On a straight cash basis, you are correct. If you're looking to feed a family of 4 on frozen dinners, your paying (looking at my grocery store's website) about $10 for the meal ($2-$3 per meal). If instead you take $20 (so 2 dinners worth), you could instead get a 5 lb whole chicken, a 4 lb bag of potatoes, and 2 lbs of dried beans, and you'd still have $5 left over for other stuff. And that should have no issues feeding your family 2 dinners.
I think a big part of the "cost", though, is not just the financial costs but rather the time costs to prep it. Yeah, cooking up beans, chicken and potatoes is not especially difficult but it does take time. And I think more than just snobbishness (though, there's some of that - a lot of people will scoff at chicken and beans when they have an option for steak), its that many people just don't want to put in the time to soak the beans, cook the chicken, mash the potatoes, etc. when instead they can just stick the TV dinner trays in the microwave.
And it's not just a cooking knowledge thing (though I know a ton of people who are terrified to do anything in the kitchen), but a laziness thing - just look at things like Grubhub, Uber Eats, etc. Their whole business model pretty much comes down to "oh, you don't want to go down the street to get takeout, so pay me to do it for you", and last year Grubhub was apparently averaging 623,000 orders per day.
last year Grubhub was apparently averaging 623,000 orders per day
Holy shit. That's amazing.
As kid, we would sometimes have pizza delivered to the house. As an adult, I don't think I've ever gotten a food delivery.
I was using grubhub to order food for pickup from a few restaurants (non-native English speakers, hard to order over phone), but then one of the owners told me that Grubhub takes 20% of the receipt for just placing an order online. That's insane.
Company I started 15 years ago developed an online ordering solution for restaurants that worked with our point of sale system. At the time it was mostly pizza places and a few coffee shops that were early adopters. Online ordering itself allowed more orders to be processed quicker with lower error rates than over phone. But we were fools and only charged a monthly fee to use our solution instead of a per order charge.
Yes, your error was in having a smart business model that made sense for you and the customer. You should have gone hugely into debt, talked about synergies and social justice and maybe toss some cloud computing in there, charged exorbitant rates (and yet still never turn a profit) and you could have been the next tech billionaire.
We just had a profitable business that we sold to a larger company for $25M. Guess I'll have to settle to being in my 40's with no debt, a bunch of farmland, and a growing machine gun collection.
Our local grocery store has steamer bags of chicken, seafood, veggies, potato's. Grab, come home, put in oven for 25 minutes and done. Usually get two meals out of it and works out to be about $3/person per meal. Less if you just do the meat and then fix a baked potato to go with it.
Also consider that a bag of chips is about $4, a tub of ice cream is $7, a 12-pack of Coke is $5. Not buying these things is free. Next time you’re at the grocery store, find some fat people and look at what they have in their shopping carts.
Some years ago I decided to stop drinking soda and having my coffee without sugar. I've lost 8 pounds without any other change.
Coke is addictive trash, no value other then making you fat.
I honestly can't wrap my head around the people doing things like grubhub or eating out regularly. Yeah it takes time to cook but I can 100% guaranteed whip up something that's far cheaper, healthier. and just as or more delicious than whatever I could get from a restaurant. And the thing is the more you practice the quicker you get with the dish you're cooking.
Yeah there can be extenuating circumstances but that's not the people eating out so damn much.
Maybe it's just my economic background is showing 🤣
Nothing against the idea of eating out, but imo it's just way too much money down the drain for anything but special occasions
On a straight cash basis, you are correct. If you're looking to feed a family of 4 on frozen dinners, your paying (looking at my grocery store's website) about $10 for the meal ($2-$3 per meal). If instead you take $20 (so 2 dinners worth), you could instead get a 5 lb whole chicken, a 4 lb bag of potatoes, and 2 lbs of dried beans, and you'd still have $5 left over for other stuff. And that should have no issues feeding your family 2 dinners.
I think a big part of the "cost", though, is not just the financial costs but rather the time costs to prep it. Yeah, cooking up beans, chicken and potatoes is not especially difficult but it does take time. And I think more than just snobbishness (though, there's some of that - a lot of people will scoff at chicken and beans when they have an option for steak), its that many people just don't want to put in the time to soak the beans, cook the chicken, mash the potatoes, etc. when instead they can just stick the TV dinner trays in the microwave.
And it's not just a cooking knowledge thing (though I know a ton of people who are terrified to do anything in the kitchen), but a laziness thing - just look at things like Grubhub, Uber Eats, etc. Their whole business model pretty much comes down to "oh, you don't want to go down the street to get takeout, so pay me to do it for you", and last year Grubhub was apparently averaging 623,000 orders per day.
Holy shit. That's amazing.
As kid, we would sometimes have pizza delivered to the house. As an adult, I don't think I've ever gotten a food delivery.
I was using grubhub to order food for pickup from a few restaurants (non-native English speakers, hard to order over phone), but then one of the owners told me that Grubhub takes 20% of the receipt for just placing an order online. That's insane.
Company I started 15 years ago developed an online ordering solution for restaurants that worked with our point of sale system. At the time it was mostly pizza places and a few coffee shops that were early adopters. Online ordering itself allowed more orders to be processed quicker with lower error rates than over phone. But we were fools and only charged a monthly fee to use our solution instead of a per order charge.
Yes, your error was in having a smart business model that made sense for you and the customer. You should have gone hugely into debt, talked about synergies and social justice and maybe toss some cloud computing in there, charged exorbitant rates (and yet still never turn a profit) and you could have been the next tech billionaire.
We just had a profitable business that we sold to a larger company for $25M. Guess I'll have to settle to being in my 40's with no debt, a bunch of farmland, and a growing machine gun collection.
Our local grocery store has steamer bags of chicken, seafood, veggies, potato's. Grab, come home, put in oven for 25 minutes and done. Usually get two meals out of it and works out to be about $3/person per meal. Less if you just do the meat and then fix a baked potato to go with it.
Also consider that a bag of chips is about $4, a tub of ice cream is $7, a 12-pack of Coke is $5. Not buying these things is free. Next time you’re at the grocery store, find some fat people and look at what they have in their shopping carts.
Some years ago I decided to stop drinking soda and having my coffee without sugar. I've lost 8 pounds without any other change. Coke is addictive trash, no value other then making you fat.
I cringe at those price. Only buying on discount and giving up some stuff that's just too expensive saves 30% - 50% of grocery spending.
For example, 200g bag of chips at $1, half a galon ofnice cream $4, and a 24 crate of coke $8.5 ( instead of a box of 12 ).
Also not overeating saves a fortune. No fatties, one dosen't have to eat the whole bag in a sitting. Use the kitchen scale and mesure your portion.
Disgraceful.
I honestly can't wrap my head around the people doing things like grubhub or eating out regularly. Yeah it takes time to cook but I can 100% guaranteed whip up something that's far cheaper, healthier. and just as or more delicious than whatever I could get from a restaurant. And the thing is the more you practice the quicker you get with the dish you're cooking.
Yeah there can be extenuating circumstances but that's not the people eating out so damn much.
Maybe it's just my economic background is showing 🤣
Nothing against the idea of eating out, but imo it's just way too much money down the drain for anything but special occasions