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.
I wouldn't stop listening over that.