Immediate reaction: "Luxury"? Have they ever tasted Fast Food?
However, fast food has gotten mighty expensive in the past few years ($10+ for a combo meal feels obscene), and so I’m finding myself getting grab-and-go items like Lunchables at the grocery store instead of stopping at a fast food restaurant. Sometimes when I feel like spending more money, I prefer going to a sit-down restaurant where paying a few dollars more buys a better meal.
It consisted of a small, spongy sandwich, called a "McGriddle", which I will never order again; a single potato-patty "hash brown" thing; and a small black coffee.
This cost $14.
Surely I will continue to make other mistakes in my life, but this is one I can avoid in future.
But I think they mean "luxury" as in "optional" rather than "luxurious".
I had a Burger King gift card in my wallet when I arrived at the PATH terminal at the World Trace Center and after I walked out of the Oculus I saw a CHOPT salad restaurant across the street and a BK across the corner. BK was crowded inside and was emitting greasy fumes I could smell outside.
My calculation was that it could take most of 30 minutes to wait in line and get my food at the BK, at the CHOPT I punched my order into a tablet and had it in 3 minutes.
I worked at BK in the late 1980s and there they would try to have burgers ready in the steam tray and on the heat chute before you ordered them so you really could get it fast. Fast food restaurants don’t seem to do this anymore.
My favorite "fast food" place is an 8-decade-old neighborhood ice cream shop. They have a variety of good sandwiches in their refrigerator case, ready to grab & go. And none of 'em have the "opps, am I eating the wrapper?" chemo-plastic taste or mouth feel of modern fast food.
And maybe workers on harder-to-fill shifts get to take a few would-be-donated burgers home every day, too.
Burgers could sit in either the heat chute or the steam tray for 10 minutes and we were supposed to throw them out if they went over that limit. Under normal conditions we didn’t throw a lot of them out but we would go to a purely on demand model on Sunday afternoons when we could sometimes go 20 minutes between customers.
It's very distasteful to hit down
To clarify, the reason that I am surprised that my comment was taken this way is because very poor people often eat fast food out of necessity. For them, it's not a luxury at all.
In any case, it certainly wasn't an intentional insult or anything. I wasn't even talking about poor people at all.
$10 for a burger and fries isn't accessible for many.
The problem is if it's the tasty the right way it is expensive, and if it is the bad kind of tasty it's unhealthy.