it, but it’s not a realistic option for lowering food prices. It’s definitely not a solution to high food prices. It’s a hobby.

Agreed, it's not a solution. But if one is buying rosemary, thyme, basil at the store those kinds of things are priced high and are very cost effective / low maintenance to grow. If one is really just getting by these aren't things to reach for but for a middle class family trying to save some money it's kind of a no brainer if they purchase them regularly.

It's the same for food prep. For some items the time to prepare doesn't offset the cost of buying the prepared item so you really only gain better nutrition or flavor. Other things, say granola, stock, dressings/sauces almost always give you a tastier, healthier product for cheaper.

As you mentioned in your other comment these kinds of things are skills that lower income families tend to have / gain. It just seems that it's becoming increasingly less common.

I wonder if it's a recent phenomenon starting with the millennials growing up in higher standard of living households where those skills weren't really needed as much and now they've gone and moved out into an economy that's far less forgiving.

As someone who grows some herbs in pots, the people being discussed on this thread aren’t going to get vapors usin a jar of dried herbs that will last for a while. Admittedly you really need fresh basil for certain things but never had enough luck growing it to do more than stick a leaf or two on something for an accent. And gardening sure doesn’t cure a not enough time to cook problem.

I think there's two groups being discussed in this thread.

The ones walking out of the grocery store with $200 in groceries that fit in two bags. And families with low wages. The former is more likely to benefit from growing herbs and leafy vegetables as they are more likely to use them. Dried herbs can be pretty expensive as well.

But yeah, I only had one sentence about gardening in my original comment. Didn't mean to emphasize that as a groundbreaking differentiator in saving money on food.

> it will help some but less than you might hope

That sounds odd, do you buy particularly expensive ingredients? I'm not in the US, but I prep my own meals with average quality ingredients. Not accounting for the extra time that it takes (which amortizes well with meal prep), I probably spend between 1/4th and 1/3rd as much as I would spend if I were to eat a similar meal at a restaurant.

> That sounds odd, do you buy particularly expensive ingredients?

Yes. Far more expensive than the cheap ingredients like the flours and oils of fast food. I focus on making my food as nutritionally dense as possible, which ain't cheap. But I ate a lot more than my share of fast-food first and did a lot of damage with it. I'm positive I'd be dead if I didn't change. That would certainly be a lot cheaper.

Agree. I don't tip myself. And abundant portions at home are easy left-overs. And often the ingredients are not completely consumed by one meal and so amortize across a number of meals.

I think if you run the real numbers, eating at home is still a huge savings. And this allowing that you are probably using higher quality ingredients.

I agree with your assessment of walking out of a grocery store with two bags costing ~$200. I went to Canada to see the eclipse and was absolutely shocked how cheap it was to go to the grocery store. Not only was the currency conversion in my favor, the prices were reasonable and aligned to what I remember from pre-pandemic times. $200 Canadian had a completely full cart. Americans are absolutely being price-gouged.

> $200 Canadian had a completely full cart. Americans are absolutely being price-gouged.

This is baffling for two reasons:

1. Canada currently has massive inflation problems. Housing prices are out of control. Groceries are expensive. Maybe you went to a small town somewhere and shopped as cheaply as possible, but your experience isn’t common.

1. I go to Costco in the US every week and fill the massive cart (bigger than your grocery store cart) for around $200. If you can’t fill a normal grocery store cart for $200 then you’re either in an extremely HCOL area or you’re shopping for expensive things.

> Canada currently has massive inflation problems.

When you break down CPI, the inflation is almost entirely on the back of rising mortgage interest costs. Canada has been within the inflation target for at least a year now if you exclude mortgage interest.

That said, even including mortgage interest, the current rate is 2.9%. That's not exactly a massive problem. That's pretty close to what the BoC is looking for

> Housing prices are out of control.

Price of rent, maybe. For buyers, the housing market crashed in 2022. Affording a home for the Average Joe hasn't gotten any easier due to higher interest rates (see the part about CPI), of course, but that's not the price of housing.

> Maybe you went to a small town somewhere

Groceries in small town Canada tend to be more expensive.

> When you break down CPI, the inflation is almost entirely on the back of rising mortgage interest costs.

This is only true recently as the interest rate hikes took a while to filter down to actual mortgages and then make it into the CPI numbers. Prior to that, groceries were a huge component of inflation.

> This is only true recently

Recently, as in within the last year, as I said.

> Prior to that, groceries were a huge component of inflation.

Years ago, sure. That whole war in Ukraine thing, coupled with the EU shutting down fertilizer plants in 2021, along with some devastating weather in the US breadbasket and an ounce of COVID-19 sent the food industry into a complete tizzy, indeed. As a Canadian farmer, the price I was being paid for food had doubled by 2022 as compared to 2019. But it was short-lived. Things are pretty much back to normal now and have been for a while. The farm gate price has returned to 2019 levels (in nominal dollars). There isn't any remaining pressure on groceries. "Currently" is what was specified in the original comment.

Yes, if you have American dollars everything in Canada is cheap. Not so if you are a Canadian.

> I went to Canada to see the eclipse and was absolutely shocked how cheap it was to go to the grocery store. Not only was the currency conversion in my favor, the prices were reasonable and aligned to what I remember from pre-pandemic times. $200 Canadian had a completely full cart.

Wait, what? As a Canadian I can assure you this is not the case. It is so much different than what you are saying that our generally passive population has undertaken a month long boycott of our largest grocer to protest the outrageous pricing. When I see American prices on social media, I am shocked at how much cheaper prices are, even with currency conversion.

I’d love to know what you thought was cheaper.

Eggs are $2 a dozen near me and frequently go on sale, I dont understand the complaints. Meat went crazy though for sure.

I just checked at the egg section of my usual supermarket. The cheapest dozen was $4.50 with the loyalty card and $4.99 without.

Long term it will help. Those bypass surgeries aren't cheap

It isn't just food, it is everything.

And the "excess savings" in the US economy due to the pandemic are gone, inflation has eaten them all up.

Combine that with high interest rates and I don't see how we avoid a fairly severe recession.

Inflation, plus a pinch of good old corporate greed. In europe most money since first covid came lost at least 20% of its value (so if somebody claims their property gained cca same amount of worth, it just kept its value). Holding money really seems to be most stupid thing to do with them.

Big retail chains were making record profits, raised prices, offloaded most of risk elsewhere, and didnt correct once covid became another meh.

You can add travel cost there, folks went mental with traveling after restrictions were dropped, and so far dont seem to slow down.

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