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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?
by 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 agoIn 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 agoQuick 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 ago2 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.
- anon291 3y agoHe's the young man who doesn't cook for a family I was talking about I'm guessing.
- alistairSH 3y agoMy kid is 30. But yeah I’m cooking for two, not four or five.
- afavour 3y ago> 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.
- opprobium 3y agoWhen I say "cooking from scratch", I specifically mean the super fast and easy stuff. Starting from raw materials doesn't mean you do anything complicated to it. 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.
- djbusby 3y agoBag o'tots and an air fryer solves the "no fries" problem. Tots > Fries
- int_19h 3y agoIt does, but that is a highly subjective value that depends on the person in question. You can't just plug in the average wage for someone doing cooking for a living and assume it's meaningful. And you especially can't do that while running a clickbait headline that just straight up says fast food is cheaper without also explicitly and prominently explaining this caveat.
- anon291 3y agoI would download the safeway app. Hamburger buns are $1 usually. Ground beef is $0.99/lb. 10 lbs of russett potatoes makes way more than 8 happy meals. frozen orange juice is like $1 each. This is insanity, and exactly expresses my point above. And if you go to a food bank, it's all free. Most are throwing away entire grocery stores worth of food.
- bluGill 3y agoMcDondalds Hamburgers have always been 100% ground beef. The hamburger in a happy meal is 1/10th a pound 80% ground beef. So about $0.55 worth of ground beef; the bun is $.33, pickle, onion, ketchup, and mustard - $.05 (probably less but I don't know how to calculate), cheese $.15 (I can't find how many slices are in a large block so I estimated). Potato $.25 (again I'm not sure how many potatoes in a fry but this seems right). Soda - $.01 sugar/flavor, $.05 ice (they are selling Coke products not making the soda directly but even still $.10 is about all soda costs in bulk). 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.
- anon291 3y ago> 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) 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/novelty-toys/new-a1-550209+16-1.fltr https://www.orientaltrading.com/toys-games-and-novelties/nov... The first one has 144 mini skateboards for 20 cents each.
- dekhn 3y agoWhat about if you add the following: the cost of the time spent preparing the meal. And the cost (mostly time) associated with cleanup- such as driving that leftover oil to the recycling center.
- tombert 3y agoI feel like the price of restaurant dining scales linearly to the number of people you're feeding, while cooking at home scales more logarithmically. [1] 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.
- School-Cotton 3y agoIf you can make feed N people for X, the only reason you can't feed one person for X/N is if you're buying too much of things and throwing them away because they go bad. This can be mitigated by freezing things, accepting eating leftovers repeatedly, making smaller quantities, etc., although indeed it's more difficult.
- tombert 3y agoYeah but if you have stuff that isn’t freezable, even if you’re ok with eating leftovers, you end up having to buy smaller quantities of stuff else you risk stuff going bad before you eat it. Smaller quantities tend to be more expensive. 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.
- selimthegrim 3y agoYou can always buy evaporated milk
- mhb 3y ago
- dave78 3y ago> A Happy Meal is frequently sold for $3. 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.
- josephg 3y ago> 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.
- tombert 3y agoI think that's partly why stuff like frozen pizza is kind of a meme with single people. Stuff in the freezer can generally keep for years before it really has anything off with it, and even after it starts getting a bit off, it's probably still not going to kill you. 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.
- valicord 3y agoMost fresh ingredients last at least a week. What kind of salads are you making that a single person can't finish before they go off?
- josephg 3y agoI was out a lot anyway - lunch with work, dinner with friends, weekend catchups with family and so on. When you live alone, you need to leave the house to socialise. I was only home for meals a few times a week. And I didn’t want salad every time I made food for myself. 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.