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Its a hassle and inconvenient. And you are usually talking about an extra 30 minutes of cooking/cleaning/shopping per meal, so 1.5 hours a day. For the "privilege" of less tasty meals. The cost savings feel minimal on a per meal basis, so it has to be a decision you constantly make to "save" money. I put save in quotations because your time costs money. If you enjoy cooking and dont mind cleaning up its no big deal, but for anyone that doesn't you are basically suggesting minimum wage rates. I can get a salad and a sandwich at a Wendys for less than $20. If I could make that exact same meal for 10$ in just 30 minutes (plus cooking and shopping for ingredients time) I'm basically working at a $20/hour wage.
Certainly poor people can save lots of money over time if they are basically willing to work an extra hour and a half a day, and cut out one of the main enjoyments in life. It also feels insane to me to blame them for not taking that "money-saving" option. They could also just pick up a second wage labor job to make sure they are working 70-80 hours a week. They can make sure to forego an extra hour of sleep a night for any jobs that don't require full wakefulness. They can use a crappy handme down phone and pick the cheapest data plan. They dont need a TV. Instead of a mattress they can just buy a sleeping bag. They can live in an apartment with a few dozen other people instead of paying rent on their own. Actually, they don't really need to pay rent, there are homeless shelters, and I've heard the weather in California is nice this time of year (and any time of year). Or they can always sleep in their car if they really need to even have a car. Or, even better, they can skip all the work. Just commit a crime that is serious enough for some prison time. Doesn't need to be a lot of prison time. Just enough to get in, once you are in you can do additional things to extend your time inside! In prison they provide rooms, food, toilets, showers, doctors, socialization, sunlight. Everything that someone needs to live.
Sorry for the sarcasm, but at some point people need to live. They need to be human. Food is one thing I'm not willing to hold over them and say "no you have to be a profit maximizing robot". I certainly don't follow that standard. My wife and I had our anniversary dinner last year at a really nice restaurant, the bill was around $700. We had a great time, the food was really amazing, the drinks were amazing, the service was great, we spent two and a half hours there.
I don't hold the poor free of all responsibility. I expect them to at least make half decent decisions on drugs, jobs, and location. Avoid drugs, find jobs that pay well for your abilities, and live in an area where you can survive and your children have the possibility to thrive.
I think one big issue is that cooking hot meals only makes economic sense when it’s normally done for 3 or more people.
Nice thing is, those 3 or more people could be the same one person, just time-shifted. Modern food storage technology is basically ubiquitous and relatively cheap, after all.
But that doesn't compare to the experience of a fresh meal.
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If homemade sandwich and salad costs you $10, you’re doing it wrong. When I was young and early in my career I aimed at $3.00 per meal and usually got there. Today it’s more like $6.00.
I handed the question over to Gemini AI.
It came up with $45 minimum for 4 sandwiches and 2 salads from Wendy's. And $30 minimum for buying all the stuff to make it yourself. Let's say that is three meals, and it comes out to $10 for making it yourself or $15 for getting it at Wendy's.
Yes, you can make cheaper meals by cutting corners and having fewer ingredients, but Wendy's could do the same thing! So you've stopped comparing like to like. And that is also part of my whole point that the food served by restaurants is often better.
This also assumes that your time/labor is free. Which is an ok assumption if you like grocery shopping, cooking, and cleaning. But most people don't like all three of those. If you value your time above minimum wage it quickly stops being worth it to cook for yourself.
If you buy ingredients to make sandwiches and salad at a store, you’re getting way more than 3 salads and sandwiches. More like 6-10, depending on the ingredients.
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A meal costing less than $10 isn't "cutting corners," I think we're running into some serious clashes of socioeconomic status and culture here.
No I think you are missing the whole point of the comparison I'm making.
To compare any meal you can make to a restaurant or fast food meal is not a good comparison. Sure you can make rice, chicken, and pop a vitamin on the side for pretty damn cheap. But its not the fact that you cooked it that is saving you money, its mainly the austerity of the meal itself that is saving you money. This would be like saying "I saved hundreds of dollars each meal, instead of getting a steak at a really good steakhouse, I instead made chicken and rice at home"
To make a fair comparison we need to do either one of two things:
I didn't do the 1st option because it would be completely unfair, and not to me. There are places that serve austerity meals in America: soup kitchens. And they give away the food for free. So obviously home cooking loses on that metric.
I did the second option where you upgrade the home cooked meal to match an option from a place that is just above the bottom tier of food. I like Wendys, so that is what I picked. On this metric home cooking wins if you enjoy shopping, cooking, and cleaning or you work a minimum wage job.
Chicken thigh: $8/bag, let's call it $1.50 for the thigh, there's at least six of them in there. Marinaded with .25¢ worth of Italian dressing and grilled.
Box of smoked gouda mac&cheese (this is real cheese goo, not powder) $2. Add .50¢ for milk, butter, and black pepper to dress it up further.
A bag of frozen brussels sprouts: $1.75
That's $6 for a meal I'd consider excessive and fancy home fare; that mac&cheese could feed two people, it could easily just be noodles with butter and parm for even cheaper. This is hardly rice-and-beans or oliver twist orphan slop.
For another dollar, you could add grilled sweet mini peppers.
Cooking all this is hardly rocket science, if a human can't bother to take the 30 minutes to prepare food for themselves and would rather waddle to the wackarnolds, I don't have much sympathy for their plight.
Or if @cjet79 wants to compare apples to apples, "throw a steak on the grill, baked potato in the miker -- add some sort of bagged salad since you are super-lazy" is about as easy as it gets and is probably better than the fancy steakhouse -- cost-wise I'm gonna say twenty bucks instead of 50+? Throw in a bottle of wine since we are being fancy and it's $30-35 vs $100+
I think this cost model probably works all the way down the chain -- ground beef at... about a dollar for a quarter pound plus one bun and a piece of cheese is a much better burger than McDonalds peddles for five bucks or so?
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What? A pizza for "one" (10 inches) from a chain pizza joint in town is $20 before any delivery fees.
I just checked Dominos and it offered me a 14 inch supreme pizza (named something else) for $20.99, which is twice the size of a 10 inch, and that's without any of the discount offers they usually have.
My local Walgreens regularly sells 10 inch frozen pepperoni pizzas at 2 for $12, so that's still more than 67% more expensive, before taking tips into account. And Walgreens is actually more expensive than Whole Foods which I don't go to as often because it's farther away, where they regularly do 2 for $10.
And that's considering a near-equivalent pre-packaged, ready-to-heat product. The cost savings tend to be far greater if you're willing to start from lower-level ingredients and if you're willing to accept food at merely high-quality, not restaurant-quality (which isn't necessarily high-quality, but certainly has certain qualities that home-cooked meals tend to lack).
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14" Domino's "ultimate pepperoni" is $26 plus $6 delivery to my house.
It's like you live in the third world. Tonight, I had a 16" pepperoni from a local place that was featured by Guy Fieri for $23. 33% bigger, approximately a hundred times tastier, and $3 less.
Ironically, the pizza in the third world is much cheaper.
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