4 ms·

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

by 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.
opprobium 3y ago
This simply isn't true and you should cite some source for this "known fact". It seems to be a "known fact" passed around by people who "don't know how much anything costs at a grocery store." Example: A quarter lb with cheese at McD Average price at a US McDonald's, $6.65: https://www.fastfoodmenuprices.com/how-much-mcdonalds-quarter-pounder/ 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/chart-detail/?chartId=106792 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.
- dekhn 3y ago
  I mean it's a known fact in that there are published articles that calculate the fully loaded cost of a (the most discounted) fast-food meal and compare it to the fully loaded cost of buying ingredients and preparing it. 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.
WheatMillington 3y ago
I can't speak for every market, but that's absolutely not true in New Zealand. Like... not even close. For the price of one portion of ood at McD's you could make the meal for an entire family.
lightedman 3y ago
"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'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.
resource_waste 3y ago
WELL AKTUALLY look at the website Efficiency Is Everything. Your 'factually verified' has been debunked in like 100 different fast food studies.

by dekhn 3y ago

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.

opprobium 3y ago

This simply isn't true and you should cite some source for this "known fact". It seems to be a "known fact" passed around by people who "don't know how much anything costs at a grocery store." Example: A quarter lb with cheese at McD Average price at a US McDonald's, $6.65: https://www.fastfoodmenuprices.com/how-much-mcdonalds-quarter-pounder/ 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/chart-detail/?chartId=106792 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.

dekhn 3y ago
I mean it's a known fact in that there are published articles that calculate the fully loaded cost of a (the most discounted) fast-food meal and compare it to the fully loaded cost of buying ingredients and preparing it. 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.

WheatMillington 3y ago

I can't speak for every market, but that's absolutely not true in New Zealand. Like... not even close. For the price of one portion of ood at McD's you could make the meal for an entire family.

lightedman 3y ago

"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'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.

resource_waste 3y ago

WELL AKTUALLY look at the website Efficiency Is Everything. Your 'factually verified' has been debunked in like 100 different fast food studies.