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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 any

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 2y 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.
- opprobium 2y ago
  You can just look at your own grocery store and your local McDs. I also live in CA and for a quarter lb with cheese comparison I looked up: My local McD's: $6.39 My local Safeway (not a budget option, no sales, you can do better than all of this): 1 1/4 lb beef patty $1.69, 1 slice cheddar cheese $0.37, 1 hamburger buns $0.22 = $2.28, misc condiments are negligible but let's say $0.25 total = $2.53 That's less than half the cost. The time and resources cost of frying that patty in a skillet and throwing it on a bun with cheese and ketchup comes nowhere close to doubling that, it's not even close.
  - dekhn 2y ago
    can you add in an estimate of your time spent preparing the food? What about cleanup? It takes me more time to clean my food prep and cook area than actually make food most of the time. And compare that to the time spent waiting in the grocery line/fast food line? What about storage costs- I just threw away a 2-week old pile of nasty ground beef that went bad before we had an opportunity to use it (totally on me, I should have cooked burgers for my kids a couple more nights). That's what I mean by "fully loaded"- when economists compare things like this, they don't just take the published dollar costs in a single location and compare them. They made a best-effort good-faith attempt at considering all the other costs which lead to a consumer making a decision. Also, fast food prices shot up in the past few years, faster than grocery prices. Most of the articles about this were written about 10-15 years ago.
    - opprobium 2y ago
      I used for cost comparison a pre-formed hamburger patty from Safeway. If it takes you more than 10 minutes to pull this from fridge, heat a pan and fry, something is wrong. You put it on a bun and put things on it and you eat it. There is no prep area to clean. Wash a pan and your plate. This isn't even a scaling issue, this is negligible time and cleanup for anywhere 1 to 4 people. This is a real side by side comparison as a McD's quarter lb also has nothing on it requiring prep. I understand what you are trying to say about "fully loaded cost". It's also wrong. The fully loaded cost is still much lower for home vs fast. Unless you insist that you really desire specifically something like deep fried french fries, a specific cooking method that is extremely scalable and well suited to restaurant production and very inconvenient at home. But it is emphatically not true that a meal of similar ingredients/macro nutrition (burger and potato) is in general ever cheaper in fast food form. If you want to promote the myth that fast food is cheaper, you should cite any other source than that you vaguely remember there being articles 10-15 years ago.

dekhn 2y 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.

opprobium 2y ago
You can just look at your own grocery store and your local McDs. I also live in CA and for a quarter lb with cheese comparison I looked up: My local McD's: $6.39 My local Safeway (not a budget option, no sales, you can do better than all of this): 1 1/4 lb beef patty $1.69, 1 slice cheddar cheese $0.37, 1 hamburger buns $0.22 = $2.28, misc condiments are negligible but let's say $0.25 total = $2.53 That's less than half the cost. The time and resources cost of frying that patty in a skillet and throwing it on a bun with cheese and ketchup comes nowhere close to doubling that, it's not even close.
- dekhn 2y ago
  can you add in an estimate of your time spent preparing the food? What about cleanup? It takes me more time to clean my food prep and cook area than actually make food most of the time. And compare that to the time spent waiting in the grocery line/fast food line? What about storage costs- I just threw away a 2-week old pile of nasty ground beef that went bad before we had an opportunity to use it (totally on me, I should have cooked burgers for my kids a couple more nights). That's what I mean by "fully loaded"- when economists compare things like this, they don't just take the published dollar costs in a single location and compare them. They made a best-effort good-faith attempt at considering all the other costs which lead to a consumer making a decision. Also, fast food prices shot up in the past few years, faster than grocery prices. Most of the articles about this were written about 10-15 years ago.
  - opprobium 2y ago
    I used for cost comparison a pre-formed hamburger patty from Safeway. If it takes you more than 10 minutes to pull this from fridge, heat a pan and fry, something is wrong. You put it on a bun and put things on it and you eat it. There is no prep area to clean. Wash a pan and your plate. This isn't even a scaling issue, this is negligible time and cleanup for anywhere 1 to 4 people. This is a real side by side comparison as a McD's quarter lb also has nothing on it requiring prep. I understand what you are trying to say about "fully loaded cost". It's also wrong. The fully loaded cost is still much lower for home vs fast. Unless you insist that you really desire specifically something like deep fried french fries, a specific cooking method that is extremely scalable and well suited to restaurant production and very inconvenient at home. But it is emphatically not true that a meal of similar ingredients/macro nutrition (burger and potato) is in general ever cheaper in fast food form. If you want to promote the myth that fast food is cheaper, you should cite any other source than that you vaguely remember there being articles 10-15 years ago.