> Real total food spending increased 11.4 percent in 2021 and 3.4 percent in 2022, driven by higher FAFH spending (up 19 percent in 2021 and 8 percent in 2022). Real FAH spending increased by 4 percent in 2021 but decreased by 2 percent in 2022.
FAH = food at home
FAFH = food away from home
So, eating out is killing our wallets. Not really a surprise considering "dollar menu" items at McDonalds now cost $6 and a halfway decent lunch is upwards of $17-20.
It's too hard to change habits in the short term, but I fully expect that over time people are going to start cooking more and cutting back on restaurant visits and the industry is going to take a huge hit because of it. Prices are simply out of control. Even more so considering the default tip expectation has crept up from 10% to now 20-25%.
>So, eating out is killing our wallets. Not really a surprise considering "dollar menu" items at McDonalds now cost $6 and a halfway decent lunch is upwards of $17-20.
Yea, it's crazy what eating out costs, and what having that same food delivered costs. It's damn convenient though.
>It's too hard to change habits in the short term, but I fully expect that over time people are going to start cooking more and cutting back on restaurant visits and the industry is going to take a huge hit because of it. Prices are simply out of control. Even more so considering the default tip expectation has crept up from 10% to now 20-25%.
I just bought stuff to make chicken quesadillas. It cost about $9 and I'll probably make at least 8 of them and have some chicken and tortilla left over after that. I can afford to eat out, but it seems like a ripoff and I just don't like getting ripped off.
Towards the end of 2021, I began cooking at home and bringing my lunch to save money. My wife and I used to eat out a lot, and I would usually buy lunch. Cooking food resulted in close to 600-$700 in savings per month. Also, cooking for myself also resulted in me eating healthier (due to me being lazy and opting for simple dishes such as cooking chicken in butter and steaming vegetables) and I ended up losing close to 40lbs over the span of a few months.
That is meaningless when they can move items in and out of the menu as they please. The McChicken sandwich was a dollar menu staple ~10 years ago. I just checked the nearest McDonalds and it now costs $4.70.
One detail here: Up 19 percent in 2021 - remember that any number from that year is comparing to the low baseline from the pandemic shutdowns in 2020, so the real effect isn't as big as it looks from that.
To see the real numbers, look at the annualized differential between 2019 and 2023.
Yes the percentages are wonky because of COVID but that doesn't change the fact that the absolute, inflation-adjusted number is the highest it has ever been.
Constant out-of-home dinning isn't sustainable anyway, unless you massively underpay the staff, which isn't possible when unemployment is low. Hope everyone knows how to cook, at least a little bit. I don't know that we're going back.
The restaurant model, sure, but I'd argue that in theory communal kitchens should be significantly more cost effective than everyone cooking for themselves in their own homes. Plenty of countries and cultures all around the world have made it work.
It should be sustainable/economical though, at least for 'basic' or staple foods.
There are a lot of efficiencies a burger joint, for instance, should be able to employ that a personal kitchen can't. It probably won't be cheaper, but it ought to be some fraction of minimum wage * the time investment of diy cooking[0]. Or at least on that order.
[0] ~minimum wage (plus payroll and etc.) being fair pay for burger flipping, and being that a professional kitchen can maintain a much higher throughput per person (e.g. a pro burger flipper in a real kitchen can probably make 10+ burgers in the time I would take to make one)
I think a significant percentage of restaurants in US cities pay some staff in cash; the staff cannot legally work in the US. As long as people are willing to accept this as a way to earn money, this will remain sustainable.
Cooking at home means going to the supermarket (or going online and ordering from the SM). If you have to cook for more than yourself, then you probably need to also put sometime into planning the meals for the week. And then of course there's the time to cook the meals. There's also cleanup. Also, let's not forget that there are plenty of people who never really learned to cook and now fear the kitchen.
Sure meals from the frozen section are an option but they're maybe only slightly less expensive than FAFH.
In any case, FAH takes time *and* effort. Perhaps not a lot of time + effort - and habit - but enough to make it easy to say, "F** it. Let's FAFH..."
If FAFH establishments start closing, local towns are going to turn into ghosts towns. FAFH is about the only thing left in a lot of cases; aside from web dispensaries.
People should have been FAH'ing long ago for health reasons and that obviously didn't workout at all.
> Cooking at home means going to the supermarket (or going online and ordering from the SM). If you have to cook for more than yourself, then you probably need to also put sometime into planning the meals for the week. And then of course there's the time to cook the meals. There's also cleanup. Also, let's not forget that there are plenty of people who never really learned to cook and now fear the kitchen.
There's a sort of gut instinct that going out is easier. After all, the sitting and ordering is a lot more passive than the prepping and cooking.
But time wise, it seems like getting in a car, driving, finding parking, walking, waiting for a table, and then the slow drawn out steps of getting drinks, appetizers and a meal over a long period of time, before repeating all the travel again... adds up to even more time!
1) It's less friction and any give point. Driving is easy when the reward is a meal. Driving is not so easy then the "reward" is the supermarket.
2) Is an event. It's exciting. It's an adventure. Again, compare than to the supermarket and cooking a meal.
At the objective level, your analysis is spot on. I do agree. I tend to not eat out or order out. But aside from myself - and yourself? - that's not how human decision-making and human behavior works.
The majority's decisions are driven by the quest for comfort.
Everything follows economics. If you can't cook but don't have the money to eat out you will learn to cook. If you don't have the time you will cut back on some other activity.
My wife and I both work full time jobs. It's easy to do meal planning when one member of the family doesn't work - but when everyone [has to] work - planning a meal every night of the week is nearly impossible.
Currently we're trying to eat at home 3 nights a week, and even that's hard. We don't want to eat the same thing for multiple days. If neither of us has time to cook, then a lot of time the ingredients are perishable and get thrown out (so now instead of spending money to go out, we're spending money on food to cook AND going out - it's a gamble).
I would even add, that I think, as a society we should move to towards eating out and delivery being the norm - It's like anything else, I specialize in Programming, my wife specializes in Medicine. When we order food - they specialize in that. It's way more efficient than us having to do it.
I never eat out. I can tell you that food bought from grocery stores and farmers markets has gone up in price by 1/3 to 1/2 from Dec 2019. And some foods disappeared never to return during the start of the pandemic.
Eating at home is going to save you money compared to eating out. But eating at home costs have gone up a shocking amount as well.
Time, food variety, and cleanup. Most people don't want the majority of their food to come from an instant pot and they don't want to think about things like grocery shopping. There's a level of skill and management involved in making your own food even if you are talking about extremely simple recipes, and it becomes invisible once you get used to it, but I suspect some people don't have those skills or habits built up. I might be overestimating the difficulty because of ADHD, but I do think it's something that can be difficult even for neurotypical people if they're not used to it.
And of course, habits are also just... habitual. If it's a habit to get to 9PM at night and think, "crud I need food, let me just order something quickly", that habit will still be difficult to break even if everything else is easy.
It's of course doable -- I basically never eat out or order food, I cook everything. But I understand why people don't. Cooking is something I have to plan around. It's annoying to want to make something and then look in the fridge and realize I forgot to buy an ingredient. And I only cook for myself, I don't have to manage a full family and kids.
But it is of course way cheaper and (depending on how you approach it) can be much healthier.
> It's too hard to change habits in the short term, but I fully expect that over time people are going to start cooking more and cutting back on restaurant visits and the industry is going to take a huge hit because of it.
Nobody is saying people can't cook. They're saying it'll take a little while for people who aren't used to cooking to change their habits and pick up some planning/organizing/cooking skills again that they might have lost. And they're saying that price (a lack of sufficiently cheap food at restaurants) will be the driving force behind that change.
Oh, I interpreted it as it takes time to learn. Which, I was trying to say that the habit can be quick and easy to break, people just need the incentive.
For example, if restaurant or prepared food prices went up 5x today, basically everyone (with space and appliance to cook) has the capability to buy a pan, spatula, bowl, fork, eggs, salt, pepper, and start making scrambled eggs for dinner.
And then they would watch a YouTube video and try lentils, and rice, and etc. And in a few weeks they would have a bunch of dishes under their belt.
Sure, I buy that with enough incentive that change could happen much faster. There isn't any kind of vendor lock-in with restaurants, and I do think that cooking is much more accessible today than it used to be, even though there's probably less effort spent teaching people how to do it.
Another thing to keep in mind here is that it takes time for people to work out specific budget changes as well. Not everyone tracks their finances aggressively, and it's not surprising to me if restaurant prices go up that it would take maybe a year or two for people to start looking at their budgets and thinking, "hey, I could cut a lot here."
A 5X price increase overnight is something that would be impossible for people not to notice, but I suspect anything that's an impulse buy where the price goes up slowly to be somewhat lagging with people's reactions to those prices, and then similarly lagging with them taking the time to implement changes as a result. See also stuff like streaming services, where someone might keep a streaming service after a price increase even though they wouldn't have signed up at that price. Both inertia and just general lack-of-insight into those price increases can slow down consumer reaction.
> Based on the percent of people who were able to do it before there were fast food restaurants everywhere, I think people will manage to figure it out.
A good lot of the people from that time are dead and they become fewer every day. Meanwhile, their children, who grew up since then, have radically different baseline expectations about what a meal should taste like, how big it should be, how filling it should be, how convenient it should be, etc
It’s very different to recall the habits of a received culture than it is to adopt a new culture that is completely alien.
In some post-apocalypse, of course people will figure this stuff out, but expecting that to happen just because of incidental market relationships in an otherwise healthy economy is a fantasy.
It takes the passion of a wellness geek or absolute desperation to throw away all your preconceptions about how you’ve related to food your whole life. It doesn’t just happen because prices crept up a little here or sank a little there.
I disagree. After a few missed meals, people will be willing to try all different kinds of food, even if they have to put a pot or pan on the stove. That’s just biology.
> I fully expect that over time people are going to start cooking more and cutting back on restaurant visits and the industry is going to take a huge hit because of it.
We can hope, but it seems unlikely to me that it would go quite like that. I'm pretty sure that once people are used to budgeting a larger share of their income on food, processed food companies and their retailers will happily soak up whatever gets trimmed from restaurant spending. There might be a net savings for those early to transition, but if it becomes a cultural trend, supermarket prices will just creep up to match the customary food budget.
Restaurants may lose, but food manufacturers and supermarkets will likely claw back the difference before they let it go back to families.
> I'm pretty sure that once people are used to budgeting a larger share of their income on food...
I think you're wrong starting here. People aren't used to budgeting a larger share of their income on food. They're blowing their budgets, and it's going to stop fairly soon, because they can't actually afford it.
> processed food companies and their retailers will happily soak up whatever gets trimmed from restaurant spending.
If consumers let them, yes. If I'm right (and the GP), consumers won't let them.
> There might be a net savings for those early to transition, but if it becomes a cultural trend, supermarket prices will just creep up to match the customary food budget.
This assumes that there's no competition in supermarkets, and that they are free to raise their prices independently of their costs.
> Restaurants may lose, but food manufacturers and supermarkets will likely claw back the difference before they let it go back to families.
This assumes the same. And, "before they let it go"? You have a very exaggerated sense of how much power and control they have.
I think this has a lot to do with the under counting of inflation. If you go back to 80s methodology inflation has been much larger that what they've let on.
Yup. I think there's also an ongoing century long shift in "modern" culture that makes classical economics food "baskets" unrepresentative. Excepting wellness geeks, nobody who participates in "modern" culture lives on classical staples of grains, produce, dairy, and affordable cuts of meat.
As a hardline economist in academia, you can say that those are what matter to poverty or starvation because people will eventually become desperate enough to reject their lived culture and return to an alien world of basic foods, but policy makers need to be realistic and acknowledge that most people have no idea how to eat without branded processed foods, fast food convenience, etc. The cultural traditions that made simple foods practical have been lost from many families and those never-learned recipes and habits don't just restore themselves to people overnight when times get tough.
That inconvenient reality of what people actually eat needs to get folded into these economic models for them to actually report on what they intend to. Otherwise, the measures just speaking to a lost time and the smattering of rustic immigrants who still know how to live satisfyingly on traditional staples.
> policy makers need to be realistic and acknowledge that most people have no idea how to eat without branded processed foods, fast food convenience, etc. The cultural traditions that made simple foods practical have been lost from many families
There's also that how we live has drastically changed since the 70s and 80s as well. These assumptions about how we eat were underpinned by the idea that there would be an adult at home, someone who had time to do the planning/thinking about, preparation, and implementation of eating with these "basic foods".
Now, with every adult in a household often working outside the house--and, as you get lower in income, spending more hours doing so--the processed foods and fast food offerings are the only way to get calories in a time-efficient way.
Your point about never-learned recipes is a good one because there are time-efficient ways to prepare food at home but that also implies needed equipment and skill, sometimes passed down from a previous generation, sometimes bought with money that people don't have. But there's little that can compare, timewise, with "just throw it in the microwave for 5 minutes" or "just grab something from a logo foodservice place on the way home". I think people intuitively understand this but there are trade-offs to be made in the moment.
> The cultural traditions that made simple foods practical have been lost from many families and those never-learned recipes and habits don't just restore themselves to people overnight when times get tough.
That strikes a chord.
How do you fix this piece though?
Not sure, I have some left over ground beef from making burgers earlier in the week, (sub the bread with lettuce) either Dan Dan noodles from a Chinese cookbook I have, or burrito bowls.
Within the constraints of a small-government capitalist worldview, I don't know if you can.
In that worldview, General Mills has a right to sell desserts for breakfast without government interference, parents have a right to feed that to their kids without government interference, and kids have a right to enjoy them without government interference.
That a generation later, a homemade breakfast feels like a weekend project that ought to be made special with all sorts of elaborate dressings is apparently just something to be accepted when these rights are honored.
I have no idea how you "outcompete" Captain Crunch with a bowl of rice porridge in that world, and can only imagine the outcry and lawsuits from General Mills if the government put much meaningful effort into trying.
I am not familiar with the methodology of reporting inflation used in the 80s - did they take a wider basket of goods, or were there other consumer purchases in question that would affect the reporting number? If we were to use the 80s methodology - what would inflation numbers look like?
I no longer do a double take at a sandwich costing $25 at takeout restaurants in the area where I live. 10 years ago, I would have been surprised to see a sandwich cost $15 at anywhere but an upscale restaurant.
If this is under counting inflation then spending at restaurants is up even more. I guess people have money to spend and are enjoying the restaurant scene.
Before the doomers run away with this thread, real spending on food prepared at home is down. This is more than off set by increased spending at restaurants. This returns to the pre-covid trends.
This is technically correct ("the best kind of correct!"), but the upward march of that inflation-adjusted trend graph is pretty clear. I'm not a doomer, just trying to be even-handed.
I'd love to see a better understanding of why American HN commenters, a cohort that likely makes 2-3x the typical compensation of an ordinary American, wants to catatastrophize a pretty decent to great American economy.
The comments are literally data being "refuted" with anecdotes.
Might be the political characteristics of the tech worker crowd. Big split between the libertarians who have claimed high inflation even when America had objectively low inflation (usually as a justification for crypto), the conspiratorial far-right that thinks that the administration is falsifying economic data because they want to end democracy, and the far-left aligned folks that have to say the economy is bad for in-group signaling even though none of them are acting like the economy is all too bad.
Consumers spending more on food because they're eating out more because they can afford it isn't a sign of a bad economy in any way.
I think that's a lot of it. Even the way econ/finance interpretations of surveys has changed because responses are now driven by politics. People will say their own finances are great, but the economy is horrible.
I don't eat any eggs or meat, and I don't own a car so I didn't pay for gas during the price spike last year. I was only impacted by inflation when my 5.50 latte went up to 6.42. Don't love it, but not enough to make me want to vote against democracy existing.
We use a basket of goods to measure inflation. There is endless debate about whether the basket is representative, but it is almost certainly more representative than just "eggs and meat".
Not sure what you're getting at with this. Are you eluding that these clean vehicle rebates are directly contributing to food price inflation? Are you saying policy is focusing on the wrong things to subsidize or what?
I have been fascinated by the price of oats recently. The 8lb box of oats I have been buying from Amazon for several years suddenly went from $15 to $32 in July. Paying $4/lb for grain feels excessive given that meat is cheaper than that in most of the country. I went looking for an explanation expecting there to been some huge crop loss, but found oat future prices have been relatively stable at around $0.15/lb. I looked at other prices, and whole foods even charges $3.6/lb for their store brand and something like $2.5/lb for bulk goods. I distinctly remember buying the same bulk oats for $0.59/lb in 2017, right around the time Amazon bought whole foods. And oat futures prices are only up about 30% since then.
I think retailers would like us to believe these increases are just them passing through rising commodity prices from inflation, but I am increasingly convinced it is collusion, either implicit or explicit, to increase margins. The most compelling evidence this is happening seems to be Costco, which generally sets its prices at near-fixed 15% markup hasn't experienced nearly the same increases and is selling similar products at less than half of that price.
I think the entire thing is indicative of a growing disconnect between the cost of commodities and what consumers are paying due to increased consolidation and collusion among retailers.
This may be due to how Amazon's "stock" works. Was it for sale by Amazon or a 3rd party?
I have a(n unsupported) theory that gung-ho retailers try out amazon from time to time, in an effort to expand. Maybe they hire someone who knows how to sell there. They price based on how they do in store, then after a few months do a reconciliation and realize how much money they lose due to amazon's ads/stocking/shipping costs. Then they raise prices.
Each time this happens, you see massive fluctuations upwards as they have to cover their cost + amazon's charges. Then a competitor gets a new ecomm/marketing/growth person who sees an "opportunity" because all the competition has priced things way too high. That person pitches leadership on how they can sell more items without much more effort ("thanks Jeff Bezos!"), but the actual understanding of how much it costs doesn't come until a couple of months later.
It also doesn't really make any sense to buy a cheap pantry staple or cereal grain like oats online and have it shipped to you. The base product is so cheap but it's heavy so traditional consumer shipping is expensive (and wasteful/bad for the environment).
There's a very good chance much of that price increase is due to increase cost of shipping. Even if Amazon gives you "free" shipping - they're building that price into the price of the product... They're not eating the shipping cost on a low margin item like a cereal grain.
I can buy organic locally grown oats at my expensive local health food co-op for less than $2/lb...unchanged from years ago.
Deliveries of any reasonable size reduce vehicle miles travelled for goods. If a delivery driver can do 50 deliveries in a 10 mile route, that is much, much better than each one of those people driving to the store and back. I live in Brooklyn and Amazon has a grocery logistics hub less 5 miles from me. My carbon footprint is just fine.
Amazon pricing is not a reliable source of changes in cost of goods sold, especially if not shipped and sold by Amazon. Plus you are pricing in home delivery.
I would use a retailer known to keep margins as low as possible like Costco as a better gauge. I buy rolled oats all the time, and between Costco and Trader Joe’s, I have not noticed any pricing swings in oats.
Agreed Amazon isnt the most reliable, but as I said, I corroborated this at a few other stores. Costco generally has fixed markups for its products (15%), as does Trader Joes. The fact that you haven't seen price fluctuations there aligns with my conclusion that the price volatility isnt being driven by increases in the cost of goods, but rather retailers who think they can trying to increase margins.
Don't put too much stock in just one Amazon listing. That doesn't reflect reality. Amazon listings fluctuate in price all the time. Maybe some algorithm decided to bump that one listing in hopes that regular orderers would keep buying it out of inertia.
Monopolization in the food industry (at just about every level) has set the stage for unchecked corporate profiteering. The real shortages during the pandemic created a pretext for ongoing gouging. Federal authorities used to intervene with various forms of price controls and limits on this kind of stuff, but now they simply wash their hands of the whole thing. This is of course all in the context of the US engaging in massive agricultural subsidies, the bulk of which go to said monopolies.
yeah, I was thinking there is absolutely 0 chance, as a percentage of household income, that people werent spending more more money on food in 1820 than now.
>Pizza night is $40 now (two pizzas and a breadstick-side), compared to $20
Honestly domino's is pretty good and is still $8 for a large carry out.
Honestly if you're okay with spending $40 for whatever pizza you like, it becomes redicously worth it to just cook it. Pizza is one of the cheapest foods to make.
For comparison I spend 10-20% more over the same time period in Virginia for groceries. It is certainly not double, not even close. But eating out has gotten rediculous.
I have cealiac's, so gluten free pizza is not cheap. So, I make GF pizza myself. I spend roughly $40 in total, and make 2 great full sized meat lover's pizzas - with everything on it - bacon, pepperoni, prosciutto, salame, cheese, pineapple, onions, peppers, chicken, etc. All in costs are about $20-22 a pie, probably 21-25 if you include large ingredients that are also used for other cooking (olive oil, eggs etc...) which is not cheap but not terribly expensive considering I make it for a group of 4-5 people, so the cost averages out to 10-11 dollars a person.
I want per-capita numbers, otherwise these graphs are with "population goes up, food spending goes up". A real mystery.
The only real statement we get is,
> From 2019 to 2020, every State and Washington, DC, saw decreases in inflation-adjusted, per capita total food spending.
But the overall graph featured near the top of the article's slope is steep enough, I think, that the per-capita number hidden somewhere in there is also increasing across the duration. If I've done the napkin math right, roughly $2k/person/yr to $2.7k/person/yr.
But the big graph as presented confounds the problem we want to see the data on (stuff is getting more expensive) with population growth.
"From 2019 to 2020" was going directly into the bottom of the pandemic shutdowns. Ignore that, that's a cherrypicked outlier. Compare the annualized differential from 2019 to 2023 if you want to see real numbers. (Even the first half of 2022 still had significant pandemic drag.)
Interesting timing—Target claims consumers' discretionary spending is down, "both in dollars and units". I wonder if this points towards food prices climbing faster than inflation.
Shhh, don't look at that. Just focus on
"U.S. GDP grew at a 4.9% annual pace in the third quarter, better than expected (cnbc.com)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38025177 and celebrate. Sure, 90% of Americans under 50 will never be able to buy a house. They are one injury away from bankruptcy. But the GDP!
This is a byproduct of the US political polarization. The state of the economy (and every other attribute of the US) has become a football game, and you must agree with your team on the state of it per whatever the talking head coach says, lest you grant the opposing team a "win". This ruins honest discourse about the state of things.
Real disposable personal incomes are up from 5 years ago. The spike in 2020 was because of a flood of government money and all of the low wage workers being ejected from the workforce.
Those are the objectives of everyone, or at least they were until a Democrat was in office.
Now we're being told low interest rates are the dominating objective of having a good economy, even though they're lower than when my parents bought their first and only house in 1994 and lower than they were during the dot-com bubble.
Aren't age-adjusted homeownership rates roughly the same for millennials as it was for baby boomers?
I won't argue that it's harder and more expensive, it sure is, but millennials seem to prioritize it enough to do whatever it takes to own a home, so home prices keep going up.
Not to flame but this is a very mis-informed opinion. Multiple sources[1][2] show that millennial homeownership rates when adjusted for age are lower across the board.
Some highlights from these sources:
[1] Today the millennial homeownership rate is 43 percent, well below the rates of generation X (67 percent) and the baby boomer and silent generations (77 percent). An important feature of millennial homeownership that often gets muddled in the media conversation is that it is increasing, and with few minor exceptions, it has always been increasing. The oldest millennials turned 18 in 1999, and every year since then there has been a net increase in the number of millennial-owned homes. Since the Great Recession, the millennial homeownership rate has grown faster than any other, particularly in the last five years while the economy has expanded quickly. Today, millennials are the least likely to own a home, but they are the most likely to purchase one.
Millennial homeownership is rising, but it is rising slower than it did for previous generations. The chart below (see link) compares homeownership rates for each generation as they age
[2] If we isolate the effects of delayed household formation proxied by changes in marital composition (i.e., we assume the marriage rate was the same as in 1990), we find the hypothetical real homeownership rate would have been 39.1 percent, 9.8 percentage points higher than current levels. As of 2021, there are 44 million young adults ages 25 to 34, meaning there would be 4.3 million additional homeowners.
The third chart in the apartment list link ("Homeownership has been in decline for decades") is exactly the plot I wanted. That chart makes the gap not look so dramatic as either your numbers or the paragraphs surrounding the chart: millennials are within 10% of the boomers at the same age. For the youngest and oldest millenials it's more like 5%.
I'm curious how this has changed since the article's publishing in 2020. Anecdotally, I know a lot of millennials who bought their first home since, but I don't know how widespread that is.
I think some amount of gap is reasonable, especially for the 20s cohort: less likely to have kids, more likely to want to live in a big dense city. Looks like millenials are closing the gap once they hit mid 30s or so, right around when they have their first or second kid and move to the burbs or further. I just can't see being worried or upset about that.
I suspect a lot of people were living closer to “paycheck to paycheck” state than they realized. No raise plus even 5-10% bumps in food prices feel like a much bigger impact when you’re suddenly running out of money when you never have before.
Same here in Germany, it's crazy how much more we spend on food now. I used to usually spend slightly over 400€ for us two per month, just a few years ago. Nowadays, I struggle to stay below 600€.
But that's not what's happening in this article. The Food Away From Home share has hit an all-time high, and FAFH costs more (because it contains more internalized labor than groceries).
Americans eat out a lot because they are unbelievably rich.
I rarely eat out these days, even lunch. It's just too much money now and not worth the convenience. I pack a lunch to take to work now and prepare breakfast and dinner at home. I might eat out two or three times a month.
The United States has a homeless population bigger than Malta [0][1]. 11.5% of our population -- 38 million people -- live in poverty [2]. The median household income is $74,580 and health insurance for a family of 4 costs $17,244 ($1,437 * 12) per year [3][4]. Average housing expenditure is $24,300 ($2,025 * 12) per year [5]. This leaves $33,036 per year in household income BEFORE taxes are taken in to account.
Meanwhile, the legal requirement for paid parental leave in most places is 0 days. Paid sick leave? 0 days. Notice period for firing an employee? 0 days. Cost of 1 year at a 4 year university? $36,436 [6]. You get the idea.
We're rich compared to developing countries, but we're a far cry from "unbelievably rich".
Hey look, we're just optimizing for the dumb metric. If we ever fix poverty, healthcare, education, child care, sick leave, vacation, car dependence, and housing, the GDP is going to go down by like 95%.
Yes Americans are rich and are also very busy. Life seems to push so fast that I know a lot of people buy food away from home due to a sense that they don’t have time to cook. There must be rich individuals in other cultures who still eat at home because they have more freedom to take the time to do so. Americans on a global scale are rich but I expect that living expenses are so high too that many people who often eat out are still struggling to get by.
Eating at home takes less time than eating out. Maybe about the same if you include washing up and putting everything away.
Getting prepared food via DoorDash, I guess might be quicker, but you're still sitting there for 30-60 minutes in most cases waiting for it to show up. You can roast a chicken and vegetables in the oven in that time.
, but you're still sitting there for 30-60 minutes in most cases waiting for it to show up.
But you aren't sitting! You are doing other things. Spending time with a child, scrolling the internet, watching tv, playing a game, doing housework, and so on.
If you roast a chicken, you still need to prepare it. This takes time. You gotta wait for the oven to heat, and you might need a side. You might need to put them in the oven at different times - that chicken is going to take 1.5 to 2 hours, after all. When everything is said and done, you then need to clean up the mess.
All in all, it will definitely take longer to cook yourself and you could use that time to do other things.
As a sidenote: This seems like a fancy meal. Its been some times since I ate meat or lived in the US, but I remember rotisserie chickens being cheaper than whole chickens from the frozen section at the store. Is it not still that way?
This is entirely situational. Where I am sitting in a central urban neighborhood I can click to reorder my standing order at the Indian restaurant on the corner—this is shockingly straightforward on Google Maps, just search the name of the restaurant and click one button—and it's 1 minute away. I often cook of course, but I don't think of cooking at home as a time-saving device. I think of it as a hobby.
FAH = food at home
FAFH = food away from home
So, eating out is killing our wallets. Not really a surprise considering "dollar menu" items at McDonalds now cost $6 and a halfway decent lunch is upwards of $17-20.
It's too hard to change habits in the short term, but I fully expect that over time people are going to start cooking more and cutting back on restaurant visits and the industry is going to take a huge hit because of it. Prices are simply out of control. Even more so considering the default tip expectation has crept up from 10% to now 20-25%.