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Notes -
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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