I've been thinking about this recently and articles that make cost comparisons of that sort tend to compare only the cost of ingredients and assume you have the equipment to cook it, the skills to cook it and that your time is worth zero.
I don't know how to come up with good metrics for measuring that but I think currently all such articles are seriously bad because most don't even list their set of implicit assumptions concerning the costs that they are bothering to measure.
Even if you limit the consideration to foods that can be eaten as-is with zero preparation or tools, grocery stores still BTFO of fast food. Anybody saying that fast food is cheap is deranged. You want fried chicken and you don't have a kitchen? The grocery store will sell you 2x as much for the same price as a KFC. If you want a sandwich, you can make a dozen for the same price as one from a sandwich shop. If you can stomach the thought of eating something green, the produce aisle is cheap as dirt. It's an internet meme to say that some people can't afford fresh produce. Absolute horse shit. I can buy a bag of carrots with the change I find on the ground walking to the store. Produce is the cheapest food there is.
If you think all of that is too boring to tolerate, then scrounge up a can opener and the possibilities explode.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
> If it takes you more than 10 minutes to pull this from fridge, heat a pan and fry, something is wrong.
Something is wrong, then, because I have to go all the way back to my place to put it on a bun and put things on it and eat it. I don't have to make that commute with fast food.
You two aren't arguing about which is cheaper; you're arguing about which externalities you're willing to ignore.
Literally not being at home to eat home made food is obviously a case where other factors dominate.
However, I really don't think that's the general case people are thinking of when trying to argue that it makes some kind of economic sense for people to eat a fast food diet. The average person does go home at some point, especially so for families.
Or more specifically, it's the claim "I can't go to the grocery store and make this meal for less than a fast food meal", that is absurd.
Time is lost getting "fast" food too. Like, the time to cook a patty in the skillet is the same time as the time waiting through the drive thru. And now factor in burning fuel.
The patty doesn’t get in my fridge unless I put it there… after I’ve gone grocery shopping and picked it up. On the other hand, I pass McDonald’s everyday on the way home from work anyways.
I worked in kitchens for years so I'm not the average home cook but even so I think if you're finding a two week old pile of ground beef in the fridge that's on you. You might have to accept that you are disorganized. A home refridgerator isn't a big place to point your eyeballs at and assess and marshall ingredients. Aside from that, I mean as far as "prep" goes... I hesitate to even use the word prep. Prepping is usually a term used for something more involved. Like if you were making your own ketchup and mustard from scratch, that would be prep and would take time. If you've just got pre-made ingredients ready to assemble into a dish then that's not really prep.
Hamburgers for a family of five with a counter-top mise en place...
Place five buns opened up on a large cutting board (1 minute tops).
Squirt your bottled condiments on the buns (1 minute tops).
Hand-rip your lettuce, five servings, place on buns (3 minutes tops).
Slice tomato rounds for each burger (3 minutes I guess if your knife skills are really bad).
Take ground beef and hand-form five patties (5 minutes tops).
Cook all five patties at once in a large pan or whatever you use (10 minutes tops - smash them if you want them well done or done fast).
Spatula out the patties onto the buns and you've got burgers.
Shouldn't take more than 20 or so minutes really and I even left the cooking part for last so as to not complicate things. What you should really be doing is cooking the burgers WHILE you set up the buns. Personally I could go from all those ingredients sitting visibly in a fridge to five burgers ready to serve in about 10 minutes.
Maybe what we have here with you and with many others in America is just a lack of food knowledge. Home food culture used to be all there was before fast food. Those traditions are lost and everyone's skill in preparing meals at home as atrophied over decades.
I mean I get that there's no more Nana in the kitchen makin the sauce and both parents work but there's so many easy, quick meals that can be made for very cheap if people simply acquired the knowledge and practiced. You don't wanna eat those fast food patties anyways they're probably like half fake with fraudulent filler material or whatever. It's hard to even recreate that lab-researched frankenfood.
> Maybe what we have here with you and with many others in America is just a lack of food knowledge.
This is exactly what's happening. This is why I find it so upsetting to hear a source like NPR mindlessly repeating the myth that fast food is cheaper. People have gotten totally out of touch with basic home economics type stuff and the food industry is all too happy for them to stay in the dark.
I can do a variation on bolognese sauce with ground beef, a few bits of thin sliced onions and finally a dab of tomato pasta sauce. 15 minutes top and done while the pasta cooks.
Cooking at home is just stupendously cheaper. I don't understand how anyone can claim otherwise. I made the switch 3 years ago and the impact on budget was phenomenal.
McDonald's has moved to a model where you get the app and it has valuable coupons that take like 30% off the price that renew every day. Which is part of why the menu costs have gone up.
Menu cost, I downloaded the app to look up the price, I was not offered a coupon.
But the exact same thing applies to the grocery prices I quoted. I gave the non-sale prices from my area's more expensive grocery store, that's what I consider the starting point, you can definitely do better.
The McDonald’s coupons are always available under a menu in the app. You have to know to look for them though. Might be regional but in my area there’s always a 20% off your whole order coupon plus some others that can do even better.
Not to dispute your point that grocery stores also have a lot of coupons and promotions and it’s definitely cheaper than fast food (also grocery store food has even cheaper options like beans, rice, canned goods etc that may not be equivalent to a fast food meal but are vastly cheaper and may not take any real time or effort to prepare).
I see the 20% in my app, but it is for orders above $10 so may not work for a single sandwich order being discussed above. But for 2 people or more, it could be quite useful. Never used this and not a McD regular, but will remember this next time.
> the articles also include costs to prepare the meal and cleanup
So because a contractor makes 500 an hour every burger they make costs 500 dollars. Yeah that sounds plausible. They should be maximalising their economic output and leaving menial labor to others.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
This comment sparked a really good debate - one which I am pretty sure I remember seeing on HN before. But what it makes me think of is seeing the parent issue: that accounting can be abused to spin the truth however you want. I really want to go in the meta direction with this and say I wish accounting shenanigans could be identified and labelled as fallacies or at least sneaky tools used for persuasion, just like people are becoming wise to established fallacies like strawman or relative privation.
Does it "cost more" based on calories/dollar, or weight of food, or cooked-meals-per-dollar? (I'm not asking for an answer, thats what everyone below your comment has been arguing about I assume). Are cigarettes "just as addictive" as heroin? Well, it depends on how you measure/define _____. I keep seeing effort wasted in arguments that all point back to the "well, it depends on how you measure it", but to me, the arguments never actually get anywhere and nobody seems to realize that they are playing with movable goalposts.
I 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.
If 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.
Yeah 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.
In 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.
$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.
2 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.
When 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.
It 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.
I 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.
McDondalds 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.
> 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)
What 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.
How long do you think it takes to grill a hamburger patty?
To your second point: This is where exact apples to apples comparison breaks down. The sane home cook skips deep frying at home and associated hassles unless it's a special occasion. Microwave the potatoes or boil. Fast, minimal cleanup, and now it isn't junk food either.
Well, I like deep fried potatoes, that's why I included it. I actually do deep fry my potatoes, straining the oil, re-using it, and ultimately recycling it. None of the alternatives are acceptable to me in terms of flavor or texture.
Could you explain in more detail why you think that cooking potatoes not in oil makes it not junk food? (in the sense of, I've looked at a wide range of comparisons and it does not seem like frying in oil magically turns healthy potatoes into cancer daemons).
It takes me about 7 minutes to fry a hamburger patty on my Griddle (to rare!), ignoring the heat-up time and clean-up time. The actual cooking is quite fast. On the other hand, I can end up waiting an hour in line at In-and-Out. So while I agree that it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, the economics articles I've seen that compare bsed on fully loaded costs (to the best that they can) seem to conclude that fast food can be about 10-20% cheaper than grocery.
frying, roasting, and baking all produce acrylamides. There's a paper from sweden that shows you can even find acrylamides in bread that was cooked at standard temp.
The story of frying and cardio is still ongoing; I've seen several full reversals in the public health field over the past 30 years. It's really painful being a quantitative physical biologist watching the press around papers that when carefully inspected provide little to no evidence supporting their position.
> driving that leftover oil to the recycling center.
Right, because people who don't have money/time to cook real food are definitely doing that. Besides, deep frying is not the only way to cook potatoes.
Do you get your McDs delivered to you instantly at no cost? If not, then takes less time to cook than drive to McDonalds, wait in line to make an order and wait for your meal to be cooked.
people trade time for money. Cooking yourself is often a family affair and so a cheap use of the little free time and money a poor person has, it pays back well because a boor person isn't then looking for something else toespendmoney on for entertainment.
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.
You have to use each chain’s app, now, to get what used to be menu prices. They figured out they could raise menu prices a ton and lots of folks would still pay it, while still keeping poor folks paying them money by providing the app option.
It’s still pretty cheap if you get whatever’s the best option from the deals and freebies they offer in the app, rather than buying whatever you want off the menu.
Who you calling poor folks!? I make big-tech SWE money and I never order from McDonalds without using the app. I guess I’d actually call it “price sensitive” vs. “price insensitive” which IMHO has only a moderate correlation with income.
> You have to use each chain’s app, now, to get what used to be menu prices.
Yes, I used their app. I have kids so I know happy meals used to be crazy cheap. They've gone up substantially in price in the past 3 years.
We used to get McDonald's once in a while as a quick, cheap meal that our kids liked. At some point within the past year or so I realized that it's not actually cheap anymore - I think they've raised their prices more than many competitors. IMO, they are now roughly at the same prices as some much more appealing options, so we don't really go there anymore.
We’re in the middle of moving so normal meals have been rather disrupted. We’ve used a 20 nuggets + 2 large fries deal a few times, about $9 with tax. Feeds three kids and then some.
I see a lot of single-happy-meal deals, but few for multiple, so that’s kinda been our go-to instead. Gotta go with what the app wants you to get. I much preferred when the menu prices were just pretty-good all the time…
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.
I 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.
I 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.
Just the lowest price in the first row of Google shopping. Admittedly unscientific. Just trying to get a ballpark sense for relative prices.
As noted elsewhere, I’m an empty nester. Cooking for two adults, both of whom are athletic and celiac, so my perception of what’s cheap is WAY skewed. We eat lots of fish, chicken, and fresh produce.
I used the McDonald's app, creating an order for drive-through pickup (they don't seem to put prices on their website that I could find). So, I believe that should be their regular menu prices. I didn't look at 3rd party websites or apps because of the extra expense.
Back of the envelope, using prices from safeway.com (in Seattle) I get the cost of a quarter pound cheeseburger being about $2.60. Significant error bars on that, because it's hard to estimate how much onions and ketchup and mustard McDonald's uses, and I'm estimating on the lettuce and pickle slices.
But, in no case would I say it costs more than $3.50 to make a quarter pounder with cheese at home. I'm also assuming the ingredients McDonald's uses are not better than even the cheapest ingredients for sale at an okay grocery store, so I'm just giving them that advantage to make it possible to compare.
The current price of a quarter pounder with cheese at McDonald's looks to be $6.22[1]. So, let's call it twice as expensive.
I didn't even bother estimating the cost of making french fries after that, since there's no way they make up the difference.
I do not, for the record, doubt that some menu items at McDonald's cost less for them to produce and sell than the equivalent would cost to make at home. I would be VERY surprised if it cost less in the long run to buy all your meals at McDonald's versus making food yourself at home. Even buying ingredients in bulk, McDonald's does have a lot of overhead to pay for and profit to make.
It's hilarious reading these posters fully convinced fast food is cheaper than cooking at home. Actually no it's sad because it shows the culinary poverty mindset so many people live with.
Buy a big package of hamburger buns and put it in the freezer if you must; it'll be fine for a while there. Thaw as you go when you want a burger: bread thaws in no time. Buy a large package of ground beef, super cheap, and segment it, re-wrap it, freeze it in amounts you know you will use when it is thawed. Want a burg? Water-thaw the meat, air-thaw the bun. Pickles are pickles and are always ready. Pre-made condiments last forever. Pull from your evolving collection of veggies OR make sure you swiped some toms and lettuce or whatever on your way home along with other ingredients for further meals because that's called planning ahead.
There, cheapest burgers you can possibly have, and better than fankenfood. It's just... organization.
And if you're too lazy to do any of that, there are about a million complete meals you could decide on which are both easier and cheaper than making a burger, let alone buying fast food.
No. I never said I actually made that complaint, because I don't. I was just pointing out that contrary to resource_waste's assertion above, fast food can in fact be less expensive than grocery food. It is not a statement of error so egregious as to be worth writing off the content of an entire media organization.
> Will people who hear it hear the second or the first?
Definitely unambiguously the first unless they're the ones trying to "well acshually" it. At the point of the second you're not even talking about burgers - the maximum cheapness calories per dollar is a five gallon jug of corn syrup or something.
Have you literally ever been shopping before that wasn't a Trader Joes or a Whole foods?
It boggles my mind anyone can think that fast food is cheaper than grocery store food for the dollar. Its basically on the level of flat earthers to me.
It was so wrong, that I never listened to NPR since.