12 ms·

One time they said that fast food was cheaper than grocery food. It was so wrong, that I never listened to NPR since.

krapp 3y ago
> One time they said that fast food was cheaper than grocery food. It often is. I can get a burger and fries at McDonalds for far less than the cost in ingredients to make it myself.
- tekla 3y ago
  You must be the type to buy ingredients in units of 1 of each and then complain that its more expensive than buying the fast food meal.
  - krapp 3y ago
    No. I never said I actually made that complaint, because I don't. I was just pointing out that contrary to resource_waste's assertion above, fast food can in fact be less expensive than grocery food. It is not a statement of error so egregious as to be worth writing off the content of an entire media organization.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      It's a statement, that even if you "well acshually" it hard enough to make it work, is still useless. 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?
      - a1369209993 3y ago
        > 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.
    - tekla 3y ago
      Have you literally ever been shopping before that wasn't a Trader Joes or a Whole foods? 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.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - wordsinaline 3y ago
    It's hilarious reading these posters fully convinced fast food is cheaper than cooking at home. Actually no it's sad because it shows the culinary poverty mindset so many people live with. 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.
    - busterarm 3y ago
      Even if you're lazy you can buy frozen Bubba Burgers and it still comes out way cheaper than McD's.
    - lupusreal 3y ago
      And if you're too lazy to do any of that, there are about a million complete meals you could decide on which are both easier and cheaper than making a burger, let alone buying fast food.
- karaterobot 3y ago
  Back of the envelope, using prices from safeway.com (in Seattle) I get the cost of a quarter pound cheeseburger being about $2.60. Significant error bars on that, because it's hard to estimate how much onions and ketchup and mustard McDonald's uses, and I'm estimating on the lettuce and pickle slices. 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/ 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.
alistairSH 3y ago
A Happy Meal is frequently sold for $3. YOu're saying to can buy the raw ingredients for a hamburger, fries, apple slices, and juice box for less?
- anon291 3y ago
  In the sense that a 1lb thing of ground beef plus whatever fillers mcdonalds uses (I believe it's some kind of oatmeal) would probably produce like about 10 happy meals, and a 50lb bag of flour from winco (plus a few tbsp salt and water) would make hundreds of buns, I think you could get it way below $3 / meal. I mean, safeway often has ground beef for a few dollars a pound, that's a lot of happy meals. In reality, these ragebait articles are written by young people (guessing young men) who have no experience cooking for a family.
  - alistairSH 3y ago
    Quick search... $3 for pack of 8 hamburger buns $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.
    - opprobium 3y ago
      2 lb of ground beef is way more beef than a happy meal. A kids meal patty is only 1/10 of a lb, you've given enough for 20 kids meals. 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.
      - 3y ago
dekhn 3y ago
That's factually correct- it is often cheaper to buy the equivalent of a hamburger, fries, and coke at McDonalds, Burger King, or other similar stores, for less than you can buy the ingredients at the supermarket. This is actually a "known thing" which has been factually verified. I wouldn't stop listening over that.
- andrewflnr 3y ago
  That's a silly measure, though, and not what anyone actuallywants to know when deciding their eating habits. What matters is amortized dollars per calorie, or maybe dollars per time period, and grocery shopping easily beats fast food on that.
  - dekhn 3y ago
    the articles I've seen that provide more detailed analysis typically suggest that you can get more "poor quality calories" from fast food. The real challenge here is most comparisons completely ignore prep and cook time as a cost, but that matters a lot for busy parents who don't have time to make the cheapest possible stew out of the cheapest ingredients. 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.
    - astrange 3y ago
      Fast food isn't poor quality depending on what you get. Fries and soda are bad, but cheeseburgers are not particularly unhealthy. They are low fiber.
    - andrewflnr 3y ago
      Prep time is a real concern, but a vastly more complicated one than comparing dollar amounts. Even if you manage to figure out a fixed dollar cost of prep time, most people aren't in a position to directly trade hours between food prep and making money. 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.
mymusewww 3y ago
[dead]
DoreenMichele 3y ago
I've been thinking about this recently and articles that make cost comparisons of that sort tend to compare only the cost of ingredients and assume you have the equipment to cook it, the skills to cook it and that your time is worth zero. 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.
- lupusreal 3y ago
  Even if you limit the consideration to foods that can be eaten as-is with zero preparation or tools, grocery stores still BTFO of fast food. Anybody saying that fast food is cheap is deranged. You want fried chicken and you don't have a kitchen? The grocery store will sell you 2x as much for the same price as a KFC. If you want a sandwich, you can make a dozen for the same price as one from a sandwich shop. If you can stomach the thought of eating something green, the produce aisle is cheap as dirt. It's an internet meme to say that some people can't afford fresh produce. Absolute horse shit. I can buy a bag of carrots with the change I find on the ground walking to the store. Produce is the cheapest food there is. If you think all of that is too boring to tolerate, then scrounge up a can opener and the possibilities explode.
  - DoreenMichele 3y ago
    You're rebutting something I made zero comment on. 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.
gosub100 3y ago
This comment sparked a really good debate - one which I am pretty sure I remember seeing on HN before. But what it makes me think of is seeing the parent issue: that accounting can be abused to spin the truth however you want. I really want to go in the meta direction with this and say I wish accounting shenanigans could be identified and labelled as fallacies or at least sneaky tools used for persuasion, just like people are becoming wise to established fallacies like strawman or relative privation. 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.

> One time they said that fast food was cheaper than grocery food. It often is. I can get a burger and fries at McDonalds for far less than the cost in ingredients to make it myself.

tekla 3y ago
You must be the type to buy ingredients in units of 1 of each and then complain that its more expensive than buying the fast food meal.
- krapp 3y ago
  No. I never said I actually made that complaint, because I don't. I was just pointing out that contrary to resource_waste's assertion above, fast food can in fact be less expensive than grocery food. It is not a statement of error so egregious as to be worth writing off the content of an entire media organization.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    It's a statement, that even if you "well acshually" it hard enough to make it work, is still useless. 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?
    - a1369209993 3y ago
      > 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.
  - tekla 3y ago
    Have you literally ever been shopping before that wasn't a Trader Joes or a Whole foods? 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.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- wordsinaline 3y ago
  It's hilarious reading these posters fully convinced fast food is cheaper than cooking at home. Actually no it's sad because it shows the culinary poverty mindset so many people live with. 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.
  - busterarm 3y ago
    Even if you're lazy you can buy frozen Bubba Burgers and it still comes out way cheaper than McD's.
  - lupusreal 3y ago
    And if you're too lazy to do any of that, there are about a million complete meals you could decide on which are both easier and cheaper than making a burger, let alone buying fast food.
karaterobot 3y ago
Back of the envelope, using prices from safeway.com (in Seattle) I get the cost of a quarter pound cheeseburger being about $2.60. Significant error bars on that, because it's hard to estimate how much onions and ketchup and mustard McDonald's uses, and I'm estimating on the lettuce and pickle slices. 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/ 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.

alistairSH 3y ago

A Happy Meal is frequently sold for $3. YOu're saying to can buy the raw ingredients for a hamburger, fries, apple slices, and juice box for less?

anon291 3y ago
In the sense that a 1lb thing of ground beef plus whatever fillers mcdonalds uses (I believe it's some kind of oatmeal) would probably produce like about 10 happy meals, and a 50lb bag of flour from winco (plus a few tbsp salt and water) would make hundreds of buns, I think you could get it way below $3 / meal. I mean, safeway often has ground beef for a few dollars a pound, that's a lot of happy meals. In reality, these ragebait articles are written by young people (guessing young men) who have no experience cooking for a family.
- alistairSH 3y ago
  Quick search... $3 for pack of 8 hamburger buns $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.
  - opprobium 3y ago
    2 lb of ground beef is way more beef than a happy meal. A kids meal patty is only 1/10 of a lb, you've given enough for 20 kids meals. 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.
    - 3y ago

dekhn 3y ago

That's factually correct- it is often cheaper to buy the equivalent of a hamburger, fries, and coke at McDonalds, Burger King, or other similar stores, for less than you can buy the ingredients at the supermarket. This is actually a "known thing" which has been factually verified. I wouldn't stop listening over that.

andrewflnr 3y ago
That's a silly measure, though, and not what anyone actuallywants to know when deciding their eating habits. What matters is amortized dollars per calorie, or maybe dollars per time period, and grocery shopping easily beats fast food on that.
- dekhn 3y ago
  the articles I've seen that provide more detailed analysis typically suggest that you can get more "poor quality calories" from fast food. The real challenge here is most comparisons completely ignore prep and cook time as a cost, but that matters a lot for busy parents who don't have time to make the cheapest possible stew out of the cheapest ingredients. 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.
  - astrange 3y ago
    Fast food isn't poor quality depending on what you get. Fries and soda are bad, but cheeseburgers are not particularly unhealthy. They are low fiber.
  - andrewflnr 3y ago
    Prep time is a real concern, but a vastly more complicated one than comparing dollar amounts. Even if you manage to figure out a fixed dollar cost of prep time, most people aren't in a position to directly trade hours between food prep and making money. 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.

mymusewww 3y ago

[dead]

DoreenMichele 3y ago

I've been thinking about this recently and articles that make cost comparisons of that sort tend to compare only the cost of ingredients and assume you have the equipment to cook it, the skills to cook it and that your time is worth zero. 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.

lupusreal 3y ago
Even if you limit the consideration to foods that can be eaten as-is with zero preparation or tools, grocery stores still BTFO of fast food. Anybody saying that fast food is cheap is deranged. You want fried chicken and you don't have a kitchen? The grocery store will sell you 2x as much for the same price as a KFC. If you want a sandwich, you can make a dozen for the same price as one from a sandwich shop. If you can stomach the thought of eating something green, the produce aisle is cheap as dirt. It's an internet meme to say that some people can't afford fresh produce. Absolute horse shit. I can buy a bag of carrots with the change I find on the ground walking to the store. Produce is the cheapest food there is. If you think all of that is too boring to tolerate, then scrounge up a can opener and the possibilities explode.
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  You're rebutting something I made zero comment on. 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.

gosub100 3y ago

This comment sparked a really good debate - one which I am pretty sure I remember seeing on HN before. But what it makes me think of is seeing the parent issue: that accounting can be abused to spin the truth however you want. I really want to go in the meta direction with this and say I wish accounting shenanigans could be identified and labelled as fallacies or at least sneaky tools used for persuasion, just like people are becoming wise to established fallacies like strawman or relative privation. 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.