> Her brother, who works as a cashier, can’t afford meals out at all, she said. The cost of his diabetes medication has increased greatly, to about $200 a month, which she helps him cover.
This is an often unacknowledged part of the cost of fast food. It turns susceptible people into diabetics. As a diabetic there is little I can eat there, since I manage it with food not drugs. When I do I get a burger and throw out the bun, which isn't very thrifty.
If you just go with the flow and eat what this culture makes easiest, it's an unusual specimen who can be healthy and happy in late life. And it's not at all unusual to turn young people into patients.
It is unusual to see young people make the choices to not turn into patients.
It costs very little to eat mostly lentils/legumes/nuts/yogurt/vegetables, and drink mostly water without carbs dissolved in it, but no business is going to survive selling those things.
Where is the next cheap lentils/legumes/nuts/yogurt/vegetables fast food restaurant?
I think it's a weird concept of a society where all the parts of it with money are directing people to do one thing - but at the same time, the people are expected to do the exact opposite and it's their own fault if they follow the coercion...
Cooking takes time and effort, which many people lack. You need to make an initial investment in utensils and appliances, which poor people can't always afford. And if you don't already know how to cook, learning it on your own can be risky. If you make a mistake, you may end up losing the food, which poor people again may not be able to afford. And learning it takes time and effort anyway.
In many cultures, men traditionally didn't know how to cook. It was not their job. That wasn't a problem, as long as men lived with their parents or in an institutional setting, until they got married. But in a modern, more individualist culture, such attitudes are holding men back.
I've been hooked on fast food before, and I still grab some on occasion, but I don't understand these common excuses for why people HAVE to consume fast food.
It's far cheaper to 1) buy unprocessed foods at the grocery store, 2) spend $20 a few times for cookware that will last plenty long enough, and 3) cook for 20min a day or do more preparation on the weekend. It doesn't require becoming a professional chef or buying appliances.
I think the main problem is that fast food is addictive and those who are vulnerable to that tend to make excuses for why they can't stop.
I have been doing all kind of strategies since I have lived largely alone for over 15 years. I have also worked in restaurant kitchens that were on the premium side. I can do very sophisticated pastries from the Ferrandi book.
If there is one thing I know for sure is that there is very little benefits in cooking, apart from the pleasure of eating something good. Even if you want to eat healthy there are plenty of ways that require very little cooking. The only problem is how much money you can throw at the problem, the easier it is the more expensive it will be.
Sometimes you don't even have a choice because of time constraints (people who do 2 hours commute everyday just can't allocate time to that).
I do not like cooking. Even just spending an hour on it sucks, and I would rather order, but I just cannot afford to order food on the daily, so I must cook something for a few days or the whole week.
If you do not have the money to order on the daily, then you either cook or someone else has to do the cooking.
You seem to take the ability of people to cook for granted. I don't think it is automatic anymore. Generational transmission of some skills has ceased.
Jamie Oliver famously asked British school kids to name objects such as an apple, a potato or a cucumber, and plenty of them did not know. They just stared at the raw vegetables/fruits, baffled.
And as of now, you cannot simply vibe-cook using AI. You actually need to know some stuff, like what is what, how to use utensils, how to treat hot objects, what is too much gas and what not enough etc.
It is very easy to learn. If I could learn it, so can anyone else. :P I have not cooked my entire life, for the most part, but when my situation requires me to cook, then I can. I find a relatively easy recipe and I just follow the instructions. It has worked out fine for me.
> Jamie Oliver famously asked British school kids to name objects such as an apple, a potato or a cucumber, and plenty of them did not know
"It is very easy to learn. If I could learn it, so can anyone else. :P "
Well, the Neanderthals cooked, so it is not exactly a rocket engineering skill ... but it is probably acquired better from other people than alone, and equipment matters as well.
If you learn to cook from your mother in a well-equipped kitchen, you will probably enjoy the process a lot more than alone with Youtube in a cheaply rented flat with one pot, one dull knife and two dented plastic plates. And if people don't enjoy some learning process, they are much more likely to drop out and resign. Especially if fast food alternatives lurk at them from their smartphones.
The best way to start cooking is probably with a knife, cutting board, an 8" or 10" skillet, and a small saucepan (i.e. little soup pot). There are pans that can work as the last two, but it helps to be able to have two pans at hand, e.g. for making rice while cooking the protein and/or vegetables, even if all you have is a single burner. And none have to be fancy. A cheap soft wood cutting board helps your cheap knife stay sharper for longer.
Outside baking, that's basically all you need, at least if you're alone. Cooking for two or especially a family is when you need more equipment as time savers and for variability, e.g. mandolin, pressure cooker, etc.
I'd venture to say this is how many people have learned to cook, and even how many avid cookers continue to cook.
If you're starting out, canned food and pasta is definitely your friend, not to mention cheap. You can start to learn to cook by boiling a pot of water for your instant Ramen, and frying an egg to toss into the bowl. Or just soft boil an egg in the boiling water and set side before doing the Ramen in the same water. Building meals around something packaged and precooked is useful and can help save money (outside beans and rice, fresh ingredients are sadly often more expensive than what you can cobble together from pantry staples).
I come from a very poor family, and I am Eastern European... so we had very "shitty" equipments. We peeled our potatoes using a knife, too. I wonder how foreign it is to others.
I have never learned to cook from anyone. I just read the recipes and/or watch some videos and that is literally it. My kitchen is not as equipped as it is in rich households.
Ordering food is ideal, but super expensive, so I personally cannot afford to do that.
Aren't you Martin Janiczek? Bro, if true, you're not helping our collective effort to resurrect "Central Europe" in colloquial use :)
We had a weird assortment of equipment as well, some dating back to Masaryk, but it was usually durable and reliable. That is why we also kept it; late stage Communism was terrible at producing durable consumer goods, while old stuff lasted for decades.
More than a billion people have successfully learned to speak Chinese, some of them very stupid. Yet here I am, struggling to remember the hanzi and the tones.
Different skills take different amounts of time and parameters to master.
Comparing learning a language to watching a video or reading a recipe and spending a few weeks adding some oil and spices in a pot or pan is ridiculous.
Sorry, I wanted to sound edgier and made my point less clear! What I wanted to convey is, it's waaaaay easier to learn a skill when you've been exposed to it since you were a baby.
My grandmother cooked daily and taught her kids to cook. My mother cooked weekly and taught us to use the microwave. Sure anyone can learn to cook, just like anyone can learn to play the piano, but it requires time, money, dedication, and the push to get started. It’s much easier if you were taught some of the basics as a kid, or had an example in your life.
It still baffles me that people compare cooking to playing an instrument. It really is not that difficult to cook, depending on what it is. Do people know how to make schnitzel (breadcrumbed meat)? Make fries? Make rice? Make boiled potatoes? Or are those things difficult as well? Making a stew out of legumes is not that difficult either. Boil your legumes, then mix eggs, flour, and paprika together, put it in oil, heat it up for a few seconds, then pour everything into the water you are boiling your legumes in. Put some herbs to your liking. That is literally it. Healthy, delicious stew of any legumes.
Agreed. The analogies to playing a musical instrument or speaking a foreign language are pretty silly.
Cooking (provided you have access to some simple cookware) is literally printing out the recipe and FOLLOWING THE DAMN INSTRUCTIONS. If that’s beyond someone’s abilities then I weep for the general state of mankind.
You can get good enough cookware for the price of a couple of McDonald's meals too. We don't all need $100 pots and pans. I feel like the people arguing that cooking is a giant obstacle can't be doing it in good faith. Watch a YouTube video and throw a couple of eggs in a $10 pan already.
If someone can afford fast food, they can afford enough utensils or equipments, too.
As I said, I come from a poor family and we only went to the McDonalds to get fast food when I was sick (because I craved it), so very rarely. Fast food was for special occasions due to its high price as opposed to cooking at home, as a poor family.
"I feel like the people arguing that cooking is a giant obstacle can't be doing it in good faith. "
I am one of those people and I am arguing in good faith. I have seen it with my own eyes.
It is not "just" skills or "just" kitchen or "just" utensils or "just" unfamiliarity with the basics or "just" being tired after getting home late (poor people often work bad schedules). It is a bit of everything, and the resulting complex is hard to disentangle.
On a similar note, have you never seen, e.g., obese people who never exercise? It is again a bit of everything. They are not used to it, they feel bad when starting, they can easily overdo it, they feel ashamed going into a gym etc. All this summed together results in avoidant behavior, even though no single reason dominates it.
Yes, all those obstacles can be overcome, but we shouldn't expect everyone to just simply leap over them. All humans aren't built this way. If they were, humanity as a whole would look a lot different than it does.
My point was that if a person learns to cook early in life, they will consider it more natural and most of those obstacles will be easier to overcome for them. They will have all the circuits wired in, so to say.
I have a similar experience when exercising. I was never obese, but my mother never exercised. Simply never. (Ironically, at 74, she is in perfect health.) And thus, I didn't understand how exercise even makes sense as a kid. I had to learn it for years. It is hard to describe how challenging is it to adjust your mindset and rhythm of life to something that was completely alien to you in your first 20 years of life, especially if that activity is optional and there is no external pressure. You can do it, but various relapses and "falling off the wagon" are way more frequent than if that activity is second nature to you.
If we want to fix things on societal level, we must be realistic. Recipes like "just do X", where X is something nontrivial, feel good and easy (especially to doers of X), but they don't have a good track record in actually achieving society-wide changes. They work for some individuals, but they have a scaling problem.
Maintaining a fast food habit is both expensive and non-trivial. For the people who have to drive to get their fast food, at least you know they are capable of learning something more complex than cooking.
OK, so how do you explain that people don't cook, especially the ones who are relatively poor and could save some money doing so?
I have been engaging in this thread for a day now and harvesting downvotes. I would certainly love to see some competing theories and dig into them instead.
> Cooking (provided you have access to some simple cookware) is literally printing out the recipe and FOLLOWING THE DAMN INSTRUCTIONS. If that’s beyond someone’s abilities then I weep for the general state of mankind.
I mean, if you don't understand how badly the US educational system is failing people then I don't know what you expect. There are a large amount and growing amount of people that are barely literate and can only follow basic instructions. This is by design because we're starving our educational systems and creating a two-tiered society where people either receive private education or no education at all. It should come at zero surprise that people can't cook because they were never taught how to cook nor how to even learn and integrate that knowledge.
My parents for example were fishermen, neither of them are functionally able to cook anything beyond tossing some meat in a crockpot and some rice in a rice cooker. Everything I know about cooking was shit I had to pick up on my own and it's only because I'm both literate and computer savvy that I can grasp and integrate these things smoothly.
While the US education system is plenty bad, I expect that a substantial number of people who can't/don't cook are not held back due to illiteracy. To be fair, this thread seems to be discussing recipes and dishes, but even "tossing some meat in a crockpot and some rice in a rice cooker" is an improvement from ordering fast food.
It's not difficult per se, but you can't throw anyone into a kitchen and expect food to be made as a result. You still need to be taught to some extent. The bar is a lot lower than playing an instrument or many other things, but there's still a bar below which (edible) food will not be made. If you've never been taught and never went out of your way to learn, you won't know how to.
Some people get out of school not being able to read and write, at least to any meaningful degree. The fact that some people get out of school not being able to cook thus shouldn't be surprising.
I got down-voted, which is odd, because I truly have not encountered anyone here in Hungary who do not know how to read nor write. The only demographic that may difficulties with that are gypsies because they typically do not go to school.
Additionally, is it not common knowledge the US education system is bad?
The 'meaningful' part of my original comment is carrying a lot of weight there. Most people are literate in the literal sense of that word, but I went to class with people who have not read a written work longer than five pages sine they went out of school, and I would not trust them to read an even vaguely complicated instruction manual without me explaining something to them. They are not literate in any meaningful sense of that word. They barely knew how to read when we took our final exams, but they did pass, since no-one wants to deal with the trouble of actually teaching them now. They're good people. The schools just failed them.
I could barely write when I got out school, in the sense that I couldn't read my own handwriting. I had to be taught anew when I learned a language that uses a different script, and that practice made my normal handwriting 10 times better.
And this is before you get into people who for most intents and purposes apparently can read, but their brain grinds to a halt when a computer requires them to do that very same activity and act accordingly. I'm not sure of those people have a similar problem of functional illiteracy, or if it's a problem of a different kind, but it sure is real and sure keeps happening.
For someone raised around music, starting a new instrument might not sound very challenging. You could get good at twinkle twinkle little star on the recorder in under an hour. Take carpentry as another example. It’s not hard. It’s not expensive to get into. But, if you never had someone in your life who was into it, then it just never occurs to you to try it.
I'm male, and I was never taught to cook nor prepare a meal. And I do not like cooking one little bit yet I can prepare a meal that all but the most fussy would eat. And I'm talking about a meal with multiple parts—meat, three vegetables with condiments, and bread etc. then say finishing with a desert.
Basic cooking is profoundly easy, and for most it's instinctive, after all one has to eat, so there's incentive. In fact I have never knowing met anyone who couldn't prepare a basic meal that would not at least sustain them and other members of a family. It's true I've met people whose food preparation leaves much to be desired and I'd prefer to avoid their cooking but the food they prepared was definitely edible.
"You seem to take the ability of people to cook for granted."
Right, I've lived my whole life in a world where everyone I know well takes one's ability to prepare a basic meal for granted, it's something that's not even contemplated it's so elementary. In fact, when reading your comment my initial reaction was as this isn't April 1st he must be winding us up for the sake of argument.
If what what you say is true and there are significant numbers of people who can't cook then to me this is a startling revelation. Similarly, I'd not previously heard of Jamie Oliver's questioning of school kids and revealing their ignorance of food types but that's not surprising given that cooking programs bore me to tears. That said, the first thing I'd no doubt agree with Oliver about is that this ignorance is truly shocking, and second we'd be questioning how did we arrive at this disgraceful situation when it would have been inconceivable several generations ago.
How can someone not pick up the basics of food preparation after seeing it done several times? Even if like me one doesn't like cooking, at three meals a day it's hard to completely avoid watching those who are preparing one's food—so the normal human gets lots of experience even if they only see food preparation infrequently.
Even with my disinterest in cooking I picked the skill up by simply being around the kitchen at meal times. By age 10 I could easily prepare a decent meal, that's just how it was for the average person.
Cooking legumineuse notoriously take a long time and you very often need to soak them before hand.
Even the simpler stuff like lentils have at least twice the cooking time of regular pasta (20-30 min at least) unless you like eating stuff hard as rocks.
On top of that; it isn't very good as is and need quite a lot of skill to taste great. The usual way to make it taste good, is to use animal fats/meats and various vegetables broths/sauces. It's a very time consuming process and very often quite expensive as well because the raw ingredients are not necessarily cheap.
So basically what happens is that either you are poor enough that one person in the household is basically dedicated to this task (especially if it's a large family) or both are working, most likely middle class, and then there is very little time to do that sort of cooking without completely destroying the possibility of having a life.
When I studied in Germany in 2010 I went to an Indian place that had a "small plate" (which was decent even for me, a man in my 20s at the time) for €2.80. The large one was €4.80. The food was magnificent, and was traditional Indian cuisine. Lots of legumes and vegetables.
Fast food is an addiction not nutrition. Some people develop the addiction and the restaurants feed it.
Normal food behavior is to eat until satiated. We've pretended it's normal to gorge yourself at McDonald's and such because saying otherwise makes some people feel bad.
People adopting normal food behavior aren't going to be drawn to eating at such a restaurant. The food that's been mentioned is trivial to make at home and requires less time than going out.
In places where there's enough mass of people to actually make this worthwhile (mainly Asia), there's tons of options, but no large ones.
I just wonder how poor people can afford to eat fast food. I wish I could afford to order food every day. I cannot. So I have to cook for myself which I have never really done before, but as an adult I had to learn.
>There are such restaurants around here in Europe but they are super expensive, so you are better off doing it on your own at home.
There's a bougie breakfast/lunch place near me like that and it's wildly successful, seems like every year they open another location.
The joke conspiracy theory in my office is that the menu is made by a world class french chef who's mocking the median target/whole foods shopper who is the customer by making stuff that's objectively garbage and incompatible with the fundamentals of cooking and papering over it with sheer skill.
"haha ze dumb white wimmen want kale, I put kale in ze mac and cheese and I make them like it"
"Quinoa is trendy you say? I put quinoa in your motherfucking eggs".
Obviously I'm leaving out details but those are actual examples of combinations. Now the food doesn't suck per say, but it ain't great either. And yet the place is wildly successful.
Most people aren't interested in a stew that you have to cook for 3 days easily. Even BBQ people expect low and slow to finish on the same day it starts. :p
I think you are having a too black and white opinion on the issue. As a founder it is actually cheaper for me to spend 1000$ on restaurant and take-out food per week than wasting time cooking for myself. Plus you support local businesses by eating out
It is cheaper to spend 1000$ on a restaurant than to take an hour or two to cook a very low-effort food that takes max 2 hours to cook and lasts for 3 days? I'm genuinely baffled.
Personally I would not call it a waste of 2 hours.
Either way, if you can afford it, then Godspeed. :D
I definitely do not have 1000 USD per week for food. I do not even have 100 USD per week for food.
I personally don’t get takeout or eat at restaurants but there are certainly many cases in the US where it would be (far) cheaper. You say 2 hours for 3 days (so 40 mins/day or about 5h/week) which I think is on the low side. If you spend an average of 90 minutes a day on everything related to food (grocery shopping, recipes, cooking, cleanup, dishes) that’s 10.5 hr/week. In any case, that’s between 5-10h/week or $75-150/week at $15/hr, enough to pay the extra over groceries for cheap fast food. At $100/hr you could easily buy nicer food with the time savings, much like the GP comment.
But of course the math is different for everyone. Some people love to cook and some hate it. Some people like things that are fairly hard to cook (Korean, Japanese, Indian.) Some people need a different dinner each night and some are happy eating a giant pot of one bulk-cooked thing across days or weeks. Personally, I occasionally cook elaborate dinners, but for weeknights I find that a rice cooker plus frozen vegetables is a nice middle ground. Variety, hot fresh food, nutritious, and also very little time required. That, and eating with friends and family and trading off cooking.
Speaking of, I have difficulties gaining weight. I would have to eat a lot. The only time I could gain weight was when I spent most of my day eating. I am not sure how other people do it. I do not have that amount of time to eat food.
While homemade rice and pinto beans is $9.26 ... when you add in the time for shopping, travel, prep, and cleanup it has an it has an effective cost of $41.80
If you take off the cost of going to groceries or that someone can spend the time to cook rather than work (or relax), then that $9.26 is the price you see.
Similarly, homemade chicken dinner is $13.78 ... or $46.32 with additional costs of living factored in.
McDonald's is $27.89 (in 2011... it's more now ... but then all the above numbers are too)... but the total cost is $36.03.
If you could get paid $16.27 rather than doing grocery shopping and the time spent cooking or cleaning then it is cheaper to eat at McDonald's than to have a home cooked meal.
For many people, cooking (and cleaning) is only economical if the time spent doing it can be completely discounted. If I have to spend 30 minutes in front of the stove not do other things, or 5-10 minutes cleaning up afterwards, that's time not doing other things that I'd enjoy. For families with kids, that sometimes means that young children are left unattended for an hour (not always viable). Getting fast food, on the other hand is has no cooking or time spent cleaning and furthermore has a good chance of having something that the kids want to eat.
"Just learn to cook" isn't always an option for every household.
Eating out for every meal isn't $1000 per week. If I went to the local diner, that would be about $200 / person / week. If I got pizza every day that would be down to about $100 / person / week.
At Whole Foods prices, $4.29 gets you 8000 calories of rice. Beans are more expensive per calorie but still very cheap. $9 would get you more beans and rice than a family of four could eat in an entire day.
I have a friend who, once he started steadily making mid-high six figures in Silicon Valley, began taking the HOV lane on his commute into work, despite driving alone. The calculus was easy. Assuming $500,000 salary (I think he made more), 8 hour days, 50 weeks a year, that's $250/hour. As a manager, he couldn't shuffle his schedule around very easily, unlike when he was programming and could come in late and leave late, or when you're a young programmer and come in early and leave late (or just sleep under your desk). The 30+ minutes saved during his commute each day was well worth the amortized cost of some tickets, and that's before accounting for the stress saved, marginal value on the dollar, additional personal time, etc. Though, when he told me this he hadn't yet accumulated many, if any, tickets, and I don't think automated occupant detection had been installed.
In the past couple of years there's now a toll option for some HOV lanes, which is how it should be. He's generally a very conscientious person, but time is money, particularly so when you're well remunerated.
> I think it's a weird concept of a society where all the parts of it with money are directing people to do one thing - but at the same time, the people are expected to do the exact opposite and it's their own fault if they follow the coercion...
You've summed up the foundation of our entire consumer economy quite well. And people might be able to devote their attention to several types of things they need and not fall prey to adversarial pop culture for those specific things, but nobody is capable of doing that for everything.
That doesn’t make sense in any way. People eat what they learn to eat and what’s available. Choice doesn’t enter into the picture unless something sort of bumps you out of your normal headspace and makes you think about it in the first place.
> Where is the next cheap lentils/legumes/nuts/yogurt/vegetables fast food restaurant?
Nowhere, because people prefer to pay for excess sat fats, sugar, carbs, and salt.
> I think it's a weird concept of a society where all the parts of it with money are directing people to do one thing - but at the same time, the people are expected to do the exact opposite and it's their own fault if they follow the coercion...
Every single health resource in society says not to eat excess sat fats, sugar, carbs, and salt. And avoid alcohol and tobacco. And gambling.
But people like short term benefits, even if they know there are long term consequences. And society is composed of people. Maybe GLP-1 pills can fix this error in the psyche.
There are plenty of these restaurants all around the world, they’re just not cheap. Poke bowls and salads and Sweetgreen are very popular, go to any downtown anywhere. But where McDonald’s uses shelf-stable, globally sourcable bulk materials, these places are the opposite. Both Coke and salads are mostly water, but the Coke ships as a concentrate and the salad ships whole. You can sign one contract and get a regular, reliable delivery of Coke to your stores in Houston, Anchorage and everywhere between; good luck doing that with salad. There also aren’t any great huge-markup upsells with healthy foods; the closest thing is guac, which costs a ton, meanwhile McDonalds can upsell you on fries or coke (which are basically free!) There’s the trend factor: Baja Blast is catchy and you can rotate it out for another neon soda in a week, how do you do that with arugula? Artificial ingredients provide more of a moat/proprietary edge; it is legally and practically trivial to copy a healthy sandwich. Healthy foods are more difficult to eat while walking or driving, so you need more seating. Then there’s the prep time, the addictive factor, calorie density…
I am without a kitchen for the last month (remodel) and I just use my microwave. There's nothing magic about cooking. Take cold things and make them hot. How are people managing to be this daft? You can cook rice, pasta, lentils, etc in a bowl and a microwave.
Pollan touches on this in The Omnivore's Dilemma. The low price of a burger is an illusion because the real costs to the environment and public health are externalized, making fast food artificially cheap due to indirect subsidies on corn byproducts and other animal feed. Healthy food competes on a totally different cost base.
There's also the split between eating with agency and just consuming which requires a top down solution. Unless the government stops subsidizing meat and corn subproducts linked to health issues the majority of people will always gravitate towards the cheapest calories available.
one thing i miss about living in a city is being near a hare krishna restaurant or similar hindu place, like ones run by the sikh community. cheap, healthy and yum. some would offer free food to homeless or if you went to one at a temple it was pay-by-donation. sometimes the donation was just being there and singing the hare krishna song with them :D
Weirdly, I do get ads for veggies, but it could be driven by my recent research spree on vegetarian recipes to have great food across the holidays for my mostly vegetarian family. I may have skewed “the algorithm “
I went to the grocery store and bought six meals worth of whole foods for two people two weeks ago. Rice, veggies, two fish meals, two meals based on eggs (I already had the eggs), one meal based on chicken. Thirty grams of protein for each meal. I had staples in my pantry already. I aimed for 2200 calories per person per day. I didn't buy organic because it's more expensive. This wasn't Whole Foods or some bougie store. I didn't buy ANY beverages.
It was $170 with my loyalty card.
Six meals at McDonald's is... Just about $35. Chipotle? $110, maybe less. Chick-fil-A? Under $50. And none of them need to be cooked or taste like wet cardboard.
$35 for 6 meals for two people at McDonalds? What?
Where I live, one meal at McDonalds is about $12. So 6 * 2 * 12 = $144. Not that much of a difference.
Also, if you aimed for 2200 calories per person per day with that $170, then it isn't really fair comparing to a single McDonald's meal, is it? It sounds like buying whole foods is cheaper.
Does McDonalds not have the $5 McValue Meals where you live? In the Bay Area, $5 + tax gets you a McChicken, 4 chicken nuggets, small fries, and small drink. $6 to upgrade to a McDouble cheeseburger instead of the McChicken. Altogether ~1000 calories per meal.
That's darn good value for your money, at least for a prepared hot meal that's convenient in most locales. $5 for ~1000 calories, plus the ingredients are fortified; the lack of fiber notwithstanding, it's not a horrible thing to eat several times a week. I live in SF where McDonalds is not very convenient, and where food prices, including prepared takeout, aren't too bad if you know where to go--my wife sometimes brings empty casserole dishes to one of our friendly neighborhood Chinese restaurants to fill up, without paying extra, though for us it's fortunately more about convenience when raising two kids with a bunch of extracurriculars than it is about penny pinching.
FWIW, I love cooking and cook as much as I can, usually at least 3 times a week, which with leftovers means 4 or 5 dinners. But between cooking, cleaning, and shopping, it can be be quite time consuming, and excepting myself, the rest of the family isn't keen on eating beans 3 nights a week. (I'm only allowed to make Red Beans & Rice a few times a year. Ditto for similar big pot meals :(
Have you used the app? You may need to use the app to get the McValue and similar lower-priced menu items. It's a brilliant price discrimination strategy.
I don't even have a smartphone. Why should I put up with these insane prices even with a discount by tracking, when I can buy the same thing for <1€ at the grocery store that is literally in the same building 10meters away.
Using the app a small soda at McDonald's is ~$1 ($1.14 near me, but that may include the SF soda tax). Less than $2 for a large for those beckoning diabetes.
But soda is definitely cheaper elsewhere, and drinks, even soda, are usually a profit center for almost any restaurant, but a loss leader at grocery stores. I remember in the mid 1990s when Coca-Cola and then Pepsi were trying to stem the tide of a decline in sales. They drastically lowered prices through certain channels, particularly grocery stores and, most memorably, vending machines outside grocery stores, where the price dropped from $0.50-$0.75 to $0.25 for a 12oz can. Almost overnight poor and working class people switched from cheaper alternatives like Kool-Aid (which was healthier--much less sugar!) to Coca-Cola and Pepsi.
I agree the app is exceptionally inconvenient, unless someone else in the car is ordering, as well as privacy intrusive. But my point is merely that McDonald's is trying to cater to price-sensitive consumers without taking a hit to their revenue, and doing so more effectively than any other fast food chain.
Sorry, I didn't multiply by two; it would have been $70. I checked the nutrition facts on the menu, it was a mix of meal deals and had nearly the same calorie counts that I was aiming for. Still less than half the cost of groceries (minus all the food I already had).
But if we're talking about the balance of macronutrients, I'd love to hear how you manage to beat the cost of fast food with legumes/nuts/yogurt and don't have a huge percentage of your calories from fat. 40g of protein from almonds is nearly a thousand calories and 90g of fat. 40g of protein from black beans is five Chipotle bowl orders worth of beans or four cups of fava beans. 35g of protein from nonfat Greek yogurt is nearly 3/4 of a pound of yogurt. If you can't stand to eat nearly a pound of nonfat yogurt in one sitting like most of the population, you'll only get 30g of protein from a 32oz tub and spend as much as a McDonald's sandwich (and get the same amount of fat).
I don't think animal products are all that expensive tbh. Chicken, milk, yogurt, eggs are all really cheap if you consider the protien content.
Completely unbeatable value especially factoring in time and convenience and heartiness is picking up a rotisserie chicken and a bag of frozen veggies.
Liver is also very affordable and extremely nutritious.
Of the four animal products you list there, only one is meat, and its a cheap meat...
Meat is not all that expensive for protein and comparatively quick and easy to cook, agreed, but the cheapest option is still veg.
Liver, and offal in general, is much underrated for both taste and health. A lot of people in the UK just do not eat it and its becoming hard to find (liver the common, but other things are not).
At least in my area, good quality meat isn't any more expensive than good quality produce. By "good meat" I mean at least pasture raised, and by "good produce" I mean at least organic.
I didnt vote one way or another but its odd to compare the cost of meat to the cost of produce. Far different calorie density and nutritional profile.
Maybe your point is that you spend about as much on meat as you do on produce, but that depends on your specific diet since they are not equivalent food groups.
The prior comments were discussing the cost of healthy meals.
Calories aren't a good measure of anything beyond burning your food. Unless your body works similar to a steam engine, it really doesn't matter how much energy you can put into water by setting your food on fire.
My point was simply that I spend roughly the cost of quality meat in my area is on par with or cheaper than quality produce given what I need to put into a meal to feel full and satiated. My point isn't that I eat only meat, I don't know the last time I had a meal that didn't also include vegetables or bread, for example. I was only calling out that one doesn't need to stick to vegetables for a reasonably priced healthy meal, at least where I live.
Also, no offense to anyone, but hearing that you should eat lentils and beans as the main for a healthy meal is as appealing as hearing you should eat only cardboard for a healthy meal.
It actually costs a lot to do those things. Money is not the only important cost. Social cost and time cost are also important. If you eat all your meals at home alone, while your friends go out to restaurants, that's a cost. If you spend time cooking from scratch instead of using processed food, that's a cost.
> It costs very little to eat mostly lentils/legumes/nuts/yogurt/vegetables, and drink mostly water without carbs dissolved in it, but no business is going to survive selling those things
This is like every new fast casual business in Manhattan in the last decade.
> Chipotle, Cava, and Sweetgreen reported earnings in the last two weeks, and all three reported the same problem: Diners age 25 to 35 are visiting their stores less frequently as they pinch pennies.
very stupid question, why dont we have a startup say from india that ships container full of diabetes meds directly to people that need them and a person in the USA who handles the distribution. Even with shipping cost included, I dont think it ll be more expensive
Regulations make this very difficult. Take a look at FDA Section 804. Startup cost is in the low tens or hundreds of thousands just to get the application accepted and then the ongoing yearly cost is in the millions. Currently, the FDA makes it very difficult for new competitors to enter the market because of these really high fees. This is part of, but not the whole, reason why drugs cost so much in the US.
That’s not because of the FDA, that’s because of CEPS. If the USG negotiated drug prices the way France does, there’d be far less disparity in average pricing. (Given the continual litany of safety, efficacy, and dosage control issues with imported drugs, FDA isn’t regulating them enough, largely because the inspection budget just isn’t there.)
I can only speak for the UK but for quite a while now, McD's has become an uninviting experience, with miserable staff, menu screens that visibly tell you to hurry the f*k up and choose the product. Not to mention customers vying with delivery drivers for orders. I think the problem applies to all-income customers.
At least from my perspective, COVID broke everything. People are more awful, quality is more awful, and prices are way up. I dread even eating out anymore as I fully expect to overpay for bad food and service.
There's an argument to be made that inflation is ultimately the driver of all three complaints, but boy did that all happen seemingly overnight.
Absolutely. I feel bad for young people growing up in this broken world. They will never even know what was taken from them.
I realize that I’m probably going to get dogpiled for saying it, but I think that the response to COVID (ie lockdowns) did far more damage than the disease itself.
I don't understand why people still blame the lockdowns. When the lockdowns started, it was unknown how dangerous Covid actually was. It could have killed 20%, or reduced lifespan by 30%, or something. Nobody knew. It takes 20/20 hindsight to blame lockdowns for what was a generational catastrophe. It's like blaming shelter in place requirements instead of the bombing of the reich.
To be fair to the parent, despite what they think about the lockdown decision now, it says nothing about whether or not they thought it made any sense then.
It's perferctly possible to believe that the lockdown was a reasonable decision with what was known then, and still believe that the lockdown is to blame for certain unavoidable consequences down the line. Again, the parent might not believe this as well but their point can be taken separately fron your complaint.
Since several generations of Americans are not familiar with a drawn out sustained attack on acceptable cost-of-living parameters, the observation that "people are more awful" should be familiar to many people who lived and endured in places that have had decades-long deteriorating econonmies. If the economy or subjective economic perception had not tanked post-lockdown, the awfulness of people would be much less pronounced I believe.
Nobody knew, that is true. But not everyone was in agreement, it only seemed that way because dissenting voices were silenced. Do some research and you’ll find that there were plenty of people predicting bad outcomes from the lockdowns. I was not one of them, but they exist for sure.
From day one, I was hearing about suggestions of social distancing and NK1 masks would do 80% of the work for you. It took waaay to long for that information to disseminate.
My standing statement is: The idea of a pandemic was so well established that Hollywood made multiple bad movies about the idea.
The other key piece that gets magically brushed aside is that there was a pandemic during the Obama administration. Obviously not as severe, but nonetheless a warning.
Yet we were somehow unprepared just a few years later? And those same incompetent entities and experts were the source of our inflation understanding and response to COVID?
I think not. Very little passes the smell test. It didn’t them. It’s even less so - if you look & listen - now.
What you’re failing to acknowledge is the public was right. It was “leadership” across the board that failed. It’s been documented and continues to be documented. It’s simply not advertised, else the lack of trust gap would widen and be more than justified.
The failure(s), we are worse off for it at this point. The handling of the COVID 19 pandemic was as misguided and anemic as Bush’s “Keep shopping” (i.e., his advise to the country in response to 9/11).
Blaming those without power for the shortcomings of those with power is revisionist history bullshit. T
It’s not anti-social, it is pro-social. To stand for the right of people to live freely, for children to get an education and to socialize with their peers, for businesses to serve their communities and provide jobs for people to feed their families.
You are the anti-social one, who would condemn entire populations to house arrest based upon dubious-at-best ideas. In my city, even outdoor gatherings of more than five people were prohibited. It was so absurd as to be almost comical, if the consequences weren’t so tragic.
Are you truly blind to the damage wrought by shutting down the entire world at the flip of a switch? Children are in crisis, inflation skyrocketed, people cannot afford to live, buy homes, start a family, get an education… and you have the nerve to call me anti-social?
And what did it accomplish? Did it actually save lives? I think not, especially when compared to targeted protection and support of vulnerable populations (elderly, immune compromised) rather than a blanket shutdown of the entire country.
Once this issue became a red vs blue thing, everyone collectively turned their brains off. The above commenter is a prime example.
Basic logic here: the things you’re defending only work when the people who make them possible aren’t getting knocked out by uncontrolled spread.
Kids don’t get an education if teachers and staff are sick. Businesses don’t serve communities if workers are out in waves. Families don’t stay afloat if workplaces shut down because too many people are ill.
You can absolutely critique the execution and the results. Plenty of it was messy. But pretending that doing nothing was somehow pro social ignores the obvious: collective safety is what keeps all those freedoms functioning in the first place.
Early on , it was clear the rate of covid complications did not merit the lockdowns. I was an early supporter of lockdowns and an even earlier supporter of ending them. It was a cold... Can we say that now? A relatively moderate flu like cold for the vast majority of people. It did not merit shutting down or slowing global trade
Early on, there wasn't any lockdown, so instead we could see whole villages and regions being in emergency state, with the military handling the logistics of moving coffins around, because there were so many. The lockdowns after 2 years were avoidable, but the first one absolutely wasn't. I'm quite content with my governments actions in the beginning and I'm not alone, the governmental approval during the first lockdown absolutely skyrocketed (>10%).
When did I say that doing nothing was the correct course of action? Oh wait - I didn’t! But it sure makes a convenient straw man for you to argue against since you are incapable of addressing my actual position, which I contrasted hamfisted lockdowns against: the targeted protection of vulnerable groups such as the elderly or immune compromised people, rather than the blanket shutdown of the entire country.
> Kids don’t get an education if teachers and staff are sick. Businesses don’t serve communities if workers are out in waves. Families don’t stay afloat if workplaces shut down because too many people are ill.
Do you not realize that the virus is still out there in the world? And that we’re not locking down? And hardly anyone is wearing a mask, social distancing, or getting vaccine boosters?
And yet, somehow, we don’t have piles of dead bodies being cremated in the streets by FEMA workers in hazmat suits. Curious, isn’t it?
It couldn’t be any more obvious that the lockdowns were totally unnecessary and a giant mistake. Just take a look around.
It almost seems like the truly dangerous epidemic is of people forming such strong attachments to emotional dogma and propaganda that they are unable to perform kindergarten-level logical deduction.
Being against lockdowns from day 1 wasn’t some principled pro social stance. Day 1 was when we had no vaccines, no immunity, no treatments, and hospitals were already buckling from basic spread. Opposing mitigation at that moment wasn’t foresight, it was ignoring exponential math.
You can absolutely argue the execution was messy and the fallout was real. Lots of people agree with that. But holding up early blanket opposition as if it was the reasonable position is just rewriting the conditions we were actually in. The only reason things look manageable now is because immunity and treatments exist. Day 1 without them didn’t magically support the world staying fully open.
> Being against lockdowns from day 1 wasn’t some principled pro social stance.
As much as people like you want to position yourselves as objective arbiters of morality, you’re anything but.
> we had no vaccines, no immunity, no treatments
So? Covid is simply not that dangerous for otherwise healthy people.
> hospitals were already buckling from basic spread
That speaks more to how brittle, under-resourced, and plagued by perverse incentives our healthcare system is, than to the threat posed by covid.
> But holding up early blanket opposition as if it was the reasonable position is just rewriting the conditions we were actually in.
You’re saying that opposing the total annihilation of societal norms, behaviors, and patterns is… unreasonable? Do you hear yourself? It’s so painfully obvious that your “thinking” is purely motivated by your desire to be morally and intellectually superior than those you bitterly attack. I can’t fathom how your self awareness is so poor that you can’t see it.
> The only reason things look manageable now is because immunity and treatments exist.
Pure bullshit. The virus was simply never that big of a threat to a healthy person, full stop. You live in a filter bubble-fueled alternate reality where you indulge your most basic and animalistic emotions of fear, anger, and hatred of “others”.
Get a grip! Practically nobody is getting vaccine boosters or any other anti-covid measure. If your fallback is to point to herd immunity, then you’re effectively aligning yourself with the Swedish approach.
Your comment above was sufficient, nothing here added additional meaningful information, it's not worth your time or the parent's to go down this road. It wasn't believed to be a flu in the beginning and I think the excess death stats bear that out. Once the people tracking it think it's equivalent to the flu, rigid policy makes less sense.
I wish people would just accept that public policy need not align with what's right for them personally based own their health own situation. I can simultaneously understand why a public policy of lockdowns on Day 1 makes sense, while at the same time fight for exceptions to the rules due to my personal situation. Everyone I think is aware that the future is personalised medicine, that we're at the very beginning of that awareness, and that the current state of the art in medicine is very crude from that perspective.
Hell, if we had infinite money we should have just sent anyone 60 plus or in ill health to Florida, Texas, SoCal and Mexico for a 6-months/year vacation and mandated that they try to spend most of their time outdoors.
This isn't about the later stuff. My statement was that being against lockdowns is an anti-social viewpoint and that you were rightly attacked for being against them. Nothing you've written challenges that. In a spherical vacuum of a society with no left right blue or China, no Epstein files, a pathogen has been introduced to your society. You don't know anything about it at all. It could be Ebola, it could be a total nothing buger. What do you do in response? Do you stay open and infect your populace, or do you lock down? It's a huge disruption, to everything and everyone. In the face of the unknown, what do you chose to do?
In the face of not knowing something, do we try and be safe, or do we say YOLO and fuck everyone who's role puts them in harms way?
> Nothing you've written challenges that
Apparently your reading comprehension is low
> You don't know anything about it at all. It could be Ebola, it could be a total nothing buger.
Except that’s just not true. You’re just inventing scenarios to scare yourself and others. Covid is a respiratory coronavirus, they are extremely thoroughly studied and well understood. We didn’t “know nothing” about it. That’s just a total fabrication that you invented because you’ve been thoroughly trounced in this debate.
> What do you do in response?
For the last time, TARGETED PROTECTION OF VULNERABLE POPULATIONS.
> Do you stay open and infect your populace, or do you lock down?
False dichotomy, see above paragraph where I once again spoonfeed you basic common sense.
Locking down is the extreme position, and should require an extreme amount of evidence advocating for it.
Don’t bother responding. You’ve made zero interesting points, and rely solely on sensational rhetoric, accusations, false dichotomy, straw men, and ad hominem. There isn’t an ounce of logic or maturity in any of your comments. Thus, I’ve grown bored of walloping you.
But you must admit it was a gamble at the time. My mother got Covid early, before lockdowns. She spent a week in the hospital and almost died. She then had a stroke, she can no longer walk. She also got cancer, and now can barely talk. Please don't tell me it was not deadly dangerous to older folks.
If the bird flu comes, and with it a mortality rate of 50%, and there is a vaccine, everybody will be locked down and forced to take the vaccine. It wont matter what anybody's opinions are about the possible harmful effects of lockdowns or vaccines.
I seem to remember that Sweden applied the WHO recommendations as they were written and didn’t lock down because the damage of locking down is huge and everybody dog pilled on them about how it was stupid.
Turn out their excess mortality was quickly better than the other Nordic countries and their economy and mental health did better if I remember correctly.
People should complain more about the lockdowns. Most of them were extremely poorly implemented and stupidly managed.
Norway and Sweden took opposite approaches in 2020—Norway used strict lockdowns, tight border controls, and intensive outbreak tracking, while Sweden kept society largely open. The results weren’t subtle. As the Juul paper puts it: “That resulted in 477 COVID-19 deaths (Norway) and 9,737 (Sweden) in 2020, respectively.”
Source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8807990/
You are only looking at 2020 and posting a source from 2021. Now look at 2021, 2022 and 2023. That’s the whole point. Sweden had slightly more excess mortality the first year especially amongst the elderly but they ended up doing similar or slightly better than their neighbours if you look at the whole pandemic.
They did significantly better on other metrics however like youth mental health and education.
I posted a ton of sources in another comment.
It’s not that surprising anyway. It’s not like Sweden did a weird and surprising experiment. They just stuck to the already existing plans designed to contain influenza while everyone else freaked out after Imperial College published their dubious models and started acting irrationally.
That’s not what the Nordic data show. Sweden didn’t “end up doing better.” It had by far the worst COVID-19 mortality in 2020, because it kept society open while its neighbors used strict controls.
The only reason Sweden’s later all-cause mortality looks “similar” is mortality displacement: COVID killed so many frail, high-risk people in 2020 that Sweden had fewer dementia and respiratory deaths in 2021–22. Nordic registry papers explicitly note this. Sweden didn’t outperform anyone. Its early losses were just so large that later excess deaths looked artificially low.
> That’s not what the Nordic data show. Sweden didn’t “end up doing better.” It had by far the worst COVID-19 mortality in 2020, because it kept society open while its neighbors used strict controls.
> The only reason Sweden’s later all-cause mortality looks “similar” is mortality displacement: COVID killed so many frail, high-risk people in 2020 that Sweden had fewer dementia and respiratory deaths in 2021–22. Nordic registry papers explicitly note this. Sweden didn’t outperform anyone. Its early losses were just so large that later excess deaths looked artificially low.
Exactly, that's exactly what I said and what the data show. We do agree except obviously there is absolutely nothing artificial about it. You can't discount the data because you don't like what it shows.
So, indeed, what the data show is that other countries barely postponned death despite Sweden having a dry tinder effect in 2020 - plenty of people vulnerable to respiratory diseases - following two years of mild flu. Sweden has indeed less excess mortality in 2021 and 2022 and tellingly the overall number is in every way comparable when it's not slightly better than the other Nordic countries. Sweden early losses in 2020 weren't even that large by the way.
To which I reach the inevitable conclusion, lockdowns were entirely useless, massive distruption of society - disproportionately impacting the youngest with schools closure - to gain mere weeks of life for the most vulnerables. Focusing on shielding the most vulnerables and putting in place containment habits were totally adequate counter measures. Once again, this is not in any way surprising, these were the WHO recommendations for containing an influenza pandemic.
To the people downvoting me, you are welcome to actually look at the numbers. [1]
Feel free to read about what it shows about lockdowns. [2] [3] [4]
I understand that the US has somehow turned this topic into a political debate and people hate facing that they might have been wrong but I am thankfully not from this part of the world and the evidence is not in favour of lockdowns ever being such a good idea. If you read the BBC article, you will see that we have reached such a polarised and abusive moment in time that even some experts are scared commenting on the available data.
When I was younger, I thought of dems as the party of logic and reason, and repubs as bible-thumpers. I don’t think this was entirely wrong, but the unthinking dogmatism of left-leaning people about lockdowns did a lot to disabuse me of that notion.
Anecdotal, my uncle, several friends' relatives died from COVID during those lockdowns. I don't know / heard anyone died because of flu (in my extended circle of people I know)
Most people are not a "hospitalized older adult". Yet they treated everyone, regardless of age, gender, health as if they were on death's door. The lock downs were absolutely overkill and went on far, far too long.
Propaganda? COVID was the third most common verified cause of death in the US in the first 18 months after the lockdown started in March, and that's despite the lockdown. That's 10x more deaths per month than the particularly bad flu last year. Do you not remember the morgue trucks? The whole health system was overwhelmed.
Too many people either never saw or forgot about the morgue trucks. Or the footage that showed flocks of vultures circling over south american cities from afar. Desperate people coughing and dying in their own cars in hospitals' driveways. Body bags littering the floors of hospitals in third world countries.
All of that happened, but it went right over a lot of people's heads, and nobody talks about it anymore because it became such a sore and divisive topic and we're all glad it's over.
I remember well the video showing a whole column of military trucks transporting bodies out of the city of Bergamo, Italy, on March 19th, 2020. I took a screenshot because the magnitude of what this meant gave me shivers. It was one of those moments when the world seemed to stop for a minute and was changed forever like on 9/11, to me at least.
Ever since, I can't find much common ground for discussion with people claiming it was just a flu. You either acknowledge the difference or you don't.
So then why isn't it happening now? Why did Israel not fare better despite their much higher vaccination rates than Gaza without any vaccinations? It was never a pandemic and never anything more than a severe flu.
Yep, mock it all you like but it's because you can't explain it and it would make you too uncomfortable too acknowledge you don't know what you're talking about at all. Follow the school of fish into the net. Have at it.
Real people, citizen journalists documented empty hospitals and ERs with no activity while the mass media tried to sell you on "morgue trucks" lol. Trump got that whole ship sent to NYC and they never used it.
I walked by the morgue trucks, so no. You've been blinded by propaganda made by the same people who "document" alien encounters. If hospitals were actually empty the rates of healthcare worker burnout and subsequent shortage wouldn't have happened.
Maybe, outside the nursing homes that racked up tons of excess deaths due to Andrew Cuomo's policies and later cover-ups.
But at hospitals? I'm sure you can point out a few specific times and locations but on the whole, they simply were not overwhelmed with Covid deaths to the point where anything like "morgue trucks" were needed.
For me yes. I'm not the same, much more depressed. I was already prone to it but two years of home imprisonment while living alone really damaged me. I also have a really bad reaction to the masks due to a youth trauma where I nearly choked. Being forced to trigger that memory daily was terrible. I did wear them of course (I'm in Europe so we had quite heavy restrictions). Maybe it was necessary for society but for me personally the damage was much higher than the benefit. On the bright side when it was over in 2022 it did make me go out again and I go out partying every weekend until 6am still. That probably wouldn't have happened because I'm in my 50s.
I think the measures were a bit overblown though some were necessary. But shit like curfews was ridiculous. It made contagion worse because the shops were only open during the day so everyone had to go there during a much shorter time. So they were always chock full of customers, exactly the thing you don't want during a pandemic.
It can be that social order is partly maintained by conformance and a bunch of people found out that there aren't consequences for choosing not to conform.
In the local facebook rants group, any time someone posts about someone doing something that is mildly antisocial (a reasonable thing to rant about), there's always several comments saying "So what, who cares".
Like sure, it isn't the end of the world to park like an asshole, but it would suck if everybody did it, so it's better if no one does it. And it's the same for dozens of other minor little things you might encounter in a given week.
Normal people were shown that they had no real bearing on the world, and were forced to live without being rushed for a year or in some places two. Without the need to constantly look over their shoulders for encroaching crises people started to examine the world around them. They had time to enjoy things without constantly battling with mental, emotional, or physical exhaustion that lead to procrastination just to recover a little bit. So many realized they were being deprived of not only recreation, but fulfilling their basic needs outside of food and sleep. So they shifted from fearing the systems that deprived them to loathing them and the people who administrated them, and resolved to deny contributing to those systems as much as possible. That's why there were so many sweeping changes starting in May of 2020, not in the way the systems of the world were run, but in the way the public at large engaged with them.
Much of what's been happening over the last five years can be compared to the behaviours of those suffering through trauma after long term abuse. Some continued the cycle against new targets, ignoring a collective truth. Others realized they were victims of the cycle and chose to work towards safeguards that would prevent it from continuing. Another group learned about the cycle and thought they would benefit from being new instigators for it.
That's like asking "why would one car crash that lasted a few seconds change your driving habits for years?" - or perhaps your entire outlook on life, the consequences of not appreciating the things around you in the moment, the realization that life is fleeting, that maybe "getting to work on time" shouldn't be as high a priority as it once was, etc, etc. All it takes is one major shake-up for people to be changed, often for life.
It wasn't a few months, it was a few years of back-and-forth political and corporate shenanigans with a new narrative every few months that the $CURRENT_THING crowd happily ran along with.
January 2020: there is nothing to afraid of, the new disease is mostly harmless and affects only the elderly and immunocompromised. Closing down borders is xenophobic. March 2020: do not go outside unless critically necessary and if you violate the rules, we will severely punish you May 2020: it's fine to have large public gatherings for BLM protests.
February 2020: masks do nothing and actually are harmful unless you are trained to use a mask, do not buy any masks. April 2020: wear a mask if you go outside, or you kill everybody else. Your own fault that you don't have a mask.
Summer of 2020: look, it's actually so great that we are all working remotely now, the nature is healing, all the emissions are so much reduced, this is the new future! Summer of 2023: everybody back to the office, real estate is suffering. People who joined during COVID time? Your contract is now altered, pray we do not alter it any further.
The promises around vaccines, printing money and "loans for struggling businesses" are even more stories of their own. Beats me why after a few years of these kind of shenanigans people would generally get tired of other people.
I certainly got tired of the people who decided the answer was to become antisocial and not even try to mitigate the risks, and then shame anyone who did. Lost a bit of my faith in humanity. Well, more than a bit, I think.
And all those years could have been avoided by treating a new unknown disease as it should have been treated instead of trusting China's word on it. Go figure.
>I certainly got tired of the people who decided the answer was to become antisocial and not even try to mitigate the risks, and then shame anyone who did. Lost a bit of my faith in humanity. Well, more than a bit, I think.
The masks didn't do shit and neither did vaccinations. It was all scaremongering. Don't you get it? Israel had nearly 100% vaccination rate but didn't do any better than Gaza which had none. Masks don't prevent the spread at all. The 6 foot distancing rule was just made up. Why do people not understand this? Is it willful ignorance?
I think it might be. In my experience, the ignorance goes together very closely with political ideology. That also ends up being a pretty good predictor of who thinks masks were supposed to protect the wearer versus who thinks they were to try and slow down the transmission rate from infected people.
Anyway ...
West Bank and Gaza: 941.84 deaths per million people, 29% vaccination rate by end of 2021.
Israel: 887.20 deaths per million people, 64% vaccination rate by end of 2021.
>That also ends up being a pretty good predictor of who thinks masks were supposed to protect the wearer versus who thinks they were to try and slow down the transmission rate from infected people.
You're projecting. I fully understand the goal, but all the evidence shows they did nothing (air still escapes, people wear them incorrectly, the virus was never even proven to be airborne). They were telling people to take their masks off between bites/eating at restaurants. It was security theater. People who don't understand this just take safety in following the herd. They certainly aren't exhibiting critical thinking skills.
You also don't understand how to compare apples to apples. How did those death rates change from 2021 compared to previous years? I bet it was virtually unchanged. That's the point. Compare Palestine 2021 to Palestine 2015 and Israel 2021 to Israel 2015. The vaccine saved no one. If the vaccine was truly effective, you would see Israel vastly outperforming Palestine starting in 2021. Did it? And how is 63 per 1,000,000 a statistically significant number even if your argument were true? I would likely attribute that to other conditions like lack of resources compared to Israel. Otherwise, you're telling me Israel vaccinated more than 2x as many people and only saved 63 people per 1,000,000 and you think that proves your point?
Saying "google them yourself" removes the ability for people to refute you and your stated position here.
A surgical mask is most often used not to protect the surgeon but rather the patient from transmission from the surgeon to the patient.
I would suggest by refuting Unmasking the surgeons: the evidence base behind the use of facemasks in surgery - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4480558/ which describes several studies about transmission from the surgeon to the patient.
Face masks were suggested not only for protection of the individual wearing them, but also as a layer of defense for transmission from someone who may be asymptomatic at the time. As such, face masks were in part to prevent transmission from someone who is in public and might be contagious and not know it in addition to than preventing someone wearing it from contracting an airborne disease (though this may require a higher grade of filtration).
> Wearing a mask can help lower the risk of respiratory virus transmission. When worn by a person with an infection, masks reduce the spread of the virus to others. Masks can also protect wearers from breathing in infectious particles from people around them.
> ...
> Generally, masks can help act as a filter to reduce the number of germs you breathe in or out. Their effectiveness can vary against different viruses, for example, based on the size of the virus. When worn by a person who has a virus, masks can reduce the chances they spread it to others. Masks can also protect wearers from inhaling germs; this type of protection typically comes from better fitting masks (for example, N95 or KN95 respirators).
Note that the first point is that the mask is to prevent the spread from the individual wearing the mask.
> Reducing disease spread requires two things: limiting contacts of infected individuals via physical distancing and other measures and reducing the transmission probability per contact. The preponderance of evidence indicates that mask wearing reduces transmissibility per contact by reducing transmission of infected respiratory particles in both laboratory and clinical contexts. Public mask wearing is most effective at reducing spread of the virus when compliance is high. Given the current shortages of medical masks, we recommend the adoption of public cloth mask wearing, as an effective form of source control, in conjunction with existing hygiene, distancing, and contact tracing strategies. Because many respiratory particles become smaller due to evaporation, we recommend increasing focus on a previously overlooked aspect of mask usage: mask wearing by infectious people (“source control”) with benefits at the population level, rather than only mask wearing by susceptible people, such as health care workers, with focus on individual outcomes.
> Johnson et al. (70) found that no influenza could be detected by RT-PCR on sample plates at 20 cm distance from coughing patients wearing masks, while it was detectable without mask for seven of the nine patients. Milton et al. (71) found surgical masks produced a 3.4-fold (95% CI: 1.8 to 6.3) reduction in viral copies in exhaled breath by 37 influenza patients. Vanden Driessche et al. (72) used an improved sampling method based on a controlled human aerosol model. By sampling a homogeneous mix of all of the air around the patient, the authors could also detect any aerosol that might leak around the edges of the mask. Among their six cystic fibrosis patients producing infected aerosol particles while coughing, the airborne Pseudomonas aeruginosa load was reduced by 88% when wearing a surgical mask compared with no mask.
No, I have no burden of proof because I'm not writing a scholastic paper and I made my argument using critical thinking that you can easily infer if you just think about it.
People aren't wearing masks anymore, do you see a dramatic increase in COVID deaths? Then your point is self-evidently wrong--no further analysis needed.
You're conflating so many different things. Surgery with an open wound is not the same as spreading COVID which was never even proven to be spread airborne. You're either intellectually dishonest or naive. Either way this is pointless. You clearly just like being told what to think. I get it, there's safety in feeling like if you just follow the rules you'll be safe. You can follow the school into the net, because freedom is not what you actually want.
They just wanted to sell you masks. Don't you get it? It's just about the money.
> I think that the response to COVID (ie lockdowns) did far more damage than the disease itself.
Possibly true in some places. I think it very likely did in the UK.
> I feel bad for young people growing up in this broken world
The world has always been broken. Look at the 20th Century, two world wars, multiple smaller wars, Gulag, great leap forward, cold war, genocides.....
In many ways the world is better than its ever been.
What is true is that the golden age the west had from the end of the cold war until the early 21st century has come to a close, but that was an exceptional time for people in a small proportion of the world.
> I realize that I’m probably going to get dogpiled for saying it, but I think that the response to COVID (ie lockdowns) did far more damage than the disease itself.
You're going to blame Covid and/or Covid response for the fact that monopolies can jack up prices without consequence? That's your conclusion? Seriously?
What's happened is that McDonald's assumed they were a monopoly supplier like everybody else and jacked prices. McDonald's unfortunately discovered that "not eating out at all" is a viable substitute to their monopoly. Whoops.
However, if you want to fix the enshittification that is going on, you need to aggressively break up the monopolies everywhere in order to insert slack back into the system to re-enable competition.
On top of that, basing everything around "Always Late(tm) Inventory" (aka "Just In Time Inventory") means that there is zero slack in the system so even IF you want to compete, there is no upstream provider that can supply you with enough material to make a meaningful difference.
Want to fix modern capitalism? Bust monopolies. Over and over. At all levels. In all fields (not just tech). Aggressively.
100%. My wife thinks I’m crazy, but every issue she observes my answer tends to have its root in covid.
An economy is an ecosystem and it’s been seriously knocked out of balance by covid, annd the fuel issues aa a consequence of Russias war hasn’t helped either. Everything that was, no longer is.
You’re not crazy and don’t let your wife say that to you, since it’s clearly ignorance or possibly rationalization to justify her positions during that time. People will rationalize immensely just to avoid having to admit they were wrong in general or also possibly that they contributed to their own consequences.
Don't worry, we know each other well enough at this stage. From her point of view I think she's tired of me relating every issue to covid (which is mostly correct).
But you're right, people can get caught in their own filter bubble, build walls and be defensive, rather than open their ears to a second opinion.
> I dread even eating out anymore as I fully expect to overpay for bad food and service.
I don't know if HN is the place to say this. But, it's just infinitely better these days to cook your own meals. With some modest initial investment and planning, you can minimize the average time and cost of doing it, while still having access to a reasonaly healthy and delicious menu, though slightly repetitive. But if you really want to indulge, setting aside a couple of hours will give you dishes that taste way beyond anything you can afford from outside.
Some people are natural born chefs with an intuitive understanding of tastebuds. But if you're like me in that you're clueless about it, there are still some exceptional recipes you can steal online. I treat cooking more like chemistry, insisting follow exact measurements and time. It still works out really well for me. You might even tweak the recipe over 4 or 5 repetitions to your at most satisfaction. Anybody who hasn't given it a try really should, at least once.
Yup. Something really simple and cheap, and definitely not worse in nutrition than McDonald's: Buy a pack of chicken legs, marinate them to your liking (for example: olive oil, salt, pepper, smoked or unsmoked paprika, onion powder, garlic powder, chicken or veggie bouillon cube), let them sit for an hour. Put it into the oven for 50min to an hour at 160 degrees Celsius. Cook rice on the side. After chicken legs are done take them out, and mix rice into the juices. Add some ketchup if you like. Put chicken legs back on top. Bake for max 4 minutes at 200 degrees. Enjoy.
Now, that will take you about 2 hours to make in absolute time, but the actual time to do this is very little, a few minutes.
Practically anything you can find online videos for are better than their counterparts from low end restaurants. I have a lot of favs, but most are regional dishes that are not very well known internationally. Pastas are an exception. Cakes too taste a whole lot different and much richer when you do it.
It always was? These discussions imply the existence of a large class of people subsisting primarily on restaurants and takeout, who surely are only a few percent of the population?
Restaurants are for special occasions. McDonald's is, or used to be, a cheap "treat", or standard food for travellers.
Yeah in the documentary “supersize me” the subject says, while he ate 30 days straight of McDonald’s, that the restaurant considered a person who ate there once a week to be a heavy consumer.
The UK is still blaming all sorts of stuff on the pandemic that are actually structural failures showing effects. It's a especially convenient time for cover considering Brexit happened in early 2020 and between then and now no major party has been willing to come out and say that Brexit has been damaging.
I don't even think it was necessary for Brexit to have been a net negative. There are plenty of ways the UK can thrive outside the EU, but the UK governments have basically done the square root of fuck all between 2016 and now to plan or execute on anything substantive.
That said, long-term problems included a lot more than Brexit, like the slow euthanasia of the industrial base and the parting out of anything but nailed down to the highest bidder.
Probably varies where you are, but in the UK (especially outside London) there are lots of places you can have reasonably good food an service at a decent price. A lot of pubs with good food now, for example.
I don't think COVID is responsible. I think COVID was the straw that made more people use doordash and then retailers saw that doordash was making profit on their product by bundling a service and they got greedy for that profit.
After all, if you'll pay $8 for a big mac + tip delivered to your door, then you'll pay $8 for a big mac. Then to get it delivered is another $2 or so, so you'll pay $10 for a big mac. Then to get it delivered is another $3 or so, so now you'll pay $13 for a big mac.
The app drives me crazy on the occasions I do have to use it.
Picking fries brings me to a one-item category where I can... pick fries again.
Latency during the order process is insane, and then they add animations and little popup alerts throughout that actively interfere with me getting my all-important order code while I'm sitting like an asshole in the drive-through.
Yeah, the McD app is ridiculous. For some items it gives me an add to order dialog and then an add to bag dialog (I might have the order of those two swapped). I'm not sure what the distinction is between adding to the order and adding to the bag.
It also has some ridiculous restrictions. Nearly every week I take advantage of their in-app deal for free medium fries on Friday if you spend at least $1 on other stuff. I make a sandwich at home, order a couple cookies plus the free fries in the app, then go pick them at the McD that is about half a mile from my home.
Occasionally though instead of making a sandwich I decide I'd like to use my McD reward points to get a free burger. But you can't get both a rewards points item and a deal item on the same order.
I end up doing a rewards points order for a free burger, picking that up at the drive through, parking, then doing a cookies plus free fries deal order, and going through the drive through again to get that.
What's the point of not allowing both a rewards item and a deal item on the same order? If the rule was you could only use one reward or deal per day, then it would make some sense.
I don't think the app will let you start a second order before you've picked up your first order, although I've never specifically tried it.
I once had the app fail to realize I had picked up my order and I was unable to do new orders. I ended up deleting the app and reinstalling it and then I could order again. That was a few years ago, though, and they've changed the app several time since, so maybe I shouldn't assume that an order still awaiting pickup blocks new orders.
Maybe I'll try it next time I want to use points and a deal at the same time and see if you can order while another order is still in progress. If that still isn't allowed, I should probably then try placing the second order on a different device (one on iPhone, one on iPad for instance) to see if the limitation is because an instance of the app can only handle one order or because some account limitation is the problem.
If that doesn't work, two devices logged into different accounts would be the next thing to try--that's got to work. I'm using "Login with Apple" for my McD account. I could make a new McD account using "Login with Google".
There's at least two in the Cardiff City Centre, one on St Mary St and one on Queen St.
Having used both at normal and at peak pisshead hours, they're both alright.
Not great, not a disaster. Slightly understaffed, and occasionally short on English language skills, but there's not an issue if you want hot food (inc vegetarian and vegan) or drinks at a daft hour.
Australian here and the sentiment is the same. Drive-through is tolerable but dine-in is not pleasant due to basic cleaning like sweeping, wiping of tables not being done.
Canadian who agrees and will add that 95% of the employees are also new immigrants which really rankles us who have had to look hard for any kind of unskilled job!
Here in Japan I have only had good experiences, but I can't say I love going to McDonalds. The breakfast offerings are decent and it's extremely fast service. During peak times seats will be around 95 percent full but the restaurant remains very clean. I think the cleanliness in part is due to the patrons being responsible.
I’m an American living in the San Francisco Bay Area who travels to Japan twice per year. McDonald’s in Japan is better than McDonald’s in America. McDonald’s in Japan not only is cleaner and has better customer service, but is cheaper.
McDonald’s in America wasn’t always expensive; I was in high school and college in the 2000s when the dollar menu had double cheeseburgers, chicken sandwiches, and small orders of fries. The regular menu didn’t break the bank, either. Prices started shooting upward in the 2010s; first the Double Cheeseburger on the dollar menu got replaced with the McDouble (one slice of cheese instead of two), then it exited the dollar menu and became 2 for $3, then 2 for $4. But after COVID, prices exploded. I remember the first time seeing a fast food combo meal selling for more than $10 sometime about five years ago, but it was the most expensive meal on the menu. Nowadays in my area $10-$12 combo meals are the norm. It’s sad and maddening; my salary hasn’t risen at this level!
Meanwhile in Japan, I could get a Big Mac meal for around ¥800. Even when the yen was strong, $8 beats $11. At today’s yen valuation ($5.09), it’s more than half the cost, and with better customer service at that!
I make six figures but I feel like fast food prices in California are a ripoff ($10+ for a crappy meal? No thanks!), and so I quit eating out except when traveling or for entertainment, such as hanging out with friends.
Yeah pretty decent in Spain. Give it another 10-20 years when McDonald's realise the customers need them more than they need the customers (ie addiction) and that'll change!
Yes here they have the Uber cheap menu4you option too. A double cheeseburger which is pretty much a big Mac (but with nicer sauce), fries and coke for €5
From the UK too, and your experience is matched by mine. The last time I was in one (I mean "the last time" in both senses of the words) I waited over 20 minutes for my food; I do not know how long it would have actually taken because at that point I got bored, wrote it off as a loss and walked out. No sense in complaining to anyone because that would have consumed even more of my time.
McDonalds is not food and it is not even fast anymore.
I cannot blame their staff for any of this anyway; if I was being paid that little to be treated like garbage I wouldn't give a shit either.
It is not apparent that we are ambivalent because of compensation.
I would argue an inverse corollary. I would argue that the most qualified people for the job are applying.
What I am noticing in my own work is fatigue from processing volume.
It's not personal. You are a statistic until you walk up to the front counter and make it personal. Only then we can actually solve your issue because we have a person to relate to.
I am curious about this notion that fast food workers don't care. I see it a lot. We absolutely care.
I think that merits an apology from me, then: what I said was wrong and I'm sorry. If I'd thought about that sentence for more than ten seconds, it'd be clear that it's all better explained not by indifference from the staff doing the actual work, but because (as you said) they are asked to work under impossible conditions, and as long as some line on a chart representing "money" goes in the right direction it's the people that set the conditions of the job who don't give a shit.
Some part of me understood this already, because...
> You are a statistic until you walk up to the front counter and make it personal.
Aside from the fact that the "front counter" is apparently deprecated these days...given what I know about my personality flaws, I am sure I'd not want to do this. It's not like they could make the food appear 20 minutes ago, and they're not responsible for the conditions that made it take 20 minutes in the first place, so what would it accomplish other than making their day worse? Maybe some warm feeling of "well I fuckin showed 'em" followed by "oh damnit, I was an arsehole" 15 seconds later which would hang over me for a LOT longer than 15 seconds. Walking out was a better outcome for everyone, including me.
That's already happening. Roadsides aren't being cleaned up because the local DOTs aren't being paid enough. That leaves fallen rocks, mud buildup from floods, tree branches, and overgrown bushes very close to the roadway. Grocery stores have empty shelves because they don't get enough stockers. If you go to the meats aisle it's a good chance you'll either find some pork that's started to turn yellow or some beef that's started to turn brown because nobody wants to dig through the freezer. They get told the meat's old, they find the visible one, and the put a price reduced sticker on it. Walk into a hospital and the grating at the entryway will be filled with mud, the baseboards along the walls in the hallways will be scuffed to hell, and the walls will have scrapes taken out of them because the maintenance staff aren't being paid enough to care. Go into a bank and you'll have one teller working both the drive through and the front desk, and they'll take their time getting to you because the drive-through counts towards their statistics since the interaction with the drop off point is tracked. They aren't paid enough to work back and forth in the down time when either is doing something the teller doesn't need to be involved in.
Apathy's just setting in across the board, and it's entirely warranted. One hour of work can't even afford you one hour of reward anymore when it comes to most non-specialized and non-salaried jobs.
I'm in the UK and have McDonalds semi-regularly. A few times a month at least. Get a receipt, fill out the online feedback form, get a code. Put the code in the app, get an offer for £2.99 sandwhich (McPlant, Big Mac, whatever the chicken thing is) and either fries or a salad. £2.99 for a McPlant and fries at 3am is a godsend.
Yup. McDonald's in the UK is a truly horrible experience that only "addicts" still put up with
Staff barely even look at you, they're miserable, fries are only 50% full, orders always wrong, no please or thanks or sorry for keeping you waiting 20 mins in the bay for a hamburger etc. Stopped going ages ago
I'd rather just skip a meal than resort to McDonald's, but I've noticed in so many places there are more deliveries going out than people eating in. This seems to go for any place that does delivery. It's even hard to read reviews for places as so many of them are rating the delivery when the food in question doesn't transport well.
What is strange is McDonalds at one point was by far the most consistent fast food place in the US. Personally it wasn't my thing but it was always a step above all the other chains.
That hasn't been the case in a long time, quality control and customer service has fallen to be just as bad as any other place.
On the kcal/£ basis, Tesco biscuits (for Americans: cookies) are more than an order of magnitude better, 487 kcal/100g, £0.22/100g, about £0.15 for as many kcal as that McMuffin: https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/290329100
On the basis of an actually balanced diet, boiling a pot of water and adding lentils, rice, and value frozen veg on a timer, are likewise. Which is of course why that's a staple diet in parts of the world much poorer than the UK.
For £5.09 you get the hash brown, so it's 500+ cals. It costs 25 mins of paid labour and it also saves N minutes of domestic labour if one were to have similar hot protein+cals at home. High-income people tend not to understand this part, they'll say you can eat beans and rice for nothing.
I have quite a lot of difficulty eating out once you start cooking at home, because think of what you are buying:
- one English muffin (is it called an English muffin in England?)
- one slice of cheese
- one egg
- one slice of ham
- one cup of coffee
- one hashbrown
£5.09 for that? Obviously when you buy from a restaurant you're paying for their labor, rent, electric, and much more so it makes sense - McDonald's franchisees tend to operate on single digit profit margins even at that cost. But mehhh, still. And then the food you end up buying is packed full of preservatives and other additives and artificial ingredients.
Dude you’re not even trying, why buy muffins and eggs when you could grow wheat, grind flour, raise chickens and get eggs for free, slaughter your own pigs and cure the bacon yourself… because labour costs nothing and convenience has no value amirite?
I find it bemusing that so people are simultaneously extremely agitated by high prices but also completely disinterested in doing anything except paying them. With this mindset it's not particularly hard to guess which direction they'll trend in over time, even if the world wasn't going nutters.
I mean these things are not difficult to make. They even freeze extremely well, and then you toss them in the microwave for a couple of minutes while you're getting ready and they're done. And the food you create is not only much cheaper, but also way healthier and also higher quality. When you go to a McDonalds you're getting the cheapest possible find they can source on a global level. The only reason they dropped pink slime [1] is because they were outed using it on television.
Incidentally that was a long time ago and while Wiki is quiet unclear it seems that the USDA chose to reclassify back as simply ground back in 2018. If it's been rebranded and remains legal, that's probably what people are now eating, again, at least in the US - as it's deemed unfit for human consumption in Canada and the EU.
I did not say that. I was responding to a person who engaged in banal snark implying that making food for oneself is a herculean task, but it all depends on what you're making, and things can be extremely stream lined. In the case of what we're talking about (mcmuffin stuff), you can even cook and freeze them in arbitrarily large quantities and it's way cheaper, healthier, and even faster since it's in your freezer instead of having to go out.
I do think that the fast food (or even eating out in general) starts to lack any real selling point for households that are capable of cooking, and so this is probably going to weight the customers, especially regulars, of these sort of places away from households that do cook. I suppose you'd argue time is the selling point, but one can even remain competitive on there with things like pressure cooker meals. There are even one pot rice cooker meals which are also great.
The UK comparison for home cooking vs fast food breakfast should be really be Wetherspoon. Spoons makes a solid stodgy full English breakfast and bottomless coffee for 5-7 quid depending on the size. Classic hangover food, and you can start the morning where the night ended.
Obviously you can beat it with home cooking, but the calorie value for a sit down meal out is compelling: 1300 cals for 7.50 (more if you go for hot chocolate).
Wetherspoons is amazing and a great replacement for McDonalds. They bring the food to your table, with cutlery, on a plate and you get unlimited coffee and tap water. I paid £4.78 for a muffin of sauage+bacon+2 eggs+hash brown and unlimited coffee this morning.
You got to choose very carefully from the menu as lot of things aren't good value.
My experience is that quality in McD is rapidly declining. We may agree was never a Michelin star restaurant. But I remember being more or leas enjoying the food. Now I just can’t. Maybe I’m getting older. But I would swear the quality is much worse now than say 5 or 10 years ago.
> My experience is that quality in McD is rapidly declining. We may agree was never a Michelin star restaurant
That's the thing with McDonalds.
You could go in to any store no matter where you was and know you got a consistent level of hygiene, cleanliness, good fast efficient service and while not gourmet food you knew the food you was going to get was a consistent standard. It was the reliable, dependable safe option in a list of unknown options. McDonalds was McDonalds know matter where you was.
Now it's no longer clean as they got rid of all the staff replacing them with screens. Stores are generally filthy with mess everywhere.
There is no consistent service as they got rid of all the staff and replaced them with screens that sometime work, sometimes don't, often out of paper for receipts/order numbers.
It's no longer fast as you need to mess about with broken screens, and repeatedly declining up sell options each step of the way vs giving a order at the counter and being done.
The quality now varies from store to store
It's no longer cheap. For the price of a McDonalds, in Australia I can go in to a Pub/Hotel and get a better meal if i get a special.
The last time I was in a McD (this year), it smelled faintly of feces, and yep it was a mess. It really did put me off going to any other McDonald's. I know that's one experience but prior ones had been trending in that direction.
The problem is they’re in an uncanny valley. They’re too expensive for low income customers and their food is too shitty to compete with other things you can get for the same price. Starbucks will give you food that’s similarly priced and much tastier and healthier. McD is disgusting.
For me it's the competition. So many competing chains and independent burger joints have sprung up and spoilt me. For 20%-30% more than mcd prices I can get something way way better.
My family and I ate at one this evening. My son wanted to try to the McRib. I'm not sure he loved it, but it looked fine. My wife and I both had the $5 McValue meal, and we got a free medium fry because it was Friday. We shared one of the drinks because I'm not supposed to be eating lots of sugar. Some McD's don't have a drink station in the public seating area anymore, but the one we go to does. All in all, it was not a bad meal for like $15. I don't see any degradation in their quality at all. I think that quality is highly dependent on which one you visit and how well it is managed.
I’ve had McDonalds twice in the past 12mo. Once locally just because I was for whatever reason craving it, once on a late night last minute road trip in the middle of nowhere midwestern USA.
Hasn’t seemed to have a discernible quality difference since back when I ate it regularly a decade ago.
Prices noticeably up, but I refuse to use the app and am willing to pay extra for the privilege.
McDonalds tastes the same as it always has. Food consistency is what they excel at, along with owning valuable real estate.
Also, the quality of a fast food restaurant (cleanliness and service) is directly correlated to the median income of the area it is in. Wealthy suburbs will have much cleaner restaurants than inner city restaurants from the same chain.
I'd say you've just grown up and experienced decent food now. McDonald's is marketed to children and caters for the child-like palate: sweet, salty and acidic, like tomato ketchup.
When I grew up in the UK in the 80s/90s we ate typical British food. Potatoes every day, boiled veg, baked beans, beige protein things. Back then it was possible to have "Chinese" or "Indian", but it's all total shit: overly sweet, not spicy, greasy as fuck bastardised rubbish. Nowadays I can actually find real Indian, French, Italian etc. that is actually delicious. It's difficult to imagine going back to beige stuff I grew up on.
I think this is under-appreciated. The technology of food has progressed immensely in the last decades! Even recipes from the 90s don't hold up as well, because home cooks have access to more knowledge, techniques, tools, ingredients, foodstuffs. And of course if you look at photos of food and typical dining from the 80s you can sort of spot a difference visually as well.
Here in Greece, we have so much good quality street food that McDonald's is street trash by comparison. I don't consider it food, there are only about eight or nine restaurants in the entire country and I think most people go there because of the novelty.
Please don't let Greece get too wealthy, the quality street food will get pushed out and replaced with overpriced yuppie food that all gets sourced from the exact same company!
Austria resident checking in - since I moved here I noticed the quality of McD’s is way, way better than in the UK. And apart from the regular menu being a whole different experience, you’ve got great quality coffee and cakes. It’s a whole world of difference.
Here in Sweden they changed their recipes a few years ago. I can’t stand the Big Mac now. Previously it at least felt kind of fresh although low quality. Now it has a weird freeze dried sensation to the vegetables :/
It's pretty hilarious because your comment is exactly their goal.
McDonald's is laser focused on low income customers. They do not want to compete in the middle income space, as they don't visit as often and there's ton more(and better) competition.
Their CEO has been blunt about this recently, and trying to find ways to get low-income customers back. Dire straits ahead for them, they've priced themselves into a place they don't want to be nor will they be able to succeed in.
> McDonald's is laser focused on low income customers.
Like some other fast food restaurants, they're desperately trying to be thought of as being Starbucks tier, with Starbucks prices, trappings, etc.
It's like Taco Bell desperately trying to be thought of as Chipotle tier, with Chipotle level prices and trappings. Like McDonald's, they significantly raised their prices without any quality improvements to justify it.
> Their CEO has been blunt about this recently, and trying to find ways to get low-income customers back.
It's lip service because news like "low income people abandon McDonald's" makes investors get bad feels about their investment.
I don’t like how the CEO is portraying this as something solely caused by outside market forces. In the last 10 years, their profit margin has gone from ~17% to ~32%. The pricing is an intentional decision that they could choose to change at any time.
Terrible take. Of course they want middle-income customers, that's a big part of why they raised prices, because they thought middle-income would absorb them. And they arent entirely wrong - those drive-thru lines are still miles long at peak times, mostly parents getting an entire family's dinner. However middle-income is still price sensitive and notice when $30 becomes $50+. Executives talk about appealing to "value-oriented" consumers (i.e. almost everybody).
It's actually Wendy's right now suffering, vs rivals McD and BK: "Wendy's (WEN) same-restaurant sales, or sales of restaurants open at least 15 months, declined from a year ago for a third straight quarter, while those of rivals McDonald's Corp. (MCD) and Restaurant Brands International Inc.'s (QSR) Burger King increased over the past two quarters."
It's not that they don't want middle class customers, of course that would be foolish. It's that they don't want to be positioned there. The CEO has made this abundantly clear.
Their financial reports are a better source of truth than anecdotes. Q1 was an absolute disaster, Q2 surprisingly OK, Q3 missing expectations but not terrible. This is not where they want to be, regardless of lip service. They will not thrive in this space, as Wendy's has found out. IMO Wendy's was the de facto try 'middle/lower middle class' fast food option.
In 2005 McDonald's net profit margin was ~12%, today it's ~30+%. Obviously that doesn't account for the entire price increase and wouldn't make that much of a difference...but worth noting.
I'm not sure where this number comes from but McDonald's profit margins may be misleading due to their franchise and real estate based model. If you spend $10 at McDonald's that's paid to the franchise and the central McDonald's corporation isn't necessarily profiting $3.
McDonalds business model is to own real estate and lease it to franchisees, and to sell those franchisees supplies to make hamburgers and fries so they can pay the rent.
It’s a commercial real estate company with extra steps, not a restaurant company. Once you understand that, McDonalds net margins are easier to understand.
Google ‘McDonalds real estate’ for a longer write up about the business model of McDonalds
You eat at McD's or most fast food places these days, you need the app to get reasonable prices, usually at a 15-20% discount. The app really does enhance the experience, order exactly what you want without human error, roll up to the drive-thru, give them the code, and they begin making the order at that point.
They've been pushing $5 value meals recently because the dollar menu's just not fiscally feasible anymore and $10-12+ for the normal value meals isn't a value to most people.
> The app really does enhance the experience, order exactly what you want without human error, roll up to the drive-thru, give them the code, and they begin making the order at that point.
They're particularly good at getting orders right compared to some other restaurants, so the additional value here to me is negligible. It's actually negative value to me, since if I can do a transaction without having to sign up, that's what I prefer. The value is entirely in the other direction: McDonald's wants to monetize their customer's identity information.
It's really location dependent. The one near me missed opening time by more than 30 minutes one day last week. I don't have more data because I only would splurge for a fast food breakfast when I need it.
The app doesn't work if it's installed from a location other than the play store. I install it via aurora store without a Google account for privacy reasons (I do have play services installed but it's not logged in, notifications still work). It's a ridiculous limitation for such an app.
You can thank Play Integrity for this, Google gives app developers the tools to implement remote attestation and "integrity" of the apps and systems they run.
Don't overlook paper coupons. A while back I took a look at the advertising junk that appears in my physical mailbox instead of just throwing it in my recycle bin and found some really good fast food coupons.
Where I am both Subway and Burger King have been sending approximately monthly a sheet full of coupons with some quite good deals.
I go through my apps and put most of them to deep sleep, ie never work in foreground. Later I heard from an internet stranger that a mobile operators app prevents users from using their phone as a Wifi hotspot.
Why would you allow notifications from most apps? What could the McDonald’s app possibly offer to warrant allowing it to dictate your attention for even a fraction of a second?
For the few times a year I eat at Burger King, I just install the app on the way, use the discount, and uninstall it right after while I'm still eating.
These articles deliberately skew reality to fit an anti-worker narrative. All the focus is on costs of labor and materials, with not one single sentence devoted to McDonald’s own financials - like the growth of their margins, the share buybacks performed, the executive compensation, or the franchising model itself.
When I was rallying for a higher minimum wage and was challenged on it driving up costs, I made it abundantly clear that would only be the outcome if the corporate leadership refused to budge on their compensation and shareholder reward schemes - which, surprising nobody, is exactly what they did, and this was the entirely expected outcome.
We’ve tried being nice about this and attempting to reach a compromise in long, gradual, sustainable changes to the economy so everyone can benefit from its improvements in efficiency and scale, but the grim reality is that said compromises are no longer on the table, and harms are inevitable. With no more room to squeeze workers, it should be of no surprise that a growing plurality are demanding immediate and substantial change instead of piecemeal reform - and Capital has every right to be terrified of an angry labor class.
Looking at McDonald's finances would have made the article better. And it mentioned their claims about labor costs. But it cited analysis which contradicted those claims.
No problem stands alone in a vacuum, and nothing at this point has “one easy fix”. These articles that try to paint higher wages or corporate consolidation as the sole reason for complex and nuanced issues aren’t just toxic to discourse around addressing these problems, they also collectively dumb down people into the debate equivalent of sports teams with no room for other positions.
The entire piece reads as a sympathy puff article to paint McDonalds in a “woe is us, our business dictates we raise prices to only serve the wealthy” posture, which is insincere at best, and almost certainly shit journalism.
McDonalds is just a real estate investment trust that happens to sell hamburgers. The business model is ‘rent high value land for a profit while racking up unrealized gains on the land and ensure a steady stream of rents by selling franchisees supplies that they can sell to make sure they can pay their rent.’ Take a look at the sorts of parcels McDonalds acquires, usually multiple acres in busy commercial areas.
In an ideal world, they’d be a restaurant company, but it’s just a real estate company with extra steps.
This has been the story in the US for a few decades now. You can’t have nice things that other developed countries take as a given like higher lineage, healthcare, higher education, public infrastructure, etc because of profit, exec compensation, stock buybacks and all the rest.
> These articles deliberately skew reality to fit an anti-worker narrative. All the focus is on costs of labor and materials, with not one single sentence devoted to McDonald’s own financials - like the growth of their margins, the share buybacks performed, the executive compensation, or the franchising model itself.
Capital will always blame Labor for their problems
Or you could not jump to completely inaccurate conclusions about someone’s viewpoints, movement participation, and policy positions based solely on one comment on a single post. You could ask questions for clarity, or challenge specific assertions, instead of leaping directly to bad faith arguments (“why don’t YOU take a pay cut?” maybe because I’m not a CEO with a compensation package in the millions of dollars a year?) to support a pre-supposed conclusion you refuse to waver from.
C’mon, ya’ll, I expected better from HN commenters. This is arguably the worst thread I’ve been in with regards to the quality of discourse.
I mean this nicely: I would really not expect much better from HN. This is ground zero for Capital's public social media discourse; I'm actually quite surprised your top-level comment hasn't been downvoted to oblivion or even flagged, since you dared to utter the unutterable: that workers deserve more and Capital deserves less. I'm with you, friend, but be careful here.
Pal's is a regional GOAT. They also have a unique "Sauceburger" with a ketchup-and-relish based sauce that takes me back to my childhood. Highly recommend.
Yes. You can still get over 2000 calories at Taco Bell for $8 (this would be five of the Cheesy Bean and Rice burrito, my personal favorite). Even a Cheesy Double Beef burrito for the meat lovers can get you over 2000 calories for just over $11 for four. And their box meals will throw in a drink for a decent price. You can spend a lot more, but you don't have to.
This isn't meant as a Taco Bell commercial, just a comparison to todays McDonald's.
I don’t think that person is right. If you’re price sensitive and don’t just look at the default [combo] prices then Taco Bell is still elite and known for giving you cheap ways to get calories.
They always have a combo that’s cheap and rotates monthly. And like you said they have a few cheap value food like Bean and rice burrito which is also one of my staples.
Also you’re supposed to use the apps if you’re price sensitive. I work outside all day and couch surf without access to a kitchen. I never look at the actual menu of any place if there’s an app available. Apps also let you see prices between different locations.
However almost everyone I see go to any place in the real world is always buying stuff just looking at the default menu prices.
Agreed. Food now is made to order, rather than being ready and waiting (likely to reduce stock waste). Last time I went there was hardly a queue, wasn't rush-hour (was quite dead actually, few staff, fewer customers).
Food still took 15 minutes, fries were cold, the main meal was nice but was overall disappointing for the eye-watering cost compared to days gone by.
And a few guys collecting for delivery which has split their focus from in-resturant customers.
The cost increases are real: beef, wheat, labor. Some of it is from inflation during the covid period, some it is from the Russia-Ukraine invasion causing havoc in fuel and grain supplies globally.
There is currently a beef shortage in Europe (of sorts). The reason is that buying cow feed has gotten too expensive/unpredictable.
I think people generally underestimate the global impact of shutting down production in Europe's bread basket, Ukraine. There is a reason Russia wants this land. It's, as usual, a war for natural resources.
We should consume a lot less beef. Wages haven't caught up with inflation in a long while, I'd hope McDonalds paying more would trigger a nationwide increase in wages (I know, too optimistic).
13.2% real wage growth, not nominal wage growth. Real wage growth is what you get after inflation is subtracted out of nominal wage growth. 0% real wage growth would be keeping up with inflation.
Agreed. Sheep are a much more sustainable ruminant and we should all shift that way. I always heard it was spoiled cans of mutton fed to GIs that killed Americas taste for sheep. More importantly, we should stop eating food shipped in from far away. Not as easy as it sounds.
I bought some canned corned mutton (from Australia, I think) recently on a whim when I was at a caribbean foods store, and it was incredibly delicious. Not much in the way of gamy flavor (which I don't hate), and more tasty than corned beef.
I think this is the recipe I used: https://www.alicaspepperpot.com/guyanese-style-corned-mutton...
That stuff wasn't cheap but I'm gonna make two cans worth next time, since my guests absolutely devoured it.
I live in Oregon where I know we have tons of sheep (you can see them when you're driving on I-5); would be great to get stuff like this with local sheep!
Meat-based proteine is important in so many different ways.
Yes, it is possible avoid meat and still have a child develop well. It was also possible to install Linux on your PC in 1991/1992. Most people couldn't, but the really smart (or special) ones could.
I meant beef specifically, not meat in general. Our ancestors didn't eat bovine meat every single day like we do now. Plus cows take up lots of grazing ground, and I'm not happy about how they're treated worse over time because we keep eating more of them, and that requires more and more cruel ways of supplying that beef.
Chicken and sheep seem to be more sustainable. But either way, I think it is good for our health to rotate the types of meat we eat and lower the portions a bit? But it's easier said than done for sure.
I think just raising awareness is enough. Trends come and go. People are drinking a lot less milk these days than in the 80's or prior for example. But on the flip side, ozempic and similar weight loss drugs are probably promoting over-consumption now.
Beef and wheat are expensive because there is a small handful of companies who produce these for the United States, and they all sit around the same table announcing how much they're going to increase their prices every quarter. It's not collusion, you see, just a fun little coincidence. Because curiously, these particular prices have gone up way faster than inflation, despite having leveled off a year or so ago. Of course, maybe it's the arbitrary taxes the unitary executive has been adding to imports. Oh well. Becoming great again has sacrifices, I suppose, like Big Macs.
Awkward writing in this article. "McDonald’s executives say the higher costs of restaurant essentials, such as beef and salaries, have pushed food prices up..."
Beef and... salaries? I think I found the name of my new fast food place.
How many low income customers are going to sit there and figure out how to min-max the McDonald's App(tm) to get the best possible deal for their money?
They're not. They're priced out from the efforts and hoops required to get the deal.
And while there's deals in the app, not every deal is the best deal (leading to the min-max situation).
(I live somewhere super-rural where McD is one of the only lunch options. I've figured out that depending on promos, one of the 'cheapest' options is to take advantage of the "buy one get one for $1" double cheeseburger every day offer, then check the 'deals' section to see if there's a cheap fry offer (because fries are always expensive). Drink offers are never worth it when the sodas are always $1-$1.49 for a large soda, but sometimes there's a "free medium fries with purchase of drink" that definitely maximizes the value offer here. Combined, this 'meal' is often less than even the new Extra Value Meals they offer at below $6-7 depending on deal applied.)
You found the exact combo I build when the cravings hit.
Use the coupon for free fries any size with drink purchase; get the $1 bonusburger, and be out with more food for less money than the two cheeseburger combo.
Where I live (Switzerland), cost of going to some proper burger joint vs mcdonalds costs roughly the same, or its very mildly cheaper for mcd. Plus unlike say France they don't serve beer here(canned heineken but at least its still technically beer).
The only reason to go there is their method of handling tons of customers (restaurant experience this ain't thats for sure), their opening hours and often location.
That's it, if you look for quality or pleasantness of experience or actual good food in statement above you don't have to bother. Worst burgers Swiss market can offer, we have different food and tasting standards here.
My experience in many countries is that for 10 to 30% more price you can eat a real hamburger made of real beef, with real pommes. But that 30% is for sure prohibitively high for many folks.
I do not think this is exactly true. People may stop eating junk outside. But having a healthy balanced diet is more expensive than buying junk and eating at home; and not only in money, but more importantly (maybe) in time. Cooking takes time and effort, which families with both working parents may struggle with. Please do not forget often those people have more exhausting and abusive jobs.
I know from first hand, how difficult can it be in that environment with limited money, time, and energy to go to the grocery store often, buy fresh things, and cook. It is much more convenient to buy things that go in the freezer, when they are in offer, and throw them into the oven when arriving home.
The problem is that people don't know how to cook. Something like pressure cookers (or crock pots where appropriate) are amazing for this sort of scenario. There are endless recipes you can find online that are toss a few ingredients in, wait, eat. Easy clean up, and delicious. I increasingly think cooking should be a part of basic education for everybody.
Stuff like rice, beans, and chicken breast are extremely cheap, and most of the way towards a balanced diet by themselves. And cookers are like magic - just toss a bunch of stuff in, some spices, and it will come out amazing. I like a bit of yogurt as my fat, but you can go way cheaper - just toss some lard in there, it'll taste great.
Costco has been 2.99/lb for chicken breast about as long as I can remember now here in Chicago. It’s only sometimes better priced than the local supermarket, but the quality is consistent and price stable.
If I have spare time on a weekend it can be picked up far cheaper in bulk from a food services supply store. 2 weeks ago when I last walked through the cooler section it was sitting at $1.29/lb in 40lb cases. Costs maybe 10 cents per food saver vacuum bag or so to freeze them in packs of 2-4 each.
A lot of folks are price takers and have forgotten how to comparison shop or buy on sale and stock up. These were skills lost over the past few generations - likely since stores thought they were competing on price far more than they actually are. Covid taught them the average consumer simply isn’t as price sensitive as the business classes teach you, and have engaged in aggressive price segmentation.
I don’t bother buying most shelf stable or freezable products these days unless it’s on a very large sale - which I’ve found tends to happen roughly quarterly for most things. Beef is the current exception, but we buy a half cow from a local farm and eat off that for a year or more.
Not everyone lives near a Costco. Not everyone is a fan of the environmental cost of their cheap chickens, or whatever. When I lived in San Francisco there was a Costco but it was more inconvenient to get to via Muni than most of the alternatives. Their parking garage is an absolute zoo.
If I have spare time on a weekend it can be picked up far cheaper in bulk
from a food services supply store.
Not everyone has the luxury of being able to store perishable items in bulk. Personally I struggle a bit to store a whole chicken in my fridge. Six and a half pounds (what you'd have to buy to get Costco's $3/lb price) is quite a lot. And if you want to cook that chicken first and then freeze it, you run a high risk of it just tasting weird.
I just checked around and for boneless, skinless chicken breasts:
Sprouts $7/lb.
Safeway $7/lb (more if you don't want the chlorine treated stuff).
Trader Joe's $7.50/lb (but they've gained a reputation for nasty, woody chicken).
Whole Foods out of stock.
Lucky's $8.50/lb.
Mollie Stone's $8.89/lb.
Berkeley Bowl $9.59/lb.
US Foods Chef Store $3.75/lb for *twelve pounds*.
At least out here there's a lot less variability than you're claiming, unless you're buying enough to fill your entire fridge/freezer.
About $5 bucks per skinless boneless chicken breast where I'm at in Canada. That's $20 in just the chicken for a meal if you happen to have a family of four.
I swear my growing boys have hollow legs. How do you eat more than I do?
Chicken well raised and fed, is usually good starting at around 30-40 EUR / kg. I supermarkets selling 1kg of chicken for 4-5 EUR / kg - I would not touch this.
The one who downvoted me obviously has a problem with high quality food.
Animals held and then sold for 4-5 EUR per kg is pure shit. Period. I would rather eat groceries instead.
Most people have no idea what high quality meet is because they buy their stuff always at large chains - remember: None of the sustainability-interested local farms sells to any of those supermarkt chains. You have to GO there to get your stuff.
Such animals you can also eat without having remorse.
The folks that this article is about are not the sort of folks who can afford €18/lb for protein. In the US, at least, cheap chicken can often be identified as it cooks up with a woody texture or suffers from a variety of visual defects. Out here I can't think of any farms selling chickens directly to consumers. More well regarded farms like Petaluma Poultry do, in fact, sell to the big chain grocery stores and that's closer to $5/lb for a whole "organic" chicken.
From a thermodynamic perspective this is somehow true; but not regarding taste, structure etc. of the meat product: There is a clear difference between superlarge chickenfarms and my local farmer with only a couple of hundreds?
Also, depending on how the animals are fed, you have different substances in the final product, like Antibiotics.
So feel free to optimize only for the "thermodynamic calorie perspective" ;-)
This [1] is amazing, and also prep freezes extremely well. There are so many great recipes online, just search - it's also referred to as an instant pot in many places.
I'm afraid home cooking is the first victim of "big tech" strip mining our attention. When you are hooked it's too difficult to plainly keep concentrated on the cooking/cleaning process and on procuring of individual ingredients. No matter how easy it is, still needs capability to deal with messy physical stuff. And it's too easy to get demotivated by mediocre result.
An harbinger of things to come, widespread crippling executive dysfunction.
Not knowing how to cook isn't the main problem. Really poor people don't have time to cook and don't have any disposable income to buy a luxury like a pressure cooker, so this is fantasy. Really poor people are on SNAP (which doesn't cover a lot of fast food) and food banks (which provide random/useless stuff like unhealthy ultra processed food, dented canned food like canned corn and tomatoes, and random produce that requires a lot of time to use).
I think this really mischaracterizes the modern poor, especially in developed countries. It's not uncommon to see poor families with things like recent model phones worth hundreds of dollars, designer clothing/shoes, and the like. In many ways these are the sort of traps that keep people in poverty. Or referencing this article itself, apparently they decided to go eat at McDonalds and managed to spend $20 on two coffees and one coke. I mean that'd break the budget of just about anybody outside of well into the upper edge of middle class.
And a pressure cooker is not a luxury, nor is it something that's outside anybody's price range. On Amazon it looks like they start around $20. And the whole point is that it takes basically 0 time, and saves a ton of money, and even time, relative to things like eating outside the house.
A good microwave oven is extremely cheap, about the same as the food for a few weeks.
I eat only food cooked by myself from raw ingredients, in a microwave oven. Previously I was cooking with traditional methods, but some years ago I have eventually discovered that I was misusing a microwave oven only for reheating, when it can be much better be used for cooking.
In most of the cases, I cook everything that I eat immediately before eating it, which rarely needs more than 20 minutes for cleaning/peeling/paring/slicing vegetables, cooking in the oven and washing dishes.
This is short enough. If I would go out to eat somewhere, I would loose much more time than that. The only thing that I do not cook immediately before eating is meat, as depending of its kind it may need up to 30 minutes of cooking in the oven, so I cook all the meat for a week during the weekend and I just reheat it and combine it with the garnish in the other days. When you cook for a large family, you can cook all the food for a week, for a few hours during a weekend day, and you can reheat the food in less than 5 minutes in all the other days.
You can even bake bread very quickly and with excellent results in a microwave oven. When I want bread, I bake it immediately before the meal. Cooking at home and using only raw ingredients results in a cost for food that is frequently even 10 times less than a similar dish would cost from a supermarket, while being more healthy due to the use of high quality ingredients without any dubious additives. Even for bread, home-made bread is about half of the price of supermarket bread. Eating in a restaurant is of course much more expensive than buying processed food from a supermarket, so the difference in cost is even higher.
Therefore I agree that most poor people spend too much on food that is also unhealthy, and that is because they do not know how to choose wisely what they eat and how to cook that quickly and inexpensively. I believe that these are essential survival skills that should be taught to everyone in elementary school, but, even if I had a much better education than most, that did not help me, so I have learned most of them only when old and after a lot of failed experiments.
You can use a traditional recipe, e.g. wheat flour + 75% water by mass + salt + either yeast or baking powder (e.g. for 500 grams of flour either 7 grams of instant dry yeast or 10 grams of baking powder), then you knead the dough for a few minutes (until the dough becomes homogeneous, elastic and sticky; after you do it a few times it becomes very easy to recognize the moment when you have kneaded enough) and when using yeast you leave it for an hour to grow.
Then you bake for a time depending on the oven and on the amount of bread. I normally make breads from 500 grams of flour, which need about 13 minutes @ 1000 W. The advantage of a microwave oven, besides the short time, is that after you have determined the right time through experiments it will be always correct.
For baking you must use a glass vessel with lid, to prevent the bread from being too dry. The vessel must be much bigger than the dough, at least twice bigger, because the bread will grow tremendously and it will be very fluffy.
The alternative to traditional bread is to make unleavened bread, which can be made even faster and I actually like its taste more.
Even with a traditional recipe, unleavened bread will grow a lot at microwaves, due to the expansion of embedded air and water. It can be made to grow more, almost like traditional leavened bread baked in a traditional oven, by increasing the amount of water in the dough. Instead of using 75% water as in traditional bread, you can increase the amount of water to around 120% by weight. With so much water, there is the additional advantage that the dough becomes very thin, so there is no need to knead it, you just have to mix it very thoroughly for a few minutes with a spoon or with an electric mixer.
Such an unleavened dough with excess water can then be baked in a glass vessel without lid, also for 10 to 15 minutes. With unleavened bread, you can have delicious bread in less than 20 minutes from start to finish.
For improved taste, you can add to the dough various spices or seeds, either whole or ground. You can also add a sweet filling when you desire it.
Microwave-baked bread normally does not have the burned crust, but if you desire it many ovens have an infrared lamp that can be used for this purpose.
Unleavened bread is trivial to make in this way. You weigh the water and the floor in the baking vessel, you mix them, then you bake.
Leavened bread is slightly more tricky, because you need to know how to knead.
For kneading dough made from 500 grams of wheat flour (high-protein flour, which is usually sold as "bread flour"), I use a big glass bowl and I knead with a single hand, while keeping the bowl in the other hand. This is much less messy than when kneading in the way used for big amounts of dough.
At the beginning, kneading consists mostly of opening and closing the hand through the dough, while at the end it consists mostly in pulling the dough upwards, which becomes very elongated while one end of it sticks to the kneading bowl, then pressing again the dough into the bowl.
At the end of kneading, the dough becomes extremely sticky, so I keep ready a so-called "pie server" that I use to remove the dough from the hand that has been used for kneading, and for aiding in the transfer of dough from the kneading bowl to the baking vessel. The same pie server is also useful after baking, to detach the hot bread from the baking vessel.
Are you interpreting "poor" as "unemployed"? The OP was talking about people who are employed full time but at a low level job (at a shop, or as a janitor or something like that).
The idea you can't eat a healthy and cheap diet is just absurd.
This is exactly how I eat. Lean chicken breast is some of the cheapest protein.
Eggs have come back down to be a good deal.
Oatmeal, sweet potatoes and rice are cheap. Olive oil is cheap.
Walmart has frozen kale in a bag for $1.50.
People don't eat healthy because they don't want to eat healthy. It doesn't taste as good and is not as much fun.
My weekly grocery bill is not that much more than cost of eating one meal from door dash.
In term of taste, of course it sucks compared to door dash. For me, that is a feature and not a bug or else I would over eat and it wouldn't be a healthy diet.
Cheap isn’t just money to buy ingredients, but also the time to prepare them. If you are working two 8 hour shifts a day, your time and energy for cooking a real dinner might be limited.
Can't really say about the UK but the cheapest options here are in order 1) frozen chicken leg quarters and 2) an entire chicken (fresh, not frozen) which you have to break down yourself. Both options are around 3-3.5€/kg
> But having a healthy balanced diet is more expensive than buying junk
In which country? Not in Central Europe, and it was never the case. Healthy food here has always been cheaper than junk food. I come from a poor family and a visit to McDonalds was always a special occasion, yet my mom cooked every single day and they were all healthy and balanced.
More expensive? Absolutely not. Never has been and is unlikely to ever be true.
More difficult? Time consuming? Requires practice? Yes. Usually overblown though on all fronts, considering the types of families that seem to find ways to make cheap meals compared to those that do not in my experience.
Fast food (and prepared/junk foods) are low friction and convenient. Cheap is not a metric they compete within.
Cooking your own food can generally be more expensive then anything mass produced because efficiency is usually better in centralized setups, but this depends on the meal. Including the time it takes, you will never beat eg. a bakery for more cost efficient bread.
Hmm.. I see your point. Grocery stores do have a lot more unhealthy foods than fast food I suppose. Lots of snacks and drinks. Even sugary breads, canned food,etc.. But because you're not eating out, it feels healthier.
So even crappier food. The people have to be blamed for this at some point. Lower income Indian and East Asian families cook fresh food every night that probably costs less than $0.50 a plate. Beans, lentils, rice, eggs, pork and chicken can take you very far.
Some people aren't taught how to cook (though I suppose they could jump on YouTube these days). And for those who are, at the very lowest incomes, they may not have a working range or oven. While a cheap microwave can be had for under $100, the cheaper plug-in stove tops don't last if used daily.
Also those people may not have time or energy to learn cooking by looking youtube. From an armchair, with good economic position and time and money for hobbies anyone can learn to cook by yt. But man I know some families where both parents (when there are 2!) come completely exhausted after 10 hs of hard work.
We changed the quality of food on our home. The amount of money and time invested was much more than we expected. Everthing from a decent equipped kitchen, with enough room, knives and other tools are needed… I lived once in 15 sq meter flat… I can tell you, is difficult to cook in a kitchenette.
No, this is just the definition of excuses. It’s very cheap and easy to cook and everyone in many parts of the world cook after 10 hour work days. It’s not the end of the world or really even optional if you want to be cost-effective and healthy. There’s only so much blame you can shift to society because this is staunchly within the realm of personal control.
>>> decent equipped kitchen, with enough room, knives and other tools are needed
But you don't need too much to cook a healthy food. One pan, one pot, one knife and a spatula. Yes, not everything could be cooked with such setup, but tons of healthy cheap food.
The per person time commitment and food options for cooking for one is difficult. I would contend it's harder to cook a balanced meal for one person than it is for a family of four.
Buying things with portions for single servings has a premium on the price. Buying things at family size portions means that you have to have that for four nights in a row otherwise you've got wasted food (that is more expensive than the single portions).
For example, I've got a wok and can do a reasonable stir fry. Going and getting chicken for it meant that I had to get a pack of four chicken breasts... and I need to cook it before they spoil in my refrigerator. The vegetables (broccoli, pepper, carrots) were a bit better for keeping but you tended not to have one or two carrots unless you shopped the more expensive organic section. You get a 1lb bundle of carrots... and a lot of times, I'd end up throwing out some at the end of the week.
I can get a 3500 calorie deep dish pizza from Little Caesars for $15 ... and that's a good two days of caloric intake right there (there are even less expensive ones - I'm a fan of Detroit style). Four meals for $4 per meal. I think it was $12 when I was unemployed for a while a couple years ago.
I still have difficulty with grocery shopping portions for single servings and getting enough variety. I currently have a meal delivery / ready meal subscription that sends boxed raw ingredients that are 2 minutes of prep for a toaster oven and is about $12 per meal (600 - 800 calories). It's less expensive than door dash, the local diner, or the sit down casual dining and is portioned for cooking for one (and a lot healthier than four meals of pizza).
... However, being able to pay that much per meal isn't something that people who are getting priced out of McDs are able to do.
That is certainly cheaper than individual and gets benefits from the scale. It isn't something that everyone can do (or tolerate eating the same thing every day for the next week).
No, it doesn't. It does serve as an ok proxy for "if I eat 600 calories, will I be hungry in an hour?"
The people who are buying pizza or McDonald's aren't after healthy food. They know it isn't healthy. They're after the an inexpensive way to not be hungry when they go to bed.
I don't know why you all have such good opinions of McDonald's, but when I went there I was maybe full, but still hungry. Not an hour later, but immediately. To me it is an absolute waste of money.
It is not cheap, the local kebap or pizza store is cheaper, and the local grocery store has hot dishes for way cheaper. The ordering experience is crappy, you need to use that weird screen instead of ordering directly, long waiting times, the food tastes awful, you have a huge garbage pile on your plate, even larger than the "food" you ate, and you are still hungry after.
Not knowing to cook is a personal failing. Like you mentioned cooking basic things is something you can pick up in one session of doomscrolling on TikTok these days.
Like if the single mum living of a minimum wage has time and energy while dressing the 2 kids to not forget such things.
Sorry I know such people that I profoundly admire. I feel is just unfair such a comment. I have enough time and little stress in my life, I can plan what I’m going to cook the next week. But I could never criticize that people for not being able to.
Critique isn't necessarily just mean spirited. It's rather difficult to know what you don't know, and so many people do awful things without knowing there are alternatives.
The example he gave of beans is perfect. They can be done almost completely passively, are healthy, and dirt cheap. Add some rice, a meat, and you have a delicious dirt cheap meal that takes probably less than 5 minutes of active effort, and also has minimal cleanup time as well.
Like this article had some quote about somebody in it spending $20 at McDonalds for some drinks and bemoaning there being nothing healthier. That's simply ridiculous. And if somebody told them that and explained why - they could very possibly dramatically increase the quality of this person's life.
All your comments are painting yourself as a victim and it’s really irking me. I also feels like you’re making a mountain out of a mole hill. This is not rocket science. It’s cooking stuff. It’s cheap and easy and you should be able to do it after 10 hour work shift.
Instead of blaming people, perhaps it is better to look at the systemic factors that we can change to help people who are already playing life on hard mode.
But if people cook more (like its typical in european folks around Mediterranean), who will then do all the necessary TV watching and doom scrolling on social cancers to make them feel even more miserable and inadequate?
Btw that portion you mention won't be 0.5$, more like 2-3$ if if balanced and healthy enough. Tons of rice as is still very common in south east Asia ain't very healthy neither. But its sorta proven once folks start to cook for themselves more, they cook healthier than preprocessed junk food. And I don't mean some exquisite stuff, spending even 10-20 mins ever second evening can provide enough for whole family.
You just listed eggs, pork and chicken. They will run you way over $0.50 a plate. Even if you shop at absolute dirt cheap groceries, it’s more like $4-5 per plate when you factor in all the costs not including labor.
I'm not saying the people aren't to blame, but no one is blameless in the cultural decay. If US natives learned to live like immigrants, many ills would be solved, dietary and otherwise.
That same pattern of the poor eating instant noodles is true in Asia as well.
The origin of a number of those products is US food aid. Governments in the 60s and 70s set up facilities to convert the wheat they were getting into a product people would eat.
I never understood how can eating at McDonald's be cheaper than cooking your own meals.
I'm not from US, but checking US grocery shops, you can eat meals made of chicken breast, bread and vegetables well below 5$ per person, well below 20$ in total for a family of 4.
Yet every time I see those discussions, fast food is always presented as a cheaper option?
Well, you see, the entire wink-wink, nudge-nudge premise of America was this: everything is cheap, but you don't have the best safety net in the world. This sort of worked, for a while, especially because we actually DID have an okay social safety net here and there for people: Medicare/Medicaid, SNAP, Social Security, ACA, etc. Now, though, these programs are being gutted, AND ALSO the Big Macs are expensive. So now, the people who run this country (like the people who own McDonald's) are giving us neither our bread nor our circuses, and that makes the F150 class very angry...
But sure, I guess there's no cost of living crisis, actually, because you have the perfect shopping list. I'll inform the nation.
When you are a single person, the math changes. It can be cheaper or even break even to eat out every day. Especially if you lack the ability to eat and/or store the minimum package amount before it goes bad. This was a massive issue in my youth before I could save up buy stuff to make things last longer in the freezer while still tasting good. It was literally break even to cook vs eat out. Thus it was actually more expensive to eat out because we have to factor the time I spent cooking and I ruined food a lot as I learned how to make and store well what I liked.
As someone with a family now, it could never work. Even without just being better at cooking and preserving food, I can buy bulkier items that have a lower cost per unit.
I guess if I were truly destitute as a young adult, I would have cooked, but I wasn't. I wanted to have s nice salad wrap and/or hot meals fancier than beans and rice.
I'm not sure where you're getting numbers but I can't buy just chicken breast for two people for less than $5 at my grocery store unless I buy in bulk. And I do not have the space to store it.
I literally see chicken breast at walmart at 2.57$/lb, that's well below 5$ per two servings.
Add some simple mashed potatoes and you're still below 5$ to feed two people in one meal.
You can also eat bens, rice, lentils, eggs, add some cheese. There's countless simple, cheap, non processed food around.
The reality is that it's "more convenient", or at least it was, because if you had to choose between spending 3$ for a complete meal you still had to cook, and some 5/6$ McDonald's processed tasty food, you'd go with #2.
But stating that it's cheaper because of "scale economy" is just false, it isn't and never was to eat out. Let alone the impact of eating such junk food.
Cool. My local grocery store chicken is between $5-6/lb today. $2 if I buy a whole chicken and butcher it myself.
Whatever prices you're seeing are not my reality, living in a major urban area in the United States. Maybe if I bought at the Walmart in Iowa next to a factory farm I could buy it for $2.50/lb, but I can't.
Simple conomy of scale. McDonald's buy chicken in bulk from vendors, and get a better deal than Safeway/wherever you shop does, they get industrial bulk handing deals and yeah they have to pay for employees to cook the food, but that's amortized over all the other customers. So it can be cheaper, the same way that it's cheaper to get oil out of the ground, refine it, do a bunch of chemistry to it, form it into plastic knives and forks, make a box for it, decorate that box, put the cutlery into the box, ship that box halfway around the world, put it in a store, and all of that's still cheaper than getting someone to wash a metal fork for you to eat dinner with.
What blew my mind is when someone explained to me the cultural difference with some places in south east Asia. In the US, eating out at restaurants is what rich people do. But in certain places in south east Asia, having a kitchen, having appliances like a fridge, having electricity for them, having dining space, having the time to go to the market to haggle with vendors, all of that adds up so it's the rich that can afford to eat at home, and everyon else eats out. So it's location dependent.
The feeling for me is the market has bifurcated into: delivered expensive shit in a bag, or omakase sushi. The middle ground of cheap decent made to order food is largely gone or on the way out. There are diners in my area still but nearly everything is over 10 nearly 20.
The quality for delivery is astoundingly low for unbelievably high prices.
I feel like this whole article is seeking to 'maximize engagement', which I'm using as a lofty euphemism for trolling its readers.
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Mariam Gergis, a registered nurse at UCLA who also works a second job as a home caregiver, said she’s better off than many others, and still she struggles. “I can barely afford McDonald’s,” she said. “But it’s a cheaper option.”
On Monday morning she sat in a booth at a McDonald’s in MacArthur Park with two others. The three beverages they ordered, two coffees and a soda, amounted to nearly $20, Gergis said, pointing to the receipt. “I’d rather have healthier foods, but when you’re on a budget, it’s difficult,” she said.
Her brother, who works as a cashier, can’t afford meals out at all, she said. The cost of his diabetes medication has increased greatly, to about $200 a month, which she helps him cover.
> The three beverages they ordered, two coffees and a soda, amounted to nearly $20
I don't live in CA, but this just seems insane? Even in "captive" locations like airports etc. where prices for stuff are higher than a typical brick-and-mortar location, I don't even understand how two coffees and a soda could approach $20. If they'd DoorDashed it, sure. But those numbers don't make sense.
You're probably imagining two black coffees, and all three drinks being of modest size like medium.
But if you turn those into "specialty" coffees and upsize them, and then add ~10% sales tax, it's very plausible that the price was closer to $20 than $10.
Between prices inflating and people's tastes being pretty unmoderated and indulgent for a long while now, the total cost of "everyday" expenses adds up quick.
Even the simple black drip coffee drinks that have basically no material or labor cost are priced at $2-4 in a lot of places now because people have become so dependent on the habit of treating themselves to one, and often a very large one, that they've become price insensitive and easily exploited by any coldly calculating business.
> black drip coffee drinks that have basically no material or labor cost
Raw coffee prices have been rising for a while now[0], and I assume even in the US people are more attuned to decent coffee.
And I kinda hope producing countries get enough power to get better deals (thus increasing coffee prices further...) as they're usually getting shafted pretty hard.
> if you turn those into "specialty" coffees and upsize them, and then add ~10% sales tax
Right off the bat, it's McDonalds, there are no "specialty" coffees. And the sales tax is irrelevant, what matters is what comes out of the pocket.
$20 for McD-quality coffees and soda is insanely expensive. It puts it above places like Starbucks which makes no sense because there's a Starbucks literally 50m/150ft away from that very same McD.
Pictures of the menu at the closest McDonald’s to MacArthur Park show the coffees at ~$4 and sodas at ~$2-3 all large, which is a more realistic number but still only around half the quoted amount.
Of course there are "specialty" coffees at many McDonald's. Well over a decade ago, recognizing the margin and admitting the public interest in sweet, creamy, coffee drinks, they began a shift into direct competition with Starbucks, et al and offer a full menu of Americanized espresso and blended coffee drinks. Like at Starbucks, these easily run over $5 for the large sizes, and they're widely available.
Because of both brand loyalty, or because they also want other things from McDonald's that Starbucks don't carry, it's a extremely successful and profitable product segment for them, even when a Starbucks is "literally 50m/150ft away".
I visited London last year and was surprised & disappointed that the McDonalds across from the Trocadero did not have any such thing as simple black drip coffee (to which I could add half-and-half). The closest I could come was "flat white", which I never heard of before in the U.S.
It does seem a little bit high... but "two (large) coffees" comes in at $5.20 each and a large soda is $3.20 https://www.mac-menus.com/#McCafé-Coffees - that's not California prices though. Without additional costs (and how much more is it in CA) we're at $13.60 there. Add another $1 to each item for a guess of pricing and sales tax and round and you're at $20.
Life is indeed difficult if you’re on a tight budget yet still buying large coffees for $5.20 and somehow concluding you’re making frugal choices because “But it’s a cheaper option.”
If you’re in an airport or highway rest area, you might not have other/better choices, but if you’re on your home turf, I guarantee you can find a way cheaper option.
I can believe McDs offered to charge around $20 for 3 drinks. What I find harder to believe is the common case of people who accept that offer and then sip them while complaining about their budget.
You can easily reduce the cost of coffee and drink much better coffee. A relatively inexpensive home setup can easily get you to $.75-.50/cup and that's using good beans.
The problem for me is that I can't eat a lot of rice due to digestive issues with it--it just backs me up like glue even when I drink tons of water. I don't think rice is a very good type of food, honestly. Beans are fine, good fiber and protein. Rice, nah.
If you’re going to go so far as downvote, at least acknowledge the fact that it’s a debated topic in the field, and that you disagree with the new findings because [].
In the 90s I knew families who’d buy bags of McDonald’s $0.29 hamburgers (I think the special sale day was Wednesday) and live on that for the rest of the week.
I only ever enter a McDonald's for coffee and there seems to be an issue with my order more often than not. And there is always someone very upset about their order.
Every time I go to Mcdonald’s, I just think wow, I should have gone to Chipotle. Less expensive and healthier. Better in just about every way. Except no drive thru and you get less food if you order online with Chipotle
You're not going to get value at Chipotle anymore, also somewhat sadly. Order a burrito and you're going to get a big flour wrap with a tiny lump of rice and meat in the very center. These guys have cost-cut themselves to death, just like everywhere else.
Are they though? I work in an office full of high earners and can’t remember the last time I saw a McDonald’s bag. I actually have access to McDonalds foot traffic data (also due to my work) and will have to run an analysis to see what trends I can uncover.
I mean, near me there are a couple of places that sell sometimes even better quality than McDonald’s for lower prices, so McDonald’s loses the competition in the financial convenience factor.
Throughout my 20s that was about the only factor that led me to McDs - a cheap, fast meal. The 2/$3 McChicken for a lazy dinner or a McMuffin for a hangover fix was always too cheap to pass up.
Nowadays McDonald’s feels like a Seinfeld bit: _Whats the deal with fast-food, it’s not fast, and it’s not food._
I’m pretty much guaranteed to spend so much on a biscuit and coffee that I could go to the local coffee shops in town and get a coffee and breakfast sandwich for the same money and oftentimes faster, somehow.
It could be worse if millions of low-income customers were already as poor as ever in living memory, for quite a number of years and still enjoying McDonalds as regularly as expected.
As recently as a year ago and now the only difference is in the decreased value of the dollar :\
I’m trying to be illustrative through glibness here, but…
If consumers can’t afford the prices required to pay a restaurant’s labor living wages, then perhaps they’re not viable customers of that restaurant.
Minimum wages above the market-set rate are a form of price control. The distorting effects of price controls—in this case, contributing to shortages of low-margin restaurant meals—are economically inevitable.
Wage is not a determining factor for McDonald's pricing and has nothing to do with that.
They successfully converted from a neighborhood fast food shop into a new chain of automats with almost no staff once touchscreens got cheap enough and the necessary software could be suitably amortized. They ditched the employees, minimized community features like playplaces and tables, dropped the low margin dollar menu that many poorer people relied on, and focused on getting higher-margin products with better photography to busy professionals with brand attachment.
Trying to turn this into the tired debate about minimum wage just distracts from a discussion about what's actually happening to this brand.
OK so what’s the problem then? Surely if McDonald’s made their own decision to move up-market, competitors have swooped in to serve the customers they’re leaving behind?
It is quite the juggling act: you have employees demanding to be paid more, the cost of goods/inflation steadily rising, while customers wanting everything to be cheaper.
Something has to give somewhere, the challenging part would be to know where.
I'm not sure if there's a more sophisticated way of doing this. But just looking at revenue vs net income for 2024 suggests McDonald's operates at about a ~33% margin.
I'm not suggesting everyone would be a millionaire with a more egalitarian distribution of wealth. But, to suggest America's skyrocketing inequality has nothing to do with the poor being unable to afford a burger is a bold claim to make.
Because if the wealthy are not extracting their fortunes from American companies, what then?
Where did you get the $311B number? Because I get a net profit of $59.25B which is only 40k per employee. This assumes that the company doesn't need to keep any profit for future usage which may or may not be case depending on how big their war chest is. Not to say that 40k couldn't be life changing for many of the Amazon employee but the 311B number seems to be pulled out of thin air.
True, but to prevent those restaurants from hiring children, feeding us poison, and dodging all taxes the market must be regulated. And we're back to the same discussion we've been having for 150 years - how do we best regulate markets.
There’s an entire academic field studying ways in which it’s not that simple. Housing, employment, and transportation are somewhat famously areas where markets need help due to information and power disparities.
Can't wait for the glorious day when Big Macs are $100 because the Market has willed it. Verily, I say unto thee, for mine eyes have beheld the Market's glory, thou art blessed to pay $100 for a Big Mac, and thou ought to bend thy knee and worship at the feet of the Market, for it is all-knowing, and all-powerful, and perfect. Selah.
Yea whenever the idea of a company's profit is under a microscope, people often reflex to exec "greed" but it's typically because it's easier to blame a fictional disney villain, than it is to dig into the root of the problem.
If you can explain why anyone needs $8.469 billion of profit (2023), I'll gladly hear you out about greed. But something tells me I'm not going to get a great answer. :)
It would however have second-order effects; having less wealthy people would drive down rents/etc. If the wealthy just keep getting wealthier you'll end up in a situation where the wealthy just trade between each other out because of higher margins and the working class has nowhere to buy things.
I don’t think this is very related to what’s actually going on here.
It used to be that fast food was always cheap. But now, fast food is a broad market that’s aimed at a wide variety of demographics.
McDonald’s just so happens to be closer to the “premium” side of the market. They have a strong brand and don’t have to be the cheapest fast food restaurant on the block. People don’t buy McDonald’s because it’s cheap.
There are plenty of fast food restaurant chains that still mainly serve lower income demographics.
Rally’s/Checkers, Church’s Chicken, Popeyes, Sonic, and maybe you could even count Arby’s, or Taco Bell depending on what you’re ordering.
Some of the bigger brands like McDonald’s do have some deals to be found but you’ll need to be on their apps hunting for them.
> Minimum wages above the market-set rate are a form of price control. The distorting effects of price controls—in this case, contributing to shortages of low-margin restaurant meals—are economically inevitable.
The article cited analysis which said California's $20 minimum wage increased fast food prices 2% approximately.
Is McDonald still a labor intensive shop? Last time I visited one I had the impression that it had become vastly more automatised: you order on a machine, and most customers just grab a bag from their car before they drive away.
>Does it magically prove I’m making a bad salary if I can’t afford my employer’s product?
Yes, if the entire premise of your employer is "here's the cheapest hot food imaginable".
>Is a five star general making a bad salary because he can’t afford a nuclear submarine?
No, because the entire premise of the military is not "here's the cheapest nuclear submarine imaginable".
What a ridiculous strawman you set up, although you swung pretty earnestly at it, Mr. Quixote.
A better example would be Walmart, whose entire premise is "we sell the cheapest goods imaginable". Despite this, a lot of Walmart (and McaDonald's employees, actually) are on government assistance. If you have a justification for why there should ever be a society where someone working at a job that boasts "we have the cheapest shit" still can't afford their job's cheap shit, then please, be my guest.
> if the entire premise of your employer is "here's the cheapest hot food imaginable”
My argument elsewhere in this thread is that this description is not what McDonald’s is nor claims to be. It might have been that at some time in the past but it’s now a relatively well-regarded and reputable option. Low end cheap would be a restaurant like Rally’s or Church’s Chicken.
Regarding your last paragraph, I think you’re completely misunderstanding what point I am making. I am not defending employers paying low wages or putting employees on food stamps. Our society shouldn’t work that way.
I’m just pointing out that whether an employee can afford a good their employer makes is essentially an irrelevant detail in isolation.
Even comparing McDonald’s to Walmart for this purpose is pointless because Walmart isn’t a franchise. McDonald’s restaurant wages are determined by local franchise owners and vary a lot.
When I worked in fast food, they gave you a meal allowance, but it didn't really matter because I would grab a hamburger patty right off the grill and chow down. God damn, now I'm getting hungry.
Supposedly you would get fired for doing it, but when the managers accused me of doing it I would just deny it with my mouth closed while still chewing, and the managers would do it too.
They probably have cameras now or something. Those were the days.
You are eating in the same place were the cooking happens, without going outside replacing your gloves, putting of your hairnet, apron and mask, and without washing your hands? That sounds like a fast way to get your store closed by the food regulation authority for insterile handling and contamination of food.
>> You are eating in the same place were the cooking happens, without going outside replacing your gloves, putting of your hairnet, apron and mask, and without washing your hands?
I'm not now, that was decades ago. We didn't wear gloves, hairnets, or masks. The guy working the grill would wear an apron.
I mean there was a bucket of dish rags under the sink there once that had maggots in it. I worked in two restaurants and as far as I know the "food regulation authority" never showed up at either of them.
I don't have any illusions that things are different now. Sometimes it's just better not to know.
I like Michael Hudson's answer: repress financial rent-seeking. Inequality is driven by rents that siphon wealth from the productive economy. Therefore: nationalize natural monopolies and destroy monopolies of privilege.
I think the bigger issue is the 500 mil/quarter stock buybacks and the several million compensation packages for the executives than the burger flipper wanting enough money to make it worthwhile to leave their house.
And they've been complaining for decades at this point that corporate is failing them. Not enough new products, bad business and advertising strategies, store renos, the list goes on.
The burger flipper making a lot more money is doing a lot more for their franchisee's than the executives are as of late.
When I was a boy quite a few decades ago, McDonald's finally came to Tampa.
Burger King already had a few locations in other towns after getting started in Miami, and they were a bit like after-school soda shops of the 1950's that Northerners were more accustomed to. Which most people don't realize had not existed up until then in Florida because of the very small fraction of students and young people in general compared to all other states.
There were no Whoppers yet or fancy logo but they did have an overhead sign with a jolly fat king sitting on a burger with lettuce and tomato. Which you got for 10 cents. Burger King was just trying to become a chain. A major attraction at the time was of course the air-conditioning, which was seldom seen outside of banks and supermarkets at this early time. The meat was not as small as the major chain at the time, Royal Castle, which had locations up the East Coast. Royal Castle was very much like the Krystal mini-burgers from the Northeast, they were 9 cents in Florida and most kids would have no less than 2 or 3. These were small tiled breakfast/lunch/"dinner" grills that served any of their fare around-the-clock. The one in our neighborhood even had a jukebox like we figured was real common up North.
Most tourists from the Northeast never took the Turnpike or even considered passing through Orlando before Disney World was built, so they all came down US-1, and it was dotted with Royal Castles all the way to Miami, people would stop in any time on a long drive for coffee, on the door it said "open 29 hours a day". This was when 7-11 was only open from 7am to 11pm (not Sunday though) and nothing else had shopping hours that late. Gas stations closed Sundays and at night too, and self-service pumping was still not the least bit primed for consideration since the arrival of the automobile. When I was about 10 I kind of figured that the Royal Castles had only been there about 10 years themselves, without threat of a hurricane up until that time, when one was on the way they had to scramble to put locks on the doors because they had never closed before.
Anyway, people knew McDonalds was going to be a California-style approach and it was not near downtown, not far but on then-undeveloped property and you could see it as they built the characteristic golden arches. Big tiles too, not the small ones. They were proud of their growth and often updated their signs with the increasing number of hamburgers sold, striving for their first million.
When they opened of course they had the longest french fries anybody had ever seen. Sticking way out of the smallest little paper sack that looked so absurd it actually got people's attention. No large orders of fries, and Big Macs were not even a dream, nothing but regular hamburgers in the white wrapper for 12 cents, cheeseburgers in the yellow wrapper for 15 cents, fries and Cokes for 10 cents, shakes 13 or 14 cents, slightly more than a burger. Grilled with onions, plus mustard, ketchup, and pickles on every one assembly-line style, and not nearly as small as the mini-burgers, but they were always ready when you got there, and nobody had realistically thought about drive-through yet.
The average wage of McDonalds my entire state is only $12, which means considerable amounts of people are working for less than that. But even at your local wage, that's only $29,000 a year for full time work before taxes, it is still a garbage wage.
McDonalds food is disgusting and overpriced compared to competition. A Happy Meal is ~$8 and the food is awful. I can go to Five Guys and get the classic combo for ~$13 and then I just have them cut the burger in half and I feed two kids. It ends up being about the same price for MORE food of a higher quality that is made to order. McDonalds locations are also really dirty inside. Kids aren't interested in the playgrounds as much and most McDonalds don't have them. AND McDonalds changed their design and look hideous now. I think they've done this to themselves. Make food with real ingredients, make it to order, and bring back the playgrounds and birthday parties for kids.
This is a trend that's probably going to continue and widen the rich-poor divide. Take airlines, there's only so many seats they can offer day to day, and with planes retiring from service and new planes slow to be delivered the inequality will only increase, and the market will shift to more affluential customers.
The likes of McDonald's will need to understand who their new customer base is quite carefully and market around that if they are to stay relevant. Sadly their products to me are garbage now; slow service, cold fries, awful oil. Obviously they've had to adapt but it's just expensive slop.
And in the UK they have had scandals around sexual harassment, which hasn't helped their image/branding.
> First they complained that restaurants like McD's were poisoning the lower classes with fast food, now they're complaining that they can't afford it?
Who is "they"? Someone, somewhere, will always complain about anything, no matter how good it is. The world is filled with critics because (my hot take) it's easier to tear things down than build them up.
Both things can be true, you know. Yes, its food is abysmally unhealthy, but it’s effectively the de facto national cafeteria of the continental United States by virtue of its widespread footprint and (previously) low prices.
In an ideal world, we should be challenging both, rather than throwing up our hands and pleading confusion because someone can’t hold two truths simultaneously.
"In an ideal world, we should be challenging both"
Not really. Calling food poison and then complaining that poor people can't afford it implies that you support poor people eating poison and or eating the food.
The first complaint implies that they shouldn't be eating it at all and result is that I just can't take the second complaint seriously.
It's just a way to shit on big corporations without having to take responsibility.
You’re grossly misunderstanding the broader arguments through misrepresenting the claims as tied together, rather than the standalone grievances they are. A single system can have multiple flaws that interact on each other without necessarily creating a single, larger issue.
McDonald’s food is unhealthy and should be improved. At the same time, they have become too expensive for the poorer working classes to afford. These are two different problems, with different solutions.
You’re basically arguing that because I cannot demonstrate “one easy fix” to a complex issue of nuance that I’m essentially advocating for poisoning people, and it demonstrates your complete inability to grasp simultaneous truths or discuss complex issues effectively without misrepresenting opposition to score points.
Well in the past you could get unhealthy but cheap, convenient food. The cheap+convenient combo no longer really exists for families that for some reason will not cook.
The lack of vegan options — and Trump flexing his one-day McDonald’s internship — finally pushed me to boycott McDonald’s altogether. Also it became slow with all the delivery drivers queuing up as well.
Burger King might be raising prices too, but at least their deals are still decent, and every burger has a vegan option (which is supposedly even cheaper for them to produce).
My actual favorite “fast food” is IKEA — surprisingly good as a coworking spot, and their vegan Köttbullar are great.
And honestly, in Germany who needs McDonald’s when there’s a good Döner place around? It’s basically a 5-in-1 burger: real bread, salad, sauces, and your choice of meat/halloumi/seitan.
From what I see here, McDonald’s mostly survives in low-density areas or as car-dependant late-night junk food where alternatives don’t exist. But if people go out less, or can’t afford a car anymore, that model gets shaky fast. There are simply too many better options now.
It reminds me of the same shrinkflation/bloat cycle we see with American pickup trucks: beds get smaller while prices balloon, and then people act surprised that these wank-tanks fail in Europe where efficient vans just work better. “Free market” also means that bad products eventually lose.
Same story with phones: everything keeps getting bigger, heavier, and more bloated with features nobody asked for. Bring back the iPhone Mini — not everything needs to be Super-Size Me.
OTOH, no company or item exists in a vacuum. If McDonald’s suppliers have increased prices, and their employees expect higher wages due to inflation, then McDonald’s must increase prices or eat the cost (unsustainable in the long-term). Does this only contribute to inflation? Yes. But so does every worker who wants higher wages - unfortunately everybody in the chain has such little influence on the wider economy that they must simply prioritise themselves.
This is an overly simplistic view, of course, not least because it presumes good faith, but that is really my point: the economy has too many moving parts to simply say “you’re to blame for inflation because you increased your prices”.
No, inflation is a monetary and political phenomenon. Companies cannot set prices arbitrarily, in particular not the fast food industry which faces what is probably the strongest competition on the planet. The entire restaurant industry does not collude on the prices of burgers.
In this particular case it's wage-push inflation. The lowest quintile of workers has seen very strong wage gains among other reasons because of tight labour markets and minimum wage legislation, which on the consumer side prices a lot of people out of the service economy.
That's a nice excuse from the executives, but it doesn't align with reality. McDonald's profits have been rising every year. [1] If those dastardly minimum wage workers and their fat paychecks were putting even the slightest bit of pressure on struggling McDonald's, the expectation would be some sort of reduction in profit. But it's the total opposite. Profits are outpacing whatever losses they're (not) experiencing from whatever supposed wage increases they have.
You’re repeating generic right wing-ish talking points. Yet profit margins have increased. If your reasoning was correct, profit margins wouldn’t be increasing as they are.
Then why are profit margins bigger? Supply and demand as the reason for profit percentage increasing margin makes no sense. I’d be interested in how you’d debate that.
That is pretty obvious from where it says “Edit:”, what isn’t obvious is how Supply and Demand prevents companies from setting prices arbitrarily. Which is and always was what your comment said.
.. no, corporations raise prices in response to the falling value of the dollar which has been occurring predictably since 2020 when the money supply was increased 20% (remember the "printer goes brr" memes and the "stimulus checks")?
Make more money supply -> money is worth less -> prices go up
simple stuff
I guess the next step is: blame corporations, nationalize them, see it causes economic problems (we're here), and then repeat (Trump promises $2k checks to everyone, this is coming soon)
> Her brother, who works as a cashier, can’t afford meals out at all, she said. The cost of his diabetes medication has increased greatly, to about $200 a month, which she helps him cover.
This is an often unacknowledged part of the cost of fast food. It turns susceptible people into diabetics. As a diabetic there is little I can eat there, since I manage it with food not drugs. When I do I get a burger and throw out the bun, which isn't very thrifty.
If you just go with the flow and eat what this culture makes easiest, it's an unusual specimen who can be healthy and happy in late life. And it's not at all unusual to turn young people into patients.
It is unusual to see young people make the choices to not turn into patients.
It costs very little to eat mostly lentils/legumes/nuts/yogurt/vegetables, and drink mostly water without carbs dissolved in it, but no business is going to survive selling those things.
Where is the next cheap lentils/legumes/nuts/yogurt/vegetables fast food restaurant?
I think it's a weird concept of a society where all the parts of it with money are directing people to do one thing - but at the same time, the people are expected to do the exact opposite and it's their own fault if they follow the coercion...
There are such restaurants around here in Europe but they are super expensive, so you are better off doing it on your own at home.
Cooking a stew of lentils or any other legumes is very easy and does not consume that much time either, and you can cook for 3 days easily.
Why are people not doing this?
Cooking takes time and effort, which many people lack. You need to make an initial investment in utensils and appliances, which poor people can't always afford. And if you don't already know how to cook, learning it on your own can be risky. If you make a mistake, you may end up losing the food, which poor people again may not be able to afford. And learning it takes time and effort anyway.
In many cultures, men traditionally didn't know how to cook. It was not their job. That wasn't a problem, as long as men lived with their parents or in an institutional setting, until they got married. But in a modern, more individualist culture, such attitudes are holding men back.
I've been hooked on fast food before, and I still grab some on occasion, but I don't understand these common excuses for why people HAVE to consume fast food.
It's far cheaper to 1) buy unprocessed foods at the grocery store, 2) spend $20 a few times for cookware that will last plenty long enough, and 3) cook for 20min a day or do more preparation on the weekend. It doesn't require becoming a professional chef or buying appliances.
I think the main problem is that fast food is addictive and those who are vulnerable to that tend to make excuses for why they can't stop.
Moreover, changing one's habits to cooking requires effort upfront, and its benefits may not be apparent (at least in the start).
I have been doing all kind of strategies since I have lived largely alone for over 15 years. I have also worked in restaurant kitchens that were on the premium side. I can do very sophisticated pastries from the Ferrandi book.
If there is one thing I know for sure is that there is very little benefits in cooking, apart from the pleasure of eating something good. Even if you want to eat healthy there are plenty of ways that require very little cooking. The only problem is how much money you can throw at the problem, the easier it is the more expensive it will be. Sometimes you don't even have a choice because of time constraints (people who do 2 hours commute everyday just can't allocate time to that).
I do not like cooking. Even just spending an hour on it sucks, and I would rather order, but I just cannot afford to order food on the daily, so I must cook something for a few days or the whole week.
If you do not have the money to order on the daily, then you either cook or someone else has to do the cooking.
Because they lack the skill?
You seem to take the ability of people to cook for granted. I don't think it is automatic anymore. Generational transmission of some skills has ceased.
Jamie Oliver famously asked British school kids to name objects such as an apple, a potato or a cucumber, and plenty of them did not know. They just stared at the raw vegetables/fruits, baffled.
And as of now, you cannot simply vibe-cook using AI. You actually need to know some stuff, like what is what, how to use utensils, how to treat hot objects, what is too much gas and what not enough etc.
It is very easy to learn. If I could learn it, so can anyone else. :P I have not cooked my entire life, for the most part, but when my situation requires me to cook, then I can. I find a relatively easy recipe and I just follow the instructions. It has worked out fine for me.
> Jamie Oliver famously asked British school kids to name objects such as an apple, a potato or a cucumber, and plenty of them did not know
Okay, the situation really is horrible then, wow.
"It is very easy to learn. If I could learn it, so can anyone else. :P "
Well, the Neanderthals cooked, so it is not exactly a rocket engineering skill ... but it is probably acquired better from other people than alone, and equipment matters as well.
If you learn to cook from your mother in a well-equipped kitchen, you will probably enjoy the process a lot more than alone with Youtube in a cheaply rented flat with one pot, one dull knife and two dented plastic plates. And if people don't enjoy some learning process, they are much more likely to drop out and resign. Especially if fast food alternatives lurk at them from their smartphones.
The best way to start cooking is probably with a knife, cutting board, an 8" or 10" skillet, and a small saucepan (i.e. little soup pot). There are pans that can work as the last two, but it helps to be able to have two pans at hand, e.g. for making rice while cooking the protein and/or vegetables, even if all you have is a single burner. And none have to be fancy. A cheap soft wood cutting board helps your cheap knife stay sharper for longer.
Outside baking, that's basically all you need, at least if you're alone. Cooking for two or especially a family is when you need more equipment as time savers and for variability, e.g. mandolin, pressure cooker, etc.
I'd venture to say this is how many people have learned to cook, and even how many avid cookers continue to cook.
If you're starting out, canned food and pasta is definitely your friend, not to mention cheap. You can start to learn to cook by boiling a pot of water for your instant Ramen, and frying an egg to toss into the bowl. Or just soft boil an egg in the boiling water and set side before doing the Ramen in the same water. Building meals around something packaged and precooked is useful and can help save money (outside beans and rice, fresh ingredients are sadly often more expensive than what you can cobble together from pantry staples).
I come from a very poor family, and I am Eastern European... so we had very "shitty" equipments. We peeled our potatoes using a knife, too. I wonder how foreign it is to others.
I have never learned to cook from anyone. I just read the recipes and/or watch some videos and that is literally it. My kitchen is not as equipped as it is in rich households.
Ordering food is ideal, but super expensive, so I personally cannot afford to do that.
Aren't you Martin Janiczek? Bro, if true, you're not helping our collective effort to resurrect "Central Europe" in colloquial use :)
We had a weird assortment of equipment as well, some dating back to Masaryk, but it was usually durable and reliable. That is why we also kept it; late stage Communism was terrible at producing durable consumer goods, while old stuff lasted for decades.
I usually refer to it as Central Europe but people have difficulties with it, just like with cooking easy food. :P
> If I could learn it, so can anyone else.
More than a billion people have successfully learned to speak Chinese, some of them very stupid. Yet here I am, struggling to remember the hanzi and the tones.
Different skills take different amounts of time and parameters to master.
Comparing learning a language to watching a video or reading a recipe and spending a few weeks adding some oil and spices in a pot or pan is ridiculous.
Sorry, I wanted to sound edgier and made my point less clear! What I wanted to convey is, it's waaaaay easier to learn a skill when you've been exposed to it since you were a baby.
My mother and grandmother cooked, but I have never participated, I just ate the food. Does it count as exposure?
My grandmother cooked daily and taught her kids to cook. My mother cooked weekly and taught us to use the microwave. Sure anyone can learn to cook, just like anyone can learn to play the piano, but it requires time, money, dedication, and the push to get started. It’s much easier if you were taught some of the basics as a kid, or had an example in your life.
It still baffles me that people compare cooking to playing an instrument. It really is not that difficult to cook, depending on what it is. Do people know how to make schnitzel (breadcrumbed meat)? Make fries? Make rice? Make boiled potatoes? Or are those things difficult as well? Making a stew out of legumes is not that difficult either. Boil your legumes, then mix eggs, flour, and paprika together, put it in oil, heat it up for a few seconds, then pour everything into the water you are boiling your legumes in. Put some herbs to your liking. That is literally it. Healthy, delicious stew of any legumes.
Agreed. The analogies to playing a musical instrument or speaking a foreign language are pretty silly.
Cooking (provided you have access to some simple cookware) is literally printing out the recipe and FOLLOWING THE DAMN INSTRUCTIONS. If that’s beyond someone’s abilities then I weep for the general state of mankind.
You can get good enough cookware for the price of a couple of McDonald's meals too. We don't all need $100 pots and pans. I feel like the people arguing that cooking is a giant obstacle can't be doing it in good faith. Watch a YouTube video and throw a couple of eggs in a $10 pan already.
This.
If someone can afford fast food, they can afford enough utensils or equipments, too.
As I said, I come from a poor family and we only went to the McDonalds to get fast food when I was sick (because I craved it), so very rarely. Fast food was for special occasions due to its high price as opposed to cooking at home, as a poor family.
"I feel like the people arguing that cooking is a giant obstacle can't be doing it in good faith. "
I am one of those people and I am arguing in good faith. I have seen it with my own eyes.
It is not "just" skills or "just" kitchen or "just" utensils or "just" unfamiliarity with the basics or "just" being tired after getting home late (poor people often work bad schedules). It is a bit of everything, and the resulting complex is hard to disentangle.
On a similar note, have you never seen, e.g., obese people who never exercise? It is again a bit of everything. They are not used to it, they feel bad when starting, they can easily overdo it, they feel ashamed going into a gym etc. All this summed together results in avoidant behavior, even though no single reason dominates it.
Yes, all those obstacles can be overcome, but we shouldn't expect everyone to just simply leap over them. All humans aren't built this way. If they were, humanity as a whole would look a lot different than it does.
My point was that if a person learns to cook early in life, they will consider it more natural and most of those obstacles will be easier to overcome for them. They will have all the circuits wired in, so to say.
I have a similar experience when exercising. I was never obese, but my mother never exercised. Simply never. (Ironically, at 74, she is in perfect health.) And thus, I didn't understand how exercise even makes sense as a kid. I had to learn it for years. It is hard to describe how challenging is it to adjust your mindset and rhythm of life to something that was completely alien to you in your first 20 years of life, especially if that activity is optional and there is no external pressure. You can do it, but various relapses and "falling off the wagon" are way more frequent than if that activity is second nature to you.
If we want to fix things on societal level, we must be realistic. Recipes like "just do X", where X is something nontrivial, feel good and easy (especially to doers of X), but they don't have a good track record in actually achieving society-wide changes. They work for some individuals, but they have a scaling problem.
Maintaining a fast food habit is both expensive and non-trivial. For the people who have to drive to get their fast food, at least you know they are capable of learning something more complex than cooking.
OK, so how do you explain that people don't cook, especially the ones who are relatively poor and could save some money doing so?
I have been engaging in this thread for a day now and harvesting downvotes. I would certainly love to see some competing theories and dig into them instead.
I mean, how do we explain the fact that in the US homeless people have access to expensive drugs? :P
> Cooking (provided you have access to some simple cookware) is literally printing out the recipe and FOLLOWING THE DAMN INSTRUCTIONS. If that’s beyond someone’s abilities then I weep for the general state of mankind.
I mean, if you don't understand how badly the US educational system is failing people then I don't know what you expect. There are a large amount and growing amount of people that are barely literate and can only follow basic instructions. This is by design because we're starving our educational systems and creating a two-tiered society where people either receive private education or no education at all. It should come at zero surprise that people can't cook because they were never taught how to cook nor how to even learn and integrate that knowledge.
My parents for example were fishermen, neither of them are functionally able to cook anything beyond tossing some meat in a crockpot and some rice in a rice cooker. Everything I know about cooking was shit I had to pick up on my own and it's only because I'm both literate and computer savvy that I can grasp and integrate these things smoothly.
While the US education system is plenty bad, I expect that a substantial number of people who can't/don't cook are not held back due to illiteracy. To be fair, this thread seems to be discussing recipes and dishes, but even "tossing some meat in a crockpot and some rice in a rice cooker" is an improvement from ordering fast food.
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It's not difficult per se, but you can't throw anyone into a kitchen and expect food to be made as a result. You still need to be taught to some extent. The bar is a lot lower than playing an instrument or many other things, but there's still a bar below which (edible) food will not be made. If you've never been taught and never went out of your way to learn, you won't know how to.
Some people get out of school not being able to read and write, at least to any meaningful degree. The fact that some people get out of school not being able to cook thus shouldn't be surprising.
Is the US education system really this bad?
The same problem is present in other parts of the world, even in Europe, although I believe not to the same extent.
I got down-voted, which is odd, because I truly have not encountered anyone here in Hungary who do not know how to read nor write. The only demographic that may difficulties with that are gypsies because they typically do not go to school.
Additionally, is it not common knowledge the US education system is bad?
Might be an American in denial.
The 'meaningful' part of my original comment is carrying a lot of weight there. Most people are literate in the literal sense of that word, but I went to class with people who have not read a written work longer than five pages sine they went out of school, and I would not trust them to read an even vaguely complicated instruction manual without me explaining something to them. They are not literate in any meaningful sense of that word. They barely knew how to read when we took our final exams, but they did pass, since no-one wants to deal with the trouble of actually teaching them now. They're good people. The schools just failed them.
I could barely write when I got out school, in the sense that I couldn't read my own handwriting. I had to be taught anew when I learned a language that uses a different script, and that practice made my normal handwriting 10 times better.
And this is before you get into people who for most intents and purposes apparently can read, but their brain grinds to a halt when a computer requires them to do that very same activity and act accordingly. I'm not sure of those people have a similar problem of functional illiteracy, or if it's a problem of a different kind, but it sure is real and sure keeps happening.
For someone raised around music, starting a new instrument might not sound very challenging. You could get good at twinkle twinkle little star on the recorder in under an hour. Take carpentry as another example. It’s not hard. It’s not expensive to get into. But, if you never had someone in your life who was into it, then it just never occurs to you to try it.
You could open a trendy restaurant in SV called 'Soup Kitchen' serving various stews and goulashes and I am confident it would do very well.
I am confident in this, too. My Hispanic girlfriend made goulash for the first time in her life and it was delicious! She used Hungarian paprika. :)
I'm male, and I was never taught to cook nor prepare a meal. And I do not like cooking one little bit yet I can prepare a meal that all but the most fussy would eat. And I'm talking about a meal with multiple parts—meat, three vegetables with condiments, and bread etc. then say finishing with a desert.
Basic cooking is profoundly easy, and for most it's instinctive, after all one has to eat, so there's incentive. In fact I have never knowing met anyone who couldn't prepare a basic meal that would not at least sustain them and other members of a family. It's true I've met people whose food preparation leaves much to be desired and I'd prefer to avoid their cooking but the food they prepared was definitely edible.
"You seem to take the ability of people to cook for granted."
Right, I've lived my whole life in a world where everyone I know well takes one's ability to prepare a basic meal for granted, it's something that's not even contemplated it's so elementary. In fact, when reading your comment my initial reaction was as this isn't April 1st he must be winding us up for the sake of argument.
If what what you say is true and there are significant numbers of people who can't cook then to me this is a startling revelation. Similarly, I'd not previously heard of Jamie Oliver's questioning of school kids and revealing their ignorance of food types but that's not surprising given that cooking programs bore me to tears. That said, the first thing I'd no doubt agree with Oliver about is that this ignorance is truly shocking, and second we'd be questioning how did we arrive at this disgraceful situation when it would have been inconceivable several generations ago.
How can someone not pick up the basics of food preparation after seeing it done several times? Even if like me one doesn't like cooking, at three meals a day it's hard to completely avoid watching those who are preparing one's food—so the normal human gets lots of experience even if they only see food preparation infrequently.
Even with my disinterest in cooking I picked the skill up by simply being around the kitchen at meal times. By age 10 I could easily prepare a decent meal, that's just how it was for the average person.
Cooking legumineuse notoriously take a long time and you very often need to soak them before hand.
Even the simpler stuff like lentils have at least twice the cooking time of regular pasta (20-30 min at least) unless you like eating stuff hard as rocks.
On top of that; it isn't very good as is and need quite a lot of skill to taste great. The usual way to make it taste good, is to use animal fats/meats and various vegetables broths/sauces. It's a very time consuming process and very often quite expensive as well because the raw ingredients are not necessarily cheap.
So basically what happens is that either you are poor enough that one person in the household is basically dedicated to this task (especially if it's a large family) or both are working, most likely middle class, and then there is very little time to do that sort of cooking without completely destroying the possibility of having a life.
People are doing this. Where did you get the impression that people stopped cooking homemade meals?
I know many that just keep ordering or buy things that are super easy to do (precooked rice, fish stabs, chicken nuggets).
When I studied in Germany in 2010 I went to an Indian place that had a "small plate" (which was decent even for me, a man in my 20s at the time) for €2.80. The large one was €4.80. The food was magnificent, and was traditional Indian cuisine. Lots of legumes and vegetables.
Fast food is an addiction not nutrition. Some people develop the addiction and the restaurants feed it.
Normal food behavior is to eat until satiated. We've pretended it's normal to gorge yourself at McDonald's and such because saying otherwise makes some people feel bad.
People adopting normal food behavior aren't going to be drawn to eating at such a restaurant. The food that's been mentioned is trivial to make at home and requires less time than going out.
In places where there's enough mass of people to actually make this worthwhile (mainly Asia), there's tons of options, but no large ones.
I just wonder how poor people can afford to eat fast food. I wish I could afford to order food every day. I cannot. So I have to cook for myself which I have never really done before, but as an adult I had to learn.
I mean, the OP is suggesting they can't...
Yeah, but I am talking about everyone else in this thread (or most people). It is WAY cheaper to cook your own food.
>There are such restaurants around here in Europe but they are super expensive, so you are better off doing it on your own at home.
There's a bougie breakfast/lunch place near me like that and it's wildly successful, seems like every year they open another location.
The joke conspiracy theory in my office is that the menu is made by a world class french chef who's mocking the median target/whole foods shopper who is the customer by making stuff that's objectively garbage and incompatible with the fundamentals of cooking and papering over it with sheer skill.
"haha ze dumb white wimmen want kale, I put kale in ze mac and cheese and I make them like it"
"Quinoa is trendy you say? I put quinoa in your motherfucking eggs".
Obviously I'm leaving out details but those are actual examples of combinations. Now the food doesn't suck per say, but it ain't great either. And yet the place is wildly successful.
They don't have time and/or money. The moment you have ample time you gonna cook.
Most people aren't interested in a stew that you have to cook for 3 days easily. Even BBQ people expect low and slow to finish on the same day it starts. :p
I think they meant once cooked you can eat it for 3 days worth of meals (in other words it is easy to cook a large quantity)
that sounds like preparing bear meat.
I think you are having a too black and white opinion on the issue. As a founder it is actually cheaper for me to spend 1000$ on restaurant and take-out food per week than wasting time cooking for myself. Plus you support local businesses by eating out
It is cheaper to spend 1000$ on a restaurant than to take an hour or two to cook a very low-effort food that takes max 2 hours to cook and lasts for 3 days? I'm genuinely baffled.
Personally I would not call it a waste of 2 hours.
Either way, if you can afford it, then Godspeed. :D
I definitely do not have 1000 USD per week for food. I do not even have 100 USD per week for food.
I personally don’t get takeout or eat at restaurants but there are certainly many cases in the US where it would be (far) cheaper. You say 2 hours for 3 days (so 40 mins/day or about 5h/week) which I think is on the low side. If you spend an average of 90 minutes a day on everything related to food (grocery shopping, recipes, cooking, cleanup, dishes) that’s 10.5 hr/week. In any case, that’s between 5-10h/week or $75-150/week at $15/hr, enough to pay the extra over groceries for cheap fast food. At $100/hr you could easily buy nicer food with the time savings, much like the GP comment.
But of course the math is different for everyone. Some people love to cook and some hate it. Some people like things that are fairly hard to cook (Korean, Japanese, Indian.) Some people need a different dinner each night and some are happy eating a giant pot of one bulk-cooked thing across days or weeks. Personally, I occasionally cook elaborate dinners, but for weeknights I find that a rice cooker plus frozen vegetables is a nice middle ground. Variety, hot fresh food, nutritious, and also very little time required. That, and eating with friends and family and trading off cooking.
Speaking of, I have difficulties gaining weight. I would have to eat a lot. The only time I could gain weight was when I spent most of my day eating. I am not sure how other people do it. I do not have that amount of time to eat food.
The cost of time is something that's discounted ... and for some households, there isn't time (parents working two jobs type thing).
One of the calculations in there is the dinner for 4 section of xkcd 980 https://xkcd.com/980/huge/#x=-2003&y=-1465&z=6
While homemade rice and pinto beans is $9.26 ... when you add in the time for shopping, travel, prep, and cleanup it has an it has an effective cost of $41.80
If you take off the cost of going to groceries or that someone can spend the time to cook rather than work (or relax), then that $9.26 is the price you see.
Similarly, homemade chicken dinner is $13.78 ... or $46.32 with additional costs of living factored in.
McDonald's is $27.89 (in 2011... it's more now ... but then all the above numbers are too)... but the total cost is $36.03.
If you could get paid $16.27 rather than doing grocery shopping and the time spent cooking or cleaning then it is cheaper to eat at McDonald's than to have a home cooked meal.
For many people, cooking (and cleaning) is only economical if the time spent doing it can be completely discounted. If I have to spend 30 minutes in front of the stove not do other things, or 5-10 minutes cleaning up afterwards, that's time not doing other things that I'd enjoy. For families with kids, that sometimes means that young children are left unattended for an hour (not always viable). Getting fast food, on the other hand is has no cooking or time spent cleaning and furthermore has a good chance of having something that the kids want to eat.
"Just learn to cook" isn't always an option for every household.
Eating out for every meal isn't $1000 per week. If I went to the local diner, that would be about $200 / person / week. If I got pizza every day that would be down to about $100 / person / week.
>While homemade rice and pinto beans is $9.26
At Whole Foods prices, $4.29 gets you 8000 calories of rice. Beans are more expensive per calorie but still very cheap. $9 would get you more beans and rice than a family of four could eat in an entire day.
Bought in bulk its even cheaper.
I have a friend who, once he started steadily making mid-high six figures in Silicon Valley, began taking the HOV lane on his commute into work, despite driving alone. The calculus was easy. Assuming $500,000 salary (I think he made more), 8 hour days, 50 weeks a year, that's $250/hour. As a manager, he couldn't shuffle his schedule around very easily, unlike when he was programming and could come in late and leave late, or when you're a young programmer and come in early and leave late (or just sleep under your desk). The 30+ minutes saved during his commute each day was well worth the amortized cost of some tickets, and that's before accounting for the stress saved, marginal value on the dollar, additional personal time, etc. Though, when he told me this he hadn't yet accumulated many, if any, tickets, and I don't think automated occupant detection had been installed.
In the past couple of years there's now a toll option for some HOV lanes, which is how it should be. He's generally a very conscientious person, but time is money, particularly so when you're well remunerated.
What a clear example of how being wealthy allows you to thumb your nose at the laws that the rest of us plebs have to follow.
> The 30+ minutes saved during his commute each day
I mean, you could also live closer to the office
It is not really feasible for many people.
> I think it's a weird concept of a society where all the parts of it with money are directing people to do one thing - but at the same time, the people are expected to do the exact opposite and it's their own fault if they follow the coercion...
You've summed up the foundation of our entire consumer economy quite well. And people might be able to devote their attention to several types of things they need and not fall prey to adversarial pop culture for those specific things, but nobody is capable of doing that for everything.
They don't exist because there isn't demand for them, hence no economies of scale, precisely to the point.
The point is absolutely right, people do just eat what tastes best, and this food just maximizes for that alone.
They do actually, for real, choose to become unhealthy.
That doesn’t make sense in any way. People eat what they learn to eat and what’s available. Choice doesn’t enter into the picture unless something sort of bumps you out of your normal headspace and makes you think about it in the first place.
> Where is the next cheap lentils/legumes/nuts/yogurt/vegetables fast food restaurant?
Nowhere, because people prefer to pay for excess sat fats, sugar, carbs, and salt.
> I think it's a weird concept of a society where all the parts of it with money are directing people to do one thing - but at the same time, the people are expected to do the exact opposite and it's their own fault if they follow the coercion...
Every single health resource in society says not to eat excess sat fats, sugar, carbs, and salt. And avoid alcohol and tobacco. And gambling.
But people like short term benefits, even if they know there are long term consequences. And society is composed of people. Maybe GLP-1 pills can fix this error in the psyche.
GL-what pills?
There are plenty of these restaurants all around the world, they’re just not cheap. Poke bowls and salads and Sweetgreen are very popular, go to any downtown anywhere. But where McDonald’s uses shelf-stable, globally sourcable bulk materials, these places are the opposite. Both Coke and salads are mostly water, but the Coke ships as a concentrate and the salad ships whole. You can sign one contract and get a regular, reliable delivery of Coke to your stores in Houston, Anchorage and everywhere between; good luck doing that with salad. There also aren’t any great huge-markup upsells with healthy foods; the closest thing is guac, which costs a ton, meanwhile McDonalds can upsell you on fries or coke (which are basically free!) There’s the trend factor: Baja Blast is catchy and you can rotate it out for another neon soda in a week, how do you do that with arugula? Artificial ingredients provide more of a moat/proprietary edge; it is legally and practically trivial to copy a healthy sandwich. Healthy foods are more difficult to eat while walking or driving, so you need more seating. Then there’s the prep time, the addictive factor, calorie density…
Instant pot is like $80. throw in a cup of lentils, some frozen veggies and some rice/potatoes and you can chill while it cooks you a meal in an hour.
I am without a kitchen for the last month (remodel) and I just use my microwave. There's nothing magic about cooking. Take cold things and make them hot. How are people managing to be this daft? You can cook rice, pasta, lentils, etc in a bowl and a microwave.
Pollan touches on this in The Omnivore's Dilemma. The low price of a burger is an illusion because the real costs to the environment and public health are externalized, making fast food artificially cheap due to indirect subsidies on corn byproducts and other animal feed. Healthy food competes on a totally different cost base.
There's also the split between eating with agency and just consuming which requires a top down solution. Unless the government stops subsidizing meat and corn subproducts linked to health issues the majority of people will always gravitate towards the cheapest calories available.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Omnivore%27s_Dilemma
Yogurt and nuts are available ready to eat at gas stations and grocery stores.
As someone who would take a yogurt parfait over most McDonald's items , I have no idea why you think it's not available.
one thing i miss about living in a city is being near a hare krishna restaurant or similar hindu place, like ones run by the sikh community. cheap, healthy and yum. some would offer free food to homeless or if you went to one at a temple it was pay-by-donation. sometimes the donation was just being there and singing the hare krishna song with them :D
We have a place in my town called Cava.
That describes Indian food trucks, or any of several places selling falafel wraps.
The only place i can get a falafel wrap is 12.50. Alright on a tech salary but way too much for most ppl.
i just paid $60 for 4 crepes. $12.50 for falafel sounds like a steal these days
look for a hindi, or middle eastern restaurant.
i prefer hindi:
muligatany soup, naan bread, vindaloo or korma chicken, borfi, dahi, lahssi, chai tea.
Indian restaurants
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Insert classic Michael Pollan “if you see it being advertised, it’s likely something you shouldn’t be eating”.
No one’s advertising spinach or beans.
Your local grocery store almost certainly is. Zucchini was $1 at Safeway last mknth
Popeye the Sailor has entered the chat. /s
Weirdly, I do get ads for veggies, but it could be driven by my recent research spree on vegetarian recipes to have great food across the holidays for my mostly vegetarian family. I may have skewed “the algorithm “
I recall advertisements for veggies from the Green Giant. And fresh veg always has a slot on the grocery flyers.
I went to the grocery store and bought six meals worth of whole foods for two people two weeks ago. Rice, veggies, two fish meals, two meals based on eggs (I already had the eggs), one meal based on chicken. Thirty grams of protein for each meal. I had staples in my pantry already. I aimed for 2200 calories per person per day. I didn't buy organic because it's more expensive. This wasn't Whole Foods or some bougie store. I didn't buy ANY beverages.
It was $170 with my loyalty card.
Six meals at McDonald's is... Just about $35. Chipotle? $110, maybe less. Chick-fil-A? Under $50. And none of them need to be cooked or taste like wet cardboard.
$35 for 6 meals for two people at McDonalds? What?
Where I live, one meal at McDonalds is about $12. So 6 * 2 * 12 = $144. Not that much of a difference.
Also, if you aimed for 2200 calories per person per day with that $170, then it isn't really fair comparing to a single McDonald's meal, is it? It sounds like buying whole foods is cheaper.
Does McDonalds not have the $5 McValue Meals where you live? In the Bay Area, $5 + tax gets you a McChicken, 4 chicken nuggets, small fries, and small drink. $6 to upgrade to a McDouble cheeseburger instead of the McChicken. Altogether ~1000 calories per meal.
That's darn good value for your money, at least for a prepared hot meal that's convenient in most locales. $5 for ~1000 calories, plus the ingredients are fortified; the lack of fiber notwithstanding, it's not a horrible thing to eat several times a week. I live in SF where McDonalds is not very convenient, and where food prices, including prepared takeout, aren't too bad if you know where to go--my wife sometimes brings empty casserole dishes to one of our friendly neighborhood Chinese restaurants to fill up, without paying extra, though for us it's fortunately more about convenience when raising two kids with a bunch of extracurriculars than it is about penny pinching.
FWIW, I love cooking and cook as much as I can, usually at least 3 times a week, which with leftovers means 4 or 5 dinners. But between cooking, cleaning, and shopping, it can be be quite time consuming, and excepting myself, the rest of the family isn't keen on eating beans 3 nights a week. (I'm only allowed to make Red Beans & Rice a few times a year. Ditto for similar big pot meals :(
Here it is more like $5 gets you a coke at McDonalds.
Have you used the app? You may need to use the app to get the McValue and similar lower-priced menu items. It's a brilliant price discrimination strategy.
I don't even have a smartphone. Why should I put up with these insane prices even with a discount by tracking, when I can buy the same thing for <1€ at the grocery store that is literally in the same building 10meters away.
Using the app a small soda at McDonald's is ~$1 ($1.14 near me, but that may include the SF soda tax). Less than $2 for a large for those beckoning diabetes.
But soda is definitely cheaper elsewhere, and drinks, even soda, are usually a profit center for almost any restaurant, but a loss leader at grocery stores. I remember in the mid 1990s when Coca-Cola and then Pepsi were trying to stem the tide of a decline in sales. They drastically lowered prices through certain channels, particularly grocery stores and, most memorably, vending machines outside grocery stores, where the price dropped from $0.50-$0.75 to $0.25 for a 12oz can. Almost overnight poor and working class people switched from cheaper alternatives like Kool-Aid (which was healthier--much less sugar!) to Coca-Cola and Pepsi.
I agree the app is exceptionally inconvenient, unless someone else in the car is ordering, as well as privacy intrusive. But my point is merely that McDonald's is trying to cater to price-sensitive consumers without taking a hit to their revenue, and doing so more effectively than any other fast food chain.
Yup i second this mcdonalds is cheap but they hid it as best as they can. You can minmax a good meal with 7.80 or so.
> You can minmax a good meal with 7.80 or so.
But at those price you can have a lot of eating-ready food at the grocery store. That is not cheap.
Sorry, I didn't multiply by two; it would have been $70. I checked the nutrition facts on the menu, it was a mix of meal deals and had nearly the same calorie counts that I was aiming for. Still less than half the cost of groceries (minus all the food I already had).
But if we're talking about the balance of macronutrients, I'd love to hear how you manage to beat the cost of fast food with legumes/nuts/yogurt and don't have a huge percentage of your calories from fat. 40g of protein from almonds is nearly a thousand calories and 90g of fat. 40g of protein from black beans is five Chipotle bowl orders worth of beans or four cups of fava beans. 35g of protein from nonfat Greek yogurt is nearly 3/4 of a pound of yogurt. If you can't stand to eat nearly a pound of nonfat yogurt in one sitting like most of the population, you'll only get 30g of protein from a 32oz tub and spend as much as a McDonald's sandwich (and get the same amount of fat).
> I'd love to hear how you manage to beat the cost of fast food with legumes/nuts/yogurt and don't have a huge percentage of your calories from fat
Lentils are $2/lb and a pound has approx 100g of protein. They've a little less than 1g of fat per 10g of protein.
"For only $11.99, the 40 piece Chicken McNuggets® from @mcdonalds will get you right for tournament time."
That will get you 5000 calories for $36 if you are willing to only eat mcnuggets. Plus the sauce.
Its worth noting that you don't need to avoid meat if the goal is to avoid being a pharmaceutical patient.
Meat is more expensive though and GP was talking about a low cost healthy diet.
I don't think animal products are all that expensive tbh. Chicken, milk, yogurt, eggs are all really cheap if you consider the protien content.
Completely unbeatable value especially factoring in time and convenience and heartiness is picking up a rotisserie chicken and a bag of frozen veggies.
Liver is also very affordable and extremely nutritious.
Of the four animal products you list there, only one is meat, and its a cheap meat...
Meat is not all that expensive for protein and comparatively quick and easy to cook, agreed, but the cheapest option is still veg.
Liver, and offal in general, is much underrated for both taste and health. A lot of people in the UK just do not eat it and its becoming hard to find (liver the common, but other things are not).
I can often get whole free range chickens for 99c/lb. So a 6lb chicken for $6.
Where is that?
Western Washington state
At least in my area, good quality meat isn't any more expensive than good quality produce. By "good meat" I mean at least pasture raised, and by "good produce" I mean at least organic.
I'd be curious for a silent down vote to actually comment here. Do you take issue with the prices of meat and produce in my area?
I didnt vote one way or another but its odd to compare the cost of meat to the cost of produce. Far different calorie density and nutritional profile.
Maybe your point is that you spend about as much on meat as you do on produce, but that depends on your specific diet since they are not equivalent food groups.
The prior comments were discussing the cost of healthy meals.
Calories aren't a good measure of anything beyond burning your food. Unless your body works similar to a steam engine, it really doesn't matter how much energy you can put into water by setting your food on fire.
My point was simply that I spend roughly the cost of quality meat in my area is on par with or cheaper than quality produce given what I need to put into a meal to feel full and satiated. My point isn't that I eat only meat, I don't know the last time I had a meal that didn't also include vegetables or bread, for example. I was only calling out that one doesn't need to stick to vegetables for a reasonably priced healthy meal, at least where I live.
Also, no offense to anyone, but hearing that you should eat lentils and beans as the main for a healthy meal is as appealing as hearing you should eat only cardboard for a healthy meal.
It actually costs a lot to do those things. Money is not the only important cost. Social cost and time cost are also important. If you eat all your meals at home alone, while your friends go out to restaurants, that's a cost. If you spend time cooking from scratch instead of using processed food, that's a cost.
> It costs very little to eat mostly lentils/legumes/nuts/yogurt/vegetables, and drink mostly water without carbs dissolved in it, but no business is going to survive selling those things
This is like every new fast casual business in Manhattan in the last decade.
Yeah, and they're not doing so hot: https://www.businessinsider.com/chipotle-cava-sweetgreen-gen...
> Chipotle, Cava, and Sweetgreen reported earnings in the last two weeks, and all three reported the same problem: Diners age 25 to 35 are visiting their stores less frequently as they pinch pennies.
Curious if you do that... Eat mostly lentils/legumes/nuts/yogurt/vegetables. Do you avoid drinking soda?
There's a lot of quirky vegan restaurants doing really well at least here in Barcelona. And health/eco shops too.
But it's not quite as tasty as a greasy burger
As usual on HN I have to scroll to some grayed out text to hear the intelligent positions.
Patients with end-stage kidney disease (ESKD) account for over 7% of Medicare spending, or approximately $46.6 billion annually.
very stupid question, why dont we have a startup say from india that ships container full of diabetes meds directly to people that need them and a person in the USA who handles the distribution. Even with shipping cost included, I dont think it ll be more expensive
Regulations make this very difficult. Take a look at FDA Section 804. Startup cost is in the low tens or hundreds of thousands just to get the application accepted and then the ongoing yearly cost is in the millions. Currently, the FDA makes it very difficult for new competitors to enter the market because of these really high fees. This is part of, but not the whole, reason why drugs cost so much in the US.
Because of the FDA. Lots of meds already come from India, but if you buy them in France or the US, the price difference is 5x.
That’s not because of the FDA, that’s because of CEPS. If the USG negotiated drug prices the way France does, there’d be far less disparity in average pricing. (Given the continual litany of safety, efficacy, and dosage control issues with imported drugs, FDA isn’t regulating them enough, largely because the inspection budget just isn’t there.)
I can only speak for the UK but for quite a while now, McD's has become an uninviting experience, with miserable staff, menu screens that visibly tell you to hurry the f*k up and choose the product. Not to mention customers vying with delivery drivers for orders. I think the problem applies to all-income customers.
At least from my perspective, COVID broke everything. People are more awful, quality is more awful, and prices are way up. I dread even eating out anymore as I fully expect to overpay for bad food and service.
There's an argument to be made that inflation is ultimately the driver of all three complaints, but boy did that all happen seemingly overnight.
Absolutely. I feel bad for young people growing up in this broken world. They will never even know what was taken from them.
I realize that I’m probably going to get dogpiled for saying it, but I think that the response to COVID (ie lockdowns) did far more damage than the disease itself.
I don't understand why people still blame the lockdowns. When the lockdowns started, it was unknown how dangerous Covid actually was. It could have killed 20%, or reduced lifespan by 30%, or something. Nobody knew. It takes 20/20 hindsight to blame lockdowns for what was a generational catastrophe. It's like blaming shelter in place requirements instead of the bombing of the reich.
To be fair to the parent, despite what they think about the lockdown decision now, it says nothing about whether or not they thought it made any sense then.
It's perferctly possible to believe that the lockdown was a reasonable decision with what was known then, and still believe that the lockdown is to blame for certain unavoidable consequences down the line. Again, the parent might not believe this as well but their point can be taken separately fron your complaint.
Since several generations of Americans are not familiar with a drawn out sustained attack on acceptable cost-of-living parameters, the observation that "people are more awful" should be familiar to many people who lived and endured in places that have had decades-long deteriorating econonmies. If the economy or subjective economic perception had not tanked post-lockdown, the awfulness of people would be much less pronounced I believe.
Nobody knew, that is true. But not everyone was in agreement, it only seemed that way because dissenting voices were silenced. Do some research and you’ll find that there were plenty of people predicting bad outcomes from the lockdowns. I was not one of them, but they exist for sure.
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From day one, I was hearing about suggestions of social distancing and NK1 masks would do 80% of the work for you. It took waaay to long for that information to disseminate.
My standing statement is: The idea of a pandemic was so well established that Hollywood made multiple bad movies about the idea.
The other key piece that gets magically brushed aside is that there was a pandemic during the Obama administration. Obviously not as severe, but nonetheless a warning.
Yet we were somehow unprepared just a few years later? And those same incompetent entities and experts were the source of our inflation understanding and response to COVID?
I think not. Very little passes the smell test. It didn’t them. It’s even less so - if you look & listen - now.
The playbook we followed was straight out of the 1918 pandemic.
Unfortunately, so was the public response to it.
What you’re failing to acknowledge is the public was right. It was “leadership” across the board that failed. It’s been documented and continues to be documented. It’s simply not advertised, else the lack of trust gap would widen and be more than justified.
The failure(s), we are worse off for it at this point. The handling of the COVID 19 pandemic was as misguided and anemic as Bush’s “Keep shopping” (i.e., his advise to the country in response to 9/11).
Blaming those without power for the shortcomings of those with power is revisionist history bullshit. T
Two weeks to flatten the curve.
Institutions can only lose their credibility once. That was one of the worst things that Covid did.
Some, including myself, were against lockdowns from day 1, and were viciously attacked for it.
It's a pretty anti-social viewpoint. Why do you think you shouldn't have been?
It’s not anti-social, it is pro-social. To stand for the right of people to live freely, for children to get an education and to socialize with their peers, for businesses to serve their communities and provide jobs for people to feed their families.
You are the anti-social one, who would condemn entire populations to house arrest based upon dubious-at-best ideas. In my city, even outdoor gatherings of more than five people were prohibited. It was so absurd as to be almost comical, if the consequences weren’t so tragic.
Are you truly blind to the damage wrought by shutting down the entire world at the flip of a switch? Children are in crisis, inflation skyrocketed, people cannot afford to live, buy homes, start a family, get an education… and you have the nerve to call me anti-social?
And what did it accomplish? Did it actually save lives? I think not, especially when compared to targeted protection and support of vulnerable populations (elderly, immune compromised) rather than a blanket shutdown of the entire country.
Once this issue became a red vs blue thing, everyone collectively turned their brains off. The above commenter is a prime example.
Basic logic here: the things you’re defending only work when the people who make them possible aren’t getting knocked out by uncontrolled spread.
Kids don’t get an education if teachers and staff are sick. Businesses don’t serve communities if workers are out in waves. Families don’t stay afloat if workplaces shut down because too many people are ill.
You can absolutely critique the execution and the results. Plenty of it was messy. But pretending that doing nothing was somehow pro social ignores the obvious: collective safety is what keeps all those freedoms functioning in the first place.
Early on , it was clear the rate of covid complications did not merit the lockdowns. I was an early supporter of lockdowns and an even earlier supporter of ending them. It was a cold... Can we say that now? A relatively moderate flu like cold for the vast majority of people. It did not merit shutting down or slowing global trade
Early on, there wasn't any lockdown, so instead we could see whole villages and regions being in emergency state, with the military handling the logistics of moving coffins around, because there were so many. The lockdowns after 2 years were avoidable, but the first one absolutely wasn't. I'm quite content with my governments actions in the beginning and I'm not alone, the governmental approval during the first lockdown absolutely skyrocketed (>10%).
The lockdown spanned two years. A few months in, it was obvious it was overkill.
> pretending that doing nothing
When did I say that doing nothing was the correct course of action? Oh wait - I didn’t! But it sure makes a convenient straw man for you to argue against since you are incapable of addressing my actual position, which I contrasted hamfisted lockdowns against: the targeted protection of vulnerable groups such as the elderly or immune compromised people, rather than the blanket shutdown of the entire country.
> Kids don’t get an education if teachers and staff are sick. Businesses don’t serve communities if workers are out in waves. Families don’t stay afloat if workplaces shut down because too many people are ill.
Do you not realize that the virus is still out there in the world? And that we’re not locking down? And hardly anyone is wearing a mask, social distancing, or getting vaccine boosters?
And yet, somehow, we don’t have piles of dead bodies being cremated in the streets by FEMA workers in hazmat suits. Curious, isn’t it?
It couldn’t be any more obvious that the lockdowns were totally unnecessary and a giant mistake. Just take a look around.
It almost seems like the truly dangerous epidemic is of people forming such strong attachments to emotional dogma and propaganda that they are unable to perform kindergarten-level logical deduction.
Being against lockdowns from day 1 wasn’t some principled pro social stance. Day 1 was when we had no vaccines, no immunity, no treatments, and hospitals were already buckling from basic spread. Opposing mitigation at that moment wasn’t foresight, it was ignoring exponential math.
You can absolutely argue the execution was messy and the fallout was real. Lots of people agree with that. But holding up early blanket opposition as if it was the reasonable position is just rewriting the conditions we were actually in. The only reason things look manageable now is because immunity and treatments exist. Day 1 without them didn’t magically support the world staying fully open.
> Being against lockdowns from day 1 wasn’t some principled pro social stance.
As much as people like you want to position yourselves as objective arbiters of morality, you’re anything but.
> we had no vaccines, no immunity, no treatments
So? Covid is simply not that dangerous for otherwise healthy people.
> hospitals were already buckling from basic spread
That speaks more to how brittle, under-resourced, and plagued by perverse incentives our healthcare system is, than to the threat posed by covid.
> But holding up early blanket opposition as if it was the reasonable position is just rewriting the conditions we were actually in.
You’re saying that opposing the total annihilation of societal norms, behaviors, and patterns is… unreasonable? Do you hear yourself? It’s so painfully obvious that your “thinking” is purely motivated by your desire to be morally and intellectually superior than those you bitterly attack. I can’t fathom how your self awareness is so poor that you can’t see it.
> The only reason things look manageable now is because immunity and treatments exist.
Pure bullshit. The virus was simply never that big of a threat to a healthy person, full stop. You live in a filter bubble-fueled alternate reality where you indulge your most basic and animalistic emotions of fear, anger, and hatred of “others”.
Get a grip! Practically nobody is getting vaccine boosters or any other anti-covid measure. If your fallback is to point to herd immunity, then you’re effectively aligning yourself with the Swedish approach.
Your comment above was sufficient, nothing here added additional meaningful information, it's not worth your time or the parent's to go down this road. It wasn't believed to be a flu in the beginning and I think the excess death stats bear that out. Once the people tracking it think it's equivalent to the flu, rigid policy makes less sense.
I wish people would just accept that public policy need not align with what's right for them personally based own their health own situation. I can simultaneously understand why a public policy of lockdowns on Day 1 makes sense, while at the same time fight for exceptions to the rules due to my personal situation. Everyone I think is aware that the future is personalised medicine, that we're at the very beginning of that awareness, and that the current state of the art in medicine is very crude from that perspective.
Hell, if we had infinite money we should have just sent anyone 60 plus or in ill health to Florida, Texas, SoCal and Mexico for a 6-months/year vacation and mandated that they try to spend most of their time outdoors.
Man, you are telling on yourself something bad right now :(
This isn't about the later stuff. My statement was that being against lockdowns is an anti-social viewpoint and that you were rightly attacked for being against them. Nothing you've written challenges that. In a spherical vacuum of a society with no left right blue or China, no Epstein files, a pathogen has been introduced to your society. You don't know anything about it at all. It could be Ebola, it could be a total nothing buger. What do you do in response? Do you stay open and infect your populace, or do you lock down? It's a huge disruption, to everything and everyone. In the face of the unknown, what do you chose to do?
In the face of not knowing something, do we try and be safe, or do we say YOLO and fuck everyone who's role puts them in harms way?
> Nothing you've written challenges that Apparently your reading comprehension is low
> You don't know anything about it at all. It could be Ebola, it could be a total nothing buger.
Except that’s just not true. You’re just inventing scenarios to scare yourself and others. Covid is a respiratory coronavirus, they are extremely thoroughly studied and well understood. We didn’t “know nothing” about it. That’s just a total fabrication that you invented because you’ve been thoroughly trounced in this debate.
> What do you do in response?
For the last time, TARGETED PROTECTION OF VULNERABLE POPULATIONS.
> Do you stay open and infect your populace, or do you lock down?
False dichotomy, see above paragraph where I once again spoonfeed you basic common sense.
Locking down is the extreme position, and should require an extreme amount of evidence advocating for it.
Don’t bother responding. You’ve made zero interesting points, and rely solely on sensational rhetoric, accusations, false dichotomy, straw men, and ad hominem. There isn’t an ounce of logic or maturity in any of your comments. Thus, I’ve grown bored of walloping you.
But you must admit it was a gamble at the time. My mother got Covid early, before lockdowns. She spent a week in the hospital and almost died. She then had a stroke, she can no longer walk. She also got cancer, and now can barely talk. Please don't tell me it was not deadly dangerous to older folks. If the bird flu comes, and with it a mortality rate of 50%, and there is a vaccine, everybody will be locked down and forced to take the vaccine. It wont matter what anybody's opinions are about the possible harmful effects of lockdowns or vaccines.
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I seem to remember that Sweden applied the WHO recommendations as they were written and didn’t lock down because the damage of locking down is huge and everybody dog pilled on them about how it was stupid.
Turn out their excess mortality was quickly better than the other Nordic countries and their economy and mental health did better if I remember correctly.
People should complain more about the lockdowns. Most of them were extremely poorly implemented and stupidly managed.
You remember incorrectly.
Norway and Sweden took opposite approaches in 2020—Norway used strict lockdowns, tight border controls, and intensive outbreak tracking, while Sweden kept society largely open. The results weren’t subtle. As the Juul paper puts it: “That resulted in 477 COVID-19 deaths (Norway) and 9,737 (Sweden) in 2020, respectively.” Source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8807990/
You are only looking at 2020 and posting a source from 2021. Now look at 2021, 2022 and 2023. That’s the whole point. Sweden had slightly more excess mortality the first year especially amongst the elderly but they ended up doing similar or slightly better than their neighbours if you look at the whole pandemic.
They did significantly better on other metrics however like youth mental health and education.
I posted a ton of sources in another comment.
It’s not that surprising anyway. It’s not like Sweden did a weird and surprising experiment. They just stuck to the already existing plans designed to contain influenza while everyone else freaked out after Imperial College published their dubious models and started acting irrationally.
That’s not what the Nordic data show. Sweden didn’t “end up doing better.” It had by far the worst COVID-19 mortality in 2020, because it kept society open while its neighbors used strict controls.
The only reason Sweden’s later all-cause mortality looks “similar” is mortality displacement: COVID killed so many frail, high-risk people in 2020 that Sweden had fewer dementia and respiratory deaths in 2021–22. Nordic registry papers explicitly note this. Sweden didn’t outperform anyone. Its early losses were just so large that later excess deaths looked artificially low.
> That’s not what the Nordic data show. Sweden didn’t “end up doing better.” It had by far the worst COVID-19 mortality in 2020, because it kept society open while its neighbors used strict controls.
> The only reason Sweden’s later all-cause mortality looks “similar” is mortality displacement: COVID killed so many frail, high-risk people in 2020 that Sweden had fewer dementia and respiratory deaths in 2021–22. Nordic registry papers explicitly note this. Sweden didn’t outperform anyone. Its early losses were just so large that later excess deaths looked artificially low.
Exactly, that's exactly what I said and what the data show. We do agree except obviously there is absolutely nothing artificial about it. You can't discount the data because you don't like what it shows.
So, indeed, what the data show is that other countries barely postponned death despite Sweden having a dry tinder effect in 2020 - plenty of people vulnerable to respiratory diseases - following two years of mild flu. Sweden has indeed less excess mortality in 2021 and 2022 and tellingly the overall number is in every way comparable when it's not slightly better than the other Nordic countries. Sweden early losses in 2020 weren't even that large by the way.
To which I reach the inevitable conclusion, lockdowns were entirely useless, massive distruption of society - disproportionately impacting the youngest with schools closure - to gain mere weeks of life for the most vulnerables. Focusing on shielding the most vulnerables and putting in place containment habits were totally adequate counter measures. Once again, this is not in any way surprising, these were the WHO recommendations for containing an influenza pandemic.
To the people downvoting me, you are welcome to actually look at the numbers. [1]
Feel free to read about what it shows about lockdowns. [2] [3] [4]
I understand that the US has somehow turned this topic into a political debate and people hate facing that they might have been wrong but I am thankfully not from this part of the world and the evidence is not in favour of lockdowns ever being such a good idea. If you read the BBC article, you will see that we have reached such a polarised and abusive moment in time that even some experts are scared commenting on the available data.
[1] https://academic.oup.com/eurpub/article/34/4/737/7675929?log...
[2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11127-024-01216-7
[3] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ecaf.12611
[4] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250304-the-countries-th...
When I was younger, I thought of dems as the party of logic and reason, and repubs as bible-thumpers. I don’t think this was entirely wrong, but the unthinking dogmatism of left-leaning people about lockdowns did a lot to disabuse me of that notion.
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> .001% higher than the flu
That isn't true. Just from this paper https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9115089 ... COVID-19 killed roughly five to seven times more hospitalized older adults than influenza.
Anecdotal, my uncle, several friends' relatives died from COVID during those lockdowns. I don't know / heard anyone died because of flu (in my extended circle of people I know)
Most people are not a "hospitalized older adult". Yet they treated everyone, regardless of age, gender, health as if they were on death's door. The lock downs were absolutely overkill and went on far, far too long.
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Propaganda? COVID was the third most common verified cause of death in the US in the first 18 months after the lockdown started in March, and that's despite the lockdown. That's 10x more deaths per month than the particularly bad flu last year. Do you not remember the morgue trucks? The whole health system was overwhelmed.
Too many people either never saw or forgot about the morgue trucks. Or the footage that showed flocks of vultures circling over south american cities from afar. Desperate people coughing and dying in their own cars in hospitals' driveways. Body bags littering the floors of hospitals in third world countries.
All of that happened, but it went right over a lot of people's heads, and nobody talks about it anymore because it became such a sore and divisive topic and we're all glad it's over.
I remember well the video showing a whole column of military trucks transporting bodies out of the city of Bergamo, Italy, on March 19th, 2020. I took a screenshot because the magnitude of what this meant gave me shivers. It was one of those moments when the world seemed to stop for a minute and was changed forever like on 9/11, to me at least.
Ever since, I can't find much common ground for discussion with people claiming it was just a flu. You either acknowledge the difference or you don't.
So then why isn't it happening now? Why did Israel not fare better despite their much higher vaccination rates than Gaza without any vaccinations? It was never a pandemic and never anything more than a severe flu.
You got it all figured out, buddy. Good for you!
Yep, mock it all you like but it's because you can't explain it and it would make you too uncomfortable too acknowledge you don't know what you're talking about at all. Follow the school of fish into the net. Have at it.
Real people, citizen journalists documented empty hospitals and ERs with no activity while the mass media tried to sell you on "morgue trucks" lol. Trump got that whole ship sent to NYC and they never used it.
I walked by the morgue trucks, so no. You've been blinded by propaganda made by the same people who "document" alien encounters. If hospitals were actually empty the rates of healthcare worker burnout and subsequent shortage wouldn't have happened.
Maybe, outside the nursing homes that racked up tons of excess deaths due to Andrew Cuomo's policies and later cover-ups.
But at hospitals? I'm sure you can point out a few specific times and locations but on the whole, they simply were not overwhelmed with Covid deaths to the point where anything like "morgue trucks" were needed.
Yep and remember all those TikTok dance videos? The ERs were sooooo busy they had time to organize and practice and edit dance videos. Truly a crisis.
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Genuine question: do you think that the lockdowns had such long-lasting effect on people as to explain the problems described above?
Why would a few months of a “bad idea” induce decade-long changes?
For me yes. I'm not the same, much more depressed. I was already prone to it but two years of home imprisonment while living alone really damaged me. I also have a really bad reaction to the masks due to a youth trauma where I nearly choked. Being forced to trigger that memory daily was terrible. I did wear them of course (I'm in Europe so we had quite heavy restrictions). Maybe it was necessary for society but for me personally the damage was much higher than the benefit. On the bright side when it was over in 2022 it did make me go out again and I go out partying every weekend until 6am still. That probably wouldn't have happened because I'm in my 50s.
I think the measures were a bit overblown though some were necessary. But shit like curfews was ridiculous. It made contagion worse because the shops were only open during the day so everyone had to go there during a much shorter time. So they were always chock full of customers, exactly the thing you don't want during a pandemic.
It can be that social order is partly maintained by conformance and a bunch of people found out that there aren't consequences for choosing not to conform.
In the local facebook rants group, any time someone posts about someone doing something that is mildly antisocial (a reasonable thing to rant about), there's always several comments saying "So what, who cares".
Like sure, it isn't the end of the world to park like an asshole, but it would suck if everybody did it, so it's better if no one does it. And it's the same for dozens of other minor little things you might encounter in a given week.
Normal people were shown that they had no real bearing on the world, and were forced to live without being rushed for a year or in some places two. Without the need to constantly look over their shoulders for encroaching crises people started to examine the world around them. They had time to enjoy things without constantly battling with mental, emotional, or physical exhaustion that lead to procrastination just to recover a little bit. So many realized they were being deprived of not only recreation, but fulfilling their basic needs outside of food and sleep. So they shifted from fearing the systems that deprived them to loathing them and the people who administrated them, and resolved to deny contributing to those systems as much as possible. That's why there were so many sweeping changes starting in May of 2020, not in the way the systems of the world were run, but in the way the public at large engaged with them.
Much of what's been happening over the last five years can be compared to the behaviours of those suffering through trauma after long term abuse. Some continued the cycle against new targets, ignoring a collective truth. Others realized they were victims of the cycle and chose to work towards safeguards that would prevent it from continuing. Another group learned about the cycle and thought they would benefit from being new instigators for it.
> Why would a few months of a “bad idea” induce decade-long changes?
I don't know about how COVID-19 was handled in the USA, but in Germany it rather was "many years of bad idea".
That's like asking "why would one car crash that lasted a few seconds change your driving habits for years?" - or perhaps your entire outlook on life, the consequences of not appreciating the things around you in the moment, the realization that life is fleeting, that maybe "getting to work on time" shouldn't be as high a priority as it once was, etc, etc. All it takes is one major shake-up for people to be changed, often for life.
It wasn't a few months, it was a few years of back-and-forth political and corporate shenanigans with a new narrative every few months that the $CURRENT_THING crowd happily ran along with.
January 2020: there is nothing to afraid of, the new disease is mostly harmless and affects only the elderly and immunocompromised. Closing down borders is xenophobic. March 2020: do not go outside unless critically necessary and if you violate the rules, we will severely punish you May 2020: it's fine to have large public gatherings for BLM protests.
February 2020: masks do nothing and actually are harmful unless you are trained to use a mask, do not buy any masks. April 2020: wear a mask if you go outside, or you kill everybody else. Your own fault that you don't have a mask.
Summer of 2020: look, it's actually so great that we are all working remotely now, the nature is healing, all the emissions are so much reduced, this is the new future! Summer of 2023: everybody back to the office, real estate is suffering. People who joined during COVID time? Your contract is now altered, pray we do not alter it any further.
The promises around vaccines, printing money and "loans for struggling businesses" are even more stories of their own. Beats me why after a few years of these kind of shenanigans people would generally get tired of other people.
I certainly got tired of the people who decided the answer was to become antisocial and not even try to mitigate the risks, and then shame anyone who did. Lost a bit of my faith in humanity. Well, more than a bit, I think.
And all those years could have been avoided by treating a new unknown disease as it should have been treated instead of trusting China's word on it. Go figure.
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>I certainly got tired of the people who decided the answer was to become antisocial and not even try to mitigate the risks, and then shame anyone who did. Lost a bit of my faith in humanity. Well, more than a bit, I think.
The masks didn't do shit and neither did vaccinations. It was all scaremongering. Don't you get it? Israel had nearly 100% vaccination rate but didn't do any better than Gaza which had none. Masks don't prevent the spread at all. The 6 foot distancing rule was just made up. Why do people not understand this? Is it willful ignorance?
> Is it willful ignorance?
I think it might be. In my experience, the ignorance goes together very closely with political ideology. That also ends up being a pretty good predictor of who thinks masks were supposed to protect the wearer versus who thinks they were to try and slow down the transmission rate from infected people.
Anyway ...
West Bank and Gaza: 941.84 deaths per million people, 29% vaccination rate by end of 2021.
Israel: 887.20 deaths per million people, 64% vaccination rate by end of 2021.
>That also ends up being a pretty good predictor of who thinks masks were supposed to protect the wearer versus who thinks they were to try and slow down the transmission rate from infected people.
You're projecting. I fully understand the goal, but all the evidence shows they did nothing (air still escapes, people wear them incorrectly, the virus was never even proven to be airborne). They were telling people to take their masks off between bites/eating at restaurants. It was security theater. People who don't understand this just take safety in following the herd. They certainly aren't exhibiting critical thinking skills.
You also don't understand how to compare apples to apples. How did those death rates change from 2021 compared to previous years? I bet it was virtually unchanged. That's the point. Compare Palestine 2021 to Palestine 2015 and Israel 2021 to Israel 2015. The vaccine saved no one. If the vaccine was truly effective, you would see Israel vastly outperforming Palestine starting in 2021. Did it? And how is 63 per 1,000,000 a statistically significant number even if your argument were true? I would likely attribute that to other conditions like lack of resources compared to Israel. Otherwise, you're telling me Israel vaccinated more than 2x as many people and only saved 63 people per 1,000,000 and you think that proves your point?
Citation needed.
Use critical thinking. Google it yourself. Come to your own conclusions. Don't just believe whatever you see on CNN and MSNBC.
Saying "google them yourself" removes the ability for people to refute you and your stated position here.
A surgical mask is most often used not to protect the surgeon but rather the patient from transmission from the surgeon to the patient.
I would suggest by refuting Unmasking the surgeons: the evidence base behind the use of facemasks in surgery - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4480558/ which describes several studies about transmission from the surgeon to the patient.
Face masks were suggested not only for protection of the individual wearing them, but also as a layer of defense for transmission from someone who may be asymptomatic at the time. As such, face masks were in part to prevent transmission from someone who is in public and might be contagious and not know it in addition to than preventing someone wearing it from contracting an airborne disease (though this may require a higher grade of filtration).
https://www.cdc.gov/respiratory-viruses/prevention/masks.htm...
> Wearing a mask can help lower the risk of respiratory virus transmission. When worn by a person with an infection, masks reduce the spread of the virus to others. Masks can also protect wearers from breathing in infectious particles from people around them.
> ...
> Generally, masks can help act as a filter to reduce the number of germs you breathe in or out. Their effectiveness can vary against different viruses, for example, based on the size of the virus. When worn by a person who has a virus, masks can reduce the chances they spread it to others. Masks can also protect wearers from inhaling germs; this type of protection typically comes from better fitting masks (for example, N95 or KN95 respirators).
Note that the first point is that the mask is to prevent the spread from the individual wearing the mask.
And specifically in the context of covid-19 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2014564118
> ...
> Reducing disease spread requires two things: limiting contacts of infected individuals via physical distancing and other measures and reducing the transmission probability per contact. The preponderance of evidence indicates that mask wearing reduces transmissibility per contact by reducing transmission of infected respiratory particles in both laboratory and clinical contexts. Public mask wearing is most effective at reducing spread of the virus when compliance is high. Given the current shortages of medical masks, we recommend the adoption of public cloth mask wearing, as an effective form of source control, in conjunction with existing hygiene, distancing, and contact tracing strategies. Because many respiratory particles become smaller due to evaporation, we recommend increasing focus on a previously overlooked aspect of mask usage: mask wearing by infectious people (“source control”) with benefits at the population level, rather than only mask wearing by susceptible people, such as health care workers, with focus on individual outcomes.
I would suggest a careful reading of section 6 on source control https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2014564118#sec-6
> Johnson et al. (70) found that no influenza could be detected by RT-PCR on sample plates at 20 cm distance from coughing patients wearing masks, while it was detectable without mask for seven of the nine patients. Milton et al. (71) found surgical masks produced a 3.4-fold (95% CI: 1.8 to 6.3) reduction in viral copies in exhaled breath by 37 influenza patients. Vanden Driessche et al. (72) used an improved sampling method based on a controlled human aerosol model. By sampling a homogeneous mix of all of the air around the patient, the authors could also detect any aerosol that might leak around the edges of the mask. Among their six cystic fibrosis patients producing infected aerosol particles while coughing, the airborne Pseudomonas aeruginosa load was reduced by 88% when wearing a surgical mask compared with no mask.
No, I have no burden of proof because I'm not writing a scholastic paper and I made my argument using critical thinking that you can easily infer if you just think about it.
People aren't wearing masks anymore, do you see a dramatic increase in COVID deaths? Then your point is self-evidently wrong--no further analysis needed.
You're conflating so many different things. Surgery with an open wound is not the same as spreading COVID which was never even proven to be spread airborne. You're either intellectually dishonest or naive. Either way this is pointless. You clearly just like being told what to think. I get it, there's safety in feeling like if you just follow the rules you'll be safe. You can follow the school into the net, because freedom is not what you actually want.
They just wanted to sell you masks. Don't you get it? It's just about the money.
So you're making things up, got it.
You summed it up nicely. Suggests that the people in power are really just flying by the seat of their pants.
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It wouldn’t. The response to COVID merely accelerated the changes that were happening due to changes in the population age histogram.
> I think that the response to COVID (ie lockdowns) did far more damage than the disease itself.
Possibly true in some places. I think it very likely did in the UK.
> I feel bad for young people growing up in this broken world
The world has always been broken. Look at the 20th Century, two world wars, multiple smaller wars, Gulag, great leap forward, cold war, genocides.....
In many ways the world is better than its ever been.
What is true is that the golden age the west had from the end of the cold war until the early 21st century has come to a close, but that was an exceptional time for people in a small proportion of the world.
Like the username. Nice reference.
> I realize that I’m probably going to get dogpiled for saying it, but I think that the response to COVID (ie lockdowns) did far more damage than the disease itself.
You're going to blame Covid and/or Covid response for the fact that monopolies can jack up prices without consequence? That's your conclusion? Seriously?
What's happened is that McDonald's assumed they were a monopoly supplier like everybody else and jacked prices. McDonald's unfortunately discovered that "not eating out at all" is a viable substitute to their monopoly. Whoops.
However, if you want to fix the enshittification that is going on, you need to aggressively break up the monopolies everywhere in order to insert slack back into the system to re-enable competition.
On top of that, basing everything around "Always Late(tm) Inventory" (aka "Just In Time Inventory") means that there is zero slack in the system so even IF you want to compete, there is no upstream provider that can supply you with enough material to make a meaningful difference.
Want to fix modern capitalism? Bust monopolies. Over and over. At all levels. In all fields (not just tech). Aggressively.
100%. My wife thinks I’m crazy, but every issue she observes my answer tends to have its root in covid. An economy is an ecosystem and it’s been seriously knocked out of balance by covid, annd the fuel issues aa a consequence of Russias war hasn’t helped either. Everything that was, no longer is.
You’re not crazy and don’t let your wife say that to you, since it’s clearly ignorance or possibly rationalization to justify her positions during that time. People will rationalize immensely just to avoid having to admit they were wrong in general or also possibly that they contributed to their own consequences.
Don't worry, we know each other well enough at this stage. From her point of view I think she's tired of me relating every issue to covid (which is mostly correct).
But you're right, people can get caught in their own filter bubble, build walls and be defensive, rather than open their ears to a second opinion.
> I dread even eating out anymore as I fully expect to overpay for bad food and service.
I don't know if HN is the place to say this. But, it's just infinitely better these days to cook your own meals. With some modest initial investment and planning, you can minimize the average time and cost of doing it, while still having access to a reasonaly healthy and delicious menu, though slightly repetitive. But if you really want to indulge, setting aside a couple of hours will give you dishes that taste way beyond anything you can afford from outside.
Some people are natural born chefs with an intuitive understanding of tastebuds. But if you're like me in that you're clueless about it, there are still some exceptional recipes you can steal online. I treat cooking more like chemistry, insisting follow exact measurements and time. It still works out really well for me. You might even tweak the recipe over 4 or 5 repetitions to your at most satisfaction. Anybody who hasn't given it a try really should, at least once.
Yup. Something really simple and cheap, and definitely not worse in nutrition than McDonald's: Buy a pack of chicken legs, marinate them to your liking (for example: olive oil, salt, pepper, smoked or unsmoked paprika, onion powder, garlic powder, chicken or veggie bouillon cube), let them sit for an hour. Put it into the oven for 50min to an hour at 160 degrees Celsius. Cook rice on the side. After chicken legs are done take them out, and mix rice into the juices. Add some ketchup if you like. Put chicken legs back on top. Bake for max 4 minutes at 200 degrees. Enjoy.
Now, that will take you about 2 hours to make in absolute time, but the actual time to do this is very little, a few minutes.
I wasn't expecting a recipe as a reply here, but I appreciate it. Sounds easy and delicious too.
Oh, forgot the lemon juice in the marinade.
How about some vegetables?
Feel free! Above recipe is simplified from this one, which includes veggies, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dooNCNUroWY
You can't finish your comment without sharing some of your favourite recipes =P
Practically anything you can find online videos for are better than their counterparts from low end restaurants. I have a lot of favs, but most are regional dishes that are not very well known internationally. Pastas are an exception. Cakes too taste a whole lot different and much richer when you do it.
It always was? These discussions imply the existence of a large class of people subsisting primarily on restaurants and takeout, who surely are only a few percent of the population?
Restaurants are for special occasions. McDonald's is, or used to be, a cheap "treat", or standard food for travellers.
Yeah in the documentary “supersize me” the subject says, while he ate 30 days straight of McDonald’s, that the restaurant considered a person who ate there once a week to be a heavy consumer.
Yet the price of good Parmesan has basically doubled since Covid?
It’s so expensive now we ration its usage.
Eating out has risen significantly too
I have a slightly different take that everything was really broken right before, but Covid and its response brought everything to bear.
I see this play out a lot in ed reform politics where leaders conveniently compact decades of prior failure into the “Covid gap”.
To be sure Covid and the response produced a slew of new problems, too, but I think they are massively inflated by prior failures.
The UK is still blaming all sorts of stuff on the pandemic that are actually structural failures showing effects. It's a especially convenient time for cover considering Brexit happened in early 2020 and between then and now no major party has been willing to come out and say that Brexit has been damaging.
I don't even think it was necessary for Brexit to have been a net negative. There are plenty of ways the UK can thrive outside the EU, but the UK governments have basically done the square root of fuck all between 2016 and now to plan or execute on anything substantive.
That said, long-term problems included a lot more than Brexit, like the slow euthanasia of the industrial base and the parting out of anything but nailed down to the highest bidder.
The secret is to eat out less often and spend more when you do. Service is fantastic still at higher end restaurants.
Probably varies where you are, but in the UK (especially outside London) there are lots of places you can have reasonably good food an service at a decent price. A lot of pubs with good food now, for example.
For £15-35 for a main course sure. Even the weekday specials are £18-22. Sandwiches £15. Food is usually just average and service below average
Not the south
Gastro pubs are mostly full of land owners, rich pensioners and dual income high earners...
If Dishoom would come to the US I would be so happy.
I don't think COVID is responsible. I think COVID was the straw that made more people use doordash and then retailers saw that doordash was making profit on their product by bundling a service and they got greedy for that profit.
After all, if you'll pay $8 for a big mac + tip delivered to your door, then you'll pay $8 for a big mac. Then to get it delivered is another $2 or so, so you'll pay $10 for a big mac. Then to get it delivered is another $3 or so, so now you'll pay $13 for a big mac.
The only losers are the customers.
COVID isn't the only thing that broke everything, but it was quite the accelerant
A packet of crisps is now $4, yes they are fancy gourmet but they were three last year, it’s just insane . Next year they will be $5 I guess?
Blame the spud monopoly for that one.
I wish I was joking.
Both are tied together. The stock market didn’t double during Covid because we were making more. The US printed a lot of money. A lot.
The app drives me crazy on the occasions I do have to use it.
Picking fries brings me to a one-item category where I can... pick fries again.
Latency during the order process is insane, and then they add animations and little popup alerts throughout that actively interfere with me getting my all-important order code while I'm sitting like an asshole in the drive-through.
Yeah, the McD app is ridiculous. For some items it gives me an add to order dialog and then an add to bag dialog (I might have the order of those two swapped). I'm not sure what the distinction is between adding to the order and adding to the bag.
It also has some ridiculous restrictions. Nearly every week I take advantage of their in-app deal for free medium fries on Friday if you spend at least $1 on other stuff. I make a sandwich at home, order a couple cookies plus the free fries in the app, then go pick them at the McD that is about half a mile from my home.
Occasionally though instead of making a sandwich I decide I'd like to use my McD reward points to get a free burger. But you can't get both a rewards points item and a deal item on the same order.
I end up doing a rewards points order for a free burger, picking that up at the drive through, parking, then doing a cookies plus free fries deal order, and going through the drive through again to get that.
What's the point of not allowing both a rewards item and a deal item on the same order? If the rule was you could only use one reward or deal per day, then it would make some sense.
Why do you go through the drive through twice instead of just pretending to be the next car as well?
I don't think the app will let you start a second order before you've picked up your first order, although I've never specifically tried it.
I once had the app fail to realize I had picked up my order and I was unable to do new orders. I ended up deleting the app and reinstalling it and then I could order again. That was a few years ago, though, and they've changed the app several time since, so maybe I shouldn't assume that an order still awaiting pickup blocks new orders.
Maybe I'll try it next time I want to use points and a deal at the same time and see if you can order while another order is still in progress. If that still isn't allowed, I should probably then try placing the second order on a different device (one on iPhone, one on iPad for instance) to see if the limitation is because an instance of the app can only handle one order or because some account limitation is the problem.
If that doesn't work, two devices logged into different accounts would be the next thing to try--that's got to work. I'm using "Login with Apple" for my McD account. I could make a new McD account using "Login with Google".
Ahh it used an app? I thought you could just pretend to be the next customer, but that makes sense, thanks.
That's funny
Loved that story!
Seeing pictures of Cardiff McD's afterhours with disheveled, boorish patrons and rubbish strewn about, no-one would want to patronize them: https://hollyhughesgraphics.wordpress.com/2014/02/07/maciej-...
There's at least two in the Cardiff City Centre, one on St Mary St and one on Queen St.
Having used both at normal and at peak pisshead hours, they're both alright.
Not great, not a disaster. Slightly understaffed, and occasionally short on English language skills, but there's not an issue if you want hot food (inc vegetarian and vegan) or drinks at a daft hour.
Australian here and the sentiment is the same. Drive-through is tolerable but dine-in is not pleasant due to basic cleaning like sweeping, wiping of tables not being done.
Around here dine-in costs the same or more than the local diner; why would you do it?
The only saving grace is the happy meal and that’s getting too expensive now, also.
Canadian who agrees and will add that 95% of the employees are also new immigrants which really rankles us who have had to look hard for any kind of unskilled job!
Here in Spain i have had only good experiences and i love sometimes going to McDonald!
Here in Japan I have only had good experiences, but I can't say I love going to McDonalds. The breakfast offerings are decent and it's extremely fast service. During peak times seats will be around 95 percent full but the restaurant remains very clean. I think the cleanliness in part is due to the patrons being responsible.
I’m an American living in the San Francisco Bay Area who travels to Japan twice per year. McDonald’s in Japan is better than McDonald’s in America. McDonald’s in Japan not only is cleaner and has better customer service, but is cheaper.
McDonald’s in America wasn’t always expensive; I was in high school and college in the 2000s when the dollar menu had double cheeseburgers, chicken sandwiches, and small orders of fries. The regular menu didn’t break the bank, either. Prices started shooting upward in the 2010s; first the Double Cheeseburger on the dollar menu got replaced with the McDouble (one slice of cheese instead of two), then it exited the dollar menu and became 2 for $3, then 2 for $4. But after COVID, prices exploded. I remember the first time seeing a fast food combo meal selling for more than $10 sometime about five years ago, but it was the most expensive meal on the menu. Nowadays in my area $10-$12 combo meals are the norm. It’s sad and maddening; my salary hasn’t risen at this level!
Meanwhile in Japan, I could get a Big Mac meal for around ¥800. Even when the yen was strong, $8 beats $11. At today’s yen valuation ($5.09), it’s more than half the cost, and with better customer service at that!
I make six figures but I feel like fast food prices in California are a ripoff ($10+ for a crappy meal? No thanks!), and so I quit eating out except when traveling or for entertainment, such as hanging out with friends.
Yeah pretty decent in Spain. Give it another 10-20 years when McDonald's realise the customers need them more than they need the customers (ie addiction) and that'll change!
Yes here they have the Uber cheap menu4you option too. A double cheeseburger which is pretty much a big Mac (but with nicer sauce), fries and coke for €5
Spain has McBeer, right? Like Portugal? Different world!
In Portugal we also have Soup and Salad :)
But, tragically, no hash browns. :(
"In Amsterdam, you can buy a beer at McDonald's!"
From the UK too, and your experience is matched by mine. The last time I was in one (I mean "the last time" in both senses of the words) I waited over 20 minutes for my food; I do not know how long it would have actually taken because at that point I got bored, wrote it off as a loss and walked out. No sense in complaining to anyone because that would have consumed even more of my time.
McDonalds is not food and it is not even fast anymore.
I cannot blame their staff for any of this anyway; if I was being paid that little to be treated like garbage I wouldn't give a shit either.
It is not apparent that we are ambivalent because of compensation.
I would argue an inverse corollary. I would argue that the most qualified people for the job are applying.
What I am noticing in my own work is fatigue from processing volume.
It's not personal. You are a statistic until you walk up to the front counter and make it personal. Only then we can actually solve your issue because we have a person to relate to.
I am curious about this notion that fast food workers don't care. I see it a lot. We absolutely care.
I think that merits an apology from me, then: what I said was wrong and I'm sorry. If I'd thought about that sentence for more than ten seconds, it'd be clear that it's all better explained not by indifference from the staff doing the actual work, but because (as you said) they are asked to work under impossible conditions, and as long as some line on a chart representing "money" goes in the right direction it's the people that set the conditions of the job who don't give a shit.
Some part of me understood this already, because...
> You are a statistic until you walk up to the front counter and make it personal.
Aside from the fact that the "front counter" is apparently deprecated these days...given what I know about my personality flaws, I am sure I'd not want to do this. It's not like they could make the food appear 20 minutes ago, and they're not responsible for the conditions that made it take 20 minutes in the first place, so what would it accomplish other than making their day worse? Maybe some warm feeling of "well I fuckin showed 'em" followed by "oh damnit, I was an arsehole" 15 seconds later which would hang over me for a LOT longer than 15 seconds. Walking out was a better outcome for everyone, including me.
I do wonder if the US is soon to experience a regression in productivity due to compensation practices.
If all accessible jobs have declining pay, when do you start to reduce effort to match?
That's already happening. Roadsides aren't being cleaned up because the local DOTs aren't being paid enough. That leaves fallen rocks, mud buildup from floods, tree branches, and overgrown bushes very close to the roadway. Grocery stores have empty shelves because they don't get enough stockers. If you go to the meats aisle it's a good chance you'll either find some pork that's started to turn yellow or some beef that's started to turn brown because nobody wants to dig through the freezer. They get told the meat's old, they find the visible one, and the put a price reduced sticker on it. Walk into a hospital and the grating at the entryway will be filled with mud, the baseboards along the walls in the hallways will be scuffed to hell, and the walls will have scrapes taken out of them because the maintenance staff aren't being paid enough to care. Go into a bank and you'll have one teller working both the drive through and the front desk, and they'll take their time getting to you because the drive-through counts towards their statistics since the interaction with the drop off point is tracked. They aren't paid enough to work back and forth in the down time when either is doing something the teller doesn't need to be involved in.
Apathy's just setting in across the board, and it's entirely warranted. One hour of work can't even afford you one hour of reward anymore when it comes to most non-specialized and non-salaried jobs.
I only used McDonald's in an emergency, if there is no where else to eat, and having to now use those screens, I must be really desperate.
Better replace the kitchen with cooking robots as well then.
I'm in the UK and have McDonalds semi-regularly. A few times a month at least. Get a receipt, fill out the online feedback form, get a code. Put the code in the app, get an offer for £2.99 sandwhich (McPlant, Big Mac, whatever the chicken thing is) and either fries or a salad. £2.99 for a McPlant and fries at 3am is a godsend.
Yup. McDonald's in the UK is a truly horrible experience that only "addicts" still put up with
Staff barely even look at you, they're miserable, fries are only 50% full, orders always wrong, no please or thanks or sorry for keeping you waiting 20 mins in the bay for a hamburger etc. Stopped going ages ago
I'd rather just skip a meal than resort to McDonald's, but I've noticed in so many places there are more deliveries going out than people eating in. This seems to go for any place that does delivery. It's even hard to read reviews for places as so many of them are rating the delivery when the food in question doesn't transport well.
What is strange is McDonalds at one point was by far the most consistent fast food place in the US. Personally it wasn't my thing but it was always a step above all the other chains.
That hasn't been the case in a long time, quality control and customer service has fallen to be just as bad as any other place.
Also, £4.20 for a Double Bacon & Egg McMuffin is just ... no. Why?
I could swear it wasn't that long ago it was under £3.
For a fiver I can get a better 'real' Bacon & Egg bap from an independent.
I paid £5.09 for a sausage and egg mcmuffin meal with coffee and a hash brown this morning. I think that's pretty reasonable, especially for London.
£5.09 is about 25 minutes work at National Minimum Wage ( £12.21 per hour ), about 5.6% of daily income at NMW and standard working hours.
A bacon & egg McMuffin provides 336 kcal, which is 13% of an adult male's RDI. So on a purely kcals:price level it does seem to provide decent value.
On the kcal/£ basis, Tesco biscuits (for Americans: cookies) are more than an order of magnitude better, 487 kcal/100g, £0.22/100g, about £0.15 for as many kcal as that McMuffin: https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/290329100
On the basis of an actually balanced diet, boiling a pot of water and adding lentils, rice, and value frozen veg on a timer, are likewise. Which is of course why that's a staple diet in parts of the world much poorer than the UK.
For £5.09 you get the hash brown, so it's 500+ cals. It costs 25 mins of paid labour and it also saves N minutes of domestic labour if one were to have similar hot protein+cals at home. High-income people tend not to understand this part, they'll say you can eat beans and rice for nothing.
I have quite a lot of difficulty eating out once you start cooking at home, because think of what you are buying:
- one English muffin (is it called an English muffin in England?)
- one slice of cheese
- one egg
- one slice of ham
- one cup of coffee
- one hashbrown
£5.09 for that? Obviously when you buy from a restaurant you're paying for their labor, rent, electric, and much more so it makes sense - McDonald's franchisees tend to operate on single digit profit margins even at that cost. But mehhh, still. And then the food you end up buying is packed full of preservatives and other additives and artificial ingredients.
It was hot and tasty and delivered near-instantly to my car at 6am. There's no way the fair price for that is less than a fiver.
If you've never lived here, I'm not sure you can really say what £5 is or isn't worth anyway.
Yeeeeah I had a £4.50 coke yesterday. Getting a meal for that price is pretty good, even if meal is in quotes.
The price for each of those at my local supermarket when buying the low quality option in bulk:
English Muffin: 70¢
Slice of cheese: 40¢
Egg: 40¢
Slice of Ham: 50¢
Hash browns: 40¢
Coffee: $1?
In total $3.40. £5.09 for that in hot, prepared form ready to eat sounds cheap to me, not expensive.
I calculated how much I spend on food, shopping at Lidl in the EU in a mid range expensive country, and I pay about 3 euros per day.
That's about the same as $3.40, but for 4 full meals (one of those is smaller than the others)
Admittedly I've optimized my menu.
but you don't say what you buy because eating only potatoes really is cheap
I do eat them, but they're not that cheap.
Oats, brown sugar, milk, (frozen) french fries, chicken burgers, "American" cheese, gnocchi, tomato basil pasta sauce, turkey nuggets, tinned beans, xv olive oil, lemon juice, cayenne pepper, garlic powder, chicken salt, seedless grapes
Dude you’re not even trying, why buy muffins and eggs when you could grow wheat, grind flour, raise chickens and get eggs for free, slaughter your own pigs and cure the bacon yourself… because labour costs nothing and convenience has no value amirite?
I find it bemusing that so people are simultaneously extremely agitated by high prices but also completely disinterested in doing anything except paying them. With this mindset it's not particularly hard to guess which direction they'll trend in over time, even if the world wasn't going nutters.
I mean these things are not difficult to make. They even freeze extremely well, and then you toss them in the microwave for a couple of minutes while you're getting ready and they're done. And the food you create is not only much cheaper, but also way healthier and also higher quality. When you go to a McDonalds you're getting the cheapest possible find they can source on a global level. The only reason they dropped pink slime [1] is because they were outed using it on television.
Incidentally that was a long time ago and while Wiki is quiet unclear it seems that the USDA chose to reclassify back as simply ground back in 2018. If it's been rebranded and remains legal, that's probably what people are now eating, again, at least in the US - as it's deemed unfit for human consumption in Canada and the EU.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_slime
I don't know where you get the assumption that people who eat McDonalds can't or don't also cook their own fresh food from scratch.
I did not say that. I was responding to a person who engaged in banal snark implying that making food for oneself is a herculean task, but it all depends on what you're making, and things can be extremely stream lined. In the case of what we're talking about (mcmuffin stuff), you can even cook and freeze them in arbitrarily large quantities and it's way cheaper, healthier, and even faster since it's in your freezer instead of having to go out.
I do think that the fast food (or even eating out in general) starts to lack any real selling point for households that are capable of cooking, and so this is probably going to weight the customers, especially regulars, of these sort of places away from households that do cook. I suppose you'd argue time is the selling point, but one can even remain competitive on there with things like pressure cooker meals. There are even one pot rice cooker meals which are also great.
I think it's from living in the world and actually meeting people.
The UK comparison for home cooking vs fast food breakfast should be really be Wetherspoon. Spoons makes a solid stodgy full English breakfast and bottomless coffee for 5-7 quid depending on the size. Classic hangover food, and you can start the morning where the night ended.
Obviously you can beat it with home cooking, but the calorie value for a sit down meal out is compelling: 1300 cals for 7.50 (more if you go for hot chocolate).
Wetherspoons is amazing and a great replacement for McDonalds. They bring the food to your table, with cutlery, on a plate and you get unlimited coffee and tap water. I paid £4.78 for a muffin of sauage+bacon+2 eggs+hash brown and unlimited coffee this morning.
You got to choose very carefully from the menu as lot of things aren't good value.
You sure it's still a fiver and not up to 7.
Even going to the grocer the price for raw goods is way up.
...well, wait: At McDonalds this is a high price for bad quality - in a good restaurant it may be cheap :-)
My experience is that quality in McD is rapidly declining. We may agree was never a Michelin star restaurant. But I remember being more or leas enjoying the food. Now I just can’t. Maybe I’m getting older. But I would swear the quality is much worse now than say 5 or 10 years ago.
> My experience is that quality in McD is rapidly declining. We may agree was never a Michelin star restaurant
That's the thing with McDonalds.
You could go in to any store no matter where you was and know you got a consistent level of hygiene, cleanliness, good fast efficient service and while not gourmet food you knew the food you was going to get was a consistent standard. It was the reliable, dependable safe option in a list of unknown options. McDonalds was McDonalds know matter where you was.
Now it's no longer clean as they got rid of all the staff replacing them with screens. Stores are generally filthy with mess everywhere.
There is no consistent service as they got rid of all the staff and replaced them with screens that sometime work, sometimes don't, often out of paper for receipts/order numbers.
It's no longer fast as you need to mess about with broken screens, and repeatedly declining up sell options each step of the way vs giving a order at the counter and being done.
The quality now varies from store to store
It's no longer cheap. For the price of a McDonalds, in Australia I can go in to a Pub/Hotel and get a better meal if i get a special.
The last time I was in a McD (this year), it smelled faintly of feces, and yep it was a mess. It really did put me off going to any other McDonald's. I know that's one experience but prior ones had been trending in that direction.
The problem is they’re in an uncanny valley. They’re too expensive for low income customers and their food is too shitty to compete with other things you can get for the same price. Starbucks will give you food that’s similarly priced and much tastier and healthier. McD is disgusting.
For me it's the competition. So many competing chains and independent burger joints have sprung up and spoilt me. For 20%-30% more than mcd prices I can get something way way better.
To be clear you're getting a banging artisanal burger meal for about £10? You sure you're not downplaying the cost?
My local proper independent burger place is just under £20 for a burger fries and drink.
My family and I ate at one this evening. My son wanted to try to the McRib. I'm not sure he loved it, but it looked fine. My wife and I both had the $5 McValue meal, and we got a free medium fry because it was Friday. We shared one of the drinks because I'm not supposed to be eating lots of sugar. Some McD's don't have a drink station in the public seating area anymore, but the one we go to does. All in all, it was not a bad meal for like $15. I don't see any degradation in their quality at all. I think that quality is highly dependent on which one you visit and how well it is managed.
I’ve had McDonalds twice in the past 12mo. Once locally just because I was for whatever reason craving it, once on a late night last minute road trip in the middle of nowhere midwestern USA.
Hasn’t seemed to have a discernible quality difference since back when I ate it regularly a decade ago.
Prices noticeably up, but I refuse to use the app and am willing to pay extra for the privilege.
McDonalds tastes the same as it always has. Food consistency is what they excel at, along with owning valuable real estate.
Also, the quality of a fast food restaurant (cleanliness and service) is directly correlated to the median income of the area it is in. Wealthy suburbs will have much cleaner restaurants than inner city restaurants from the same chain.
I'd say you've just grown up and experienced decent food now. McDonald's is marketed to children and caters for the child-like palate: sweet, salty and acidic, like tomato ketchup.
When I grew up in the UK in the 80s/90s we ate typical British food. Potatoes every day, boiled veg, baked beans, beige protein things. Back then it was possible to have "Chinese" or "Indian", but it's all total shit: overly sweet, not spicy, greasy as fuck bastardised rubbish. Nowadays I can actually find real Indian, French, Italian etc. that is actually delicious. It's difficult to imagine going back to beige stuff I grew up on.
I think this is under-appreciated. The technology of food has progressed immensely in the last decades! Even recipes from the 90s don't hold up as well, because home cooks have access to more knowledge, techniques, tools, ingredients, foodstuffs. And of course if you look at photos of food and typical dining from the 80s you can sort of spot a difference visually as well.
Seems to be exactly the same quality at least here in the US, that it has always been.
In some ways the rest of the world's McDonald's are simply plummeting to the low quality of those in the US.
Here in Greece, we have so much good quality street food that McDonald's is street trash by comparison. I don't consider it food, there are only about eight or nine restaurants in the entire country and I think most people go there because of the novelty.
Please don't let Greece get too wealthy, the quality street food will get pushed out and replaced with overpriced yuppie food that all gets sourced from the exact same company!
Austria resident checking in - since I moved here I noticed the quality of McD’s is way, way better than in the UK. And apart from the regular menu being a whole different experience, you’ve got great quality coffee and cakes. It’s a whole world of difference.
Here in Sweden they changed their recipes a few years ago. I can’t stand the Big Mac now. Previously it at least felt kind of fresh although low quality. Now it has a weird freeze dried sensation to the vegetables :/
As of ~1 year ago, American-fast-food-in-France was still noticeably better than -in-America.
"They're poor, they don't care a about basic human dignity." - McDonald's CEO probably.
It truly is the most "Shove this in your slop hole you wretch" experience in all of fast food.
It's pretty hilarious because your comment is exactly their goal.
McDonald's is laser focused on low income customers. They do not want to compete in the middle income space, as they don't visit as often and there's ton more(and better) competition.
Their CEO has been blunt about this recently, and trying to find ways to get low-income customers back. Dire straits ahead for them, they've priced themselves into a place they don't want to be nor will they be able to succeed in.
> McDonald's is laser focused on low income customers.
Like some other fast food restaurants, they're desperately trying to be thought of as being Starbucks tier, with Starbucks prices, trappings, etc.
It's like Taco Bell desperately trying to be thought of as Chipotle tier, with Chipotle level prices and trappings. Like McDonald's, they significantly raised their prices without any quality improvements to justify it.
> Their CEO has been blunt about this recently, and trying to find ways to get low-income customers back.
It's lip service because news like "low income people abandon McDonald's" makes investors get bad feels about their investment.
I don’t like how the CEO is portraying this as something solely caused by outside market forces. In the last 10 years, their profit margin has gone from ~17% to ~32%. The pricing is an intentional decision that they could choose to change at any time.
I used to eat there when I was young and poor.
I used to stop at ones off the highway if I was taking a road trip.
I used to grab the occasional soft serve just for nostalgia sake.
Now I'll hit the gas stations deli sandwiches or roller dogs before setting foot in the attached McDonalds.
Terrible take. Of course they want middle-income customers, that's a big part of why they raised prices, because they thought middle-income would absorb them. And they arent entirely wrong - those drive-thru lines are still miles long at peak times, mostly parents getting an entire family's dinner. However middle-income is still price sensitive and notice when $30 becomes $50+. Executives talk about appealing to "value-oriented" consumers (i.e. almost everybody).
"traffic among higher-income customers continues to grow across the fast-food sector, increasing “nearly double digits” in the quarter, he (Kempczinski) said" -https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/11/05/mcdonalds...
It's actually Wendy's right now suffering, vs rivals McD and BK: "Wendy's (WEN) same-restaurant sales, or sales of restaurants open at least 15 months, declined from a year ago for a third straight quarter, while those of rivals McDonald's Corp. (MCD) and Restaurant Brands International Inc.'s (QSR) Burger King increased over the past two quarters."
https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20251107156/wen...
It's not that they don't want middle class customers, of course that would be foolish. It's that they don't want to be positioned there. The CEO has made this abundantly clear.
Their financial reports are a better source of truth than anecdotes. Q1 was an absolute disaster, Q2 surprisingly OK, Q3 missing expectations but not terrible. This is not where they want to be, regardless of lip service. They will not thrive in this space, as Wendy's has found out. IMO Wendy's was the de facto try 'middle/lower middle class' fast food option.
In 2005 McDonald's net profit margin was ~12%, today it's ~30+%. Obviously that doesn't account for the entire price increase and wouldn't make that much of a difference...but worth noting.
Yes, they have progressively become a higher-margin business, which necessitates moving up market to consumers who will pay those margins.
Why do you _have_ to extract more money out of people just because you can? Is it truly not enough for the McDonald's executives?
Their function is to maximize profit. I doubt they think about their company's position in society often if at all.
But there are many factors. Allowing stock buybacks is definitely one of those.
If I'm reading this chart right they're spending about $500M/quarter on buybacks? https://www.financecharts.com/stocks/MCD/cash-flow/repurchas...
No, it’s extracting more money out of different people. Because they’re a more profitable target for investment than the former people.
publicly traded company, the stock price must go up. always.
and it's not the executives, it's the owners. those on the board, or who own a ton of shares.
stock price doesn't go up and those execs get replaced until they find someone who will.
10 USD is still the magic barrier, Id say?
I'm not sure where this number comes from but McDonald's profit margins may be misleading due to their franchise and real estate based model. If you spend $10 at McDonald's that's paid to the franchise and the central McDonald's corporation isn't necessarily profiting $3.
McDonalds business model is to own real estate and lease it to franchisees, and to sell those franchisees supplies to make hamburgers and fries so they can pay the rent.
It’s a commercial real estate company with extra steps, not a restaurant company. Once you understand that, McDonalds net margins are easier to understand.
Google ‘McDonalds real estate’ for a longer write up about the business model of McDonalds
It’s because their cogs is basically same. They are vertically integrated.
You eat at McD's or most fast food places these days, you need the app to get reasonable prices, usually at a 15-20% discount. The app really does enhance the experience, order exactly what you want without human error, roll up to the drive-thru, give them the code, and they begin making the order at that point.
They've been pushing $5 value meals recently because the dollar menu's just not fiscally feasible anymore and $10-12+ for the normal value meals isn't a value to most people.
> The app really does enhance the experience, order exactly what you want without human error, roll up to the drive-thru, give them the code, and they begin making the order at that point.
They're particularly good at getting orders right compared to some other restaurants, so the additional value here to me is negligible. It's actually negative value to me, since if I can do a transaction without having to sign up, that's what I prefer. The value is entirely in the other direction: McDonald's wants to monetize their customer's identity information.
Try ordering a heated muffin. My current success rate at the drive through is 2/8. The other 6 times it's not heated.
It's really location dependent. The one near me missed opening time by more than 30 minutes one day last week. I don't have more data because I only would splurge for a fast food breakfast when I need it.
You don’t know, the other 6 times the employees might have yelled at the muffin to make it angry.
The app doesn't work if it's installed from a location other than the play store. I install it via aurora store without a Google account for privacy reasons (I do have play services installed but it's not logged in, notifications still work). It's a ridiculous limitation for such an app.
You can thank Play Integrity for this, Google gives app developers the tools to implement remote attestation and "integrity" of the apps and systems they run.
Don't overlook paper coupons. A while back I took a look at the advertising junk that appears in my physical mailbox instead of just throwing it in my recycle bin and found some really good fast food coupons.
Where I am both Subway and Burger King have been sending approximately monthly a sheet full of coupons with some quite good deals.
Subway you just google “November 2025 subway coupon” and find the Reddit thread and use FL1299 and get two footlongs for the price of a decimeter.
mahahahaaaaaa..... any restaurant that requires an App to access it, completely insane.
I had the mcdonalds app installed once, and then my phone pinged with a notification when I was driving near a mcdonalds. Never again.
I go through my apps and put most of them to deep sleep, ie never work in foreground. Later I heard from an internet stranger that a mobile operators app prevents users from using their phone as a Wifi hotspot.
Why would you allow notifications from most apps? What could the McDonald’s app possibly offer to warrant allowing it to dictate your attention for even a fraction of a second?
This is, uh, kind of missing the point, isn't it?
"Hey, this megacorporation made me download an app to buy food from them, and now it's being creepy."
"Have you considered that it's actually all your fault?"
I donno a flash deal or something?
For the few times a year I eat at Burger King, I just install the app on the way, use the discount, and uninstall it right after while I'm still eating.
>The app really does enhance the experience...
Sure, like paying your local mob boss enhances the experience of not having your legs broken.
These articles deliberately skew reality to fit an anti-worker narrative. All the focus is on costs of labor and materials, with not one single sentence devoted to McDonald’s own financials - like the growth of their margins, the share buybacks performed, the executive compensation, or the franchising model itself.
When I was rallying for a higher minimum wage and was challenged on it driving up costs, I made it abundantly clear that would only be the outcome if the corporate leadership refused to budge on their compensation and shareholder reward schemes - which, surprising nobody, is exactly what they did, and this was the entirely expected outcome.
We’ve tried being nice about this and attempting to reach a compromise in long, gradual, sustainable changes to the economy so everyone can benefit from its improvements in efficiency and scale, but the grim reality is that said compromises are no longer on the table, and harms are inevitable. With no more room to squeeze workers, it should be of no surprise that a growing plurality are demanding immediate and substantial change instead of piecemeal reform - and Capital has every right to be terrified of an angry labor class.
Looking at McDonald's finances would have made the article better. And it mentioned their claims about labor costs. But it cited analysis which contradicted those claims.
No problem stands alone in a vacuum, and nothing at this point has “one easy fix”. These articles that try to paint higher wages or corporate consolidation as the sole reason for complex and nuanced issues aren’t just toxic to discourse around addressing these problems, they also collectively dumb down people into the debate equivalent of sports teams with no room for other positions.
The entire piece reads as a sympathy puff article to paint McDonalds in a “woe is us, our business dictates we raise prices to only serve the wealthy” posture, which is insincere at best, and almost certainly shit journalism.
The article discussed several factors increasing costs and decreasing low income household spending. My impression and yours were very different.
McDonalds is just a real estate investment trust that happens to sell hamburgers. The business model is ‘rent high value land for a profit while racking up unrealized gains on the land and ensure a steady stream of rents by selling franchisees supplies that they can sell to make sure they can pay their rent.’ Take a look at the sorts of parcels McDonalds acquires, usually multiple acres in busy commercial areas.
In an ideal world, they’d be a restaurant company, but it’s just a real estate company with extra steps.
I agree that minimum wage should be higher!
> growth of their margins
Are you going to mention what these margins go to?
This has been the story in the US for a few decades now. You can’t have nice things that other developed countries take as a given like higher lineage, healthcare, higher education, public infrastructure, etc because of profit, exec compensation, stock buybacks and all the rest.
To suggest decreasing those is akin to treason.
under the current US techno-capitalist regime, it may quite literally be treason to suggest it in the near future.
> These articles deliberately skew reality to fit an anti-worker narrative. All the focus is on costs of labor and materials, with not one single sentence devoted to McDonald’s own financials - like the growth of their margins, the share buybacks performed, the executive compensation, or the franchising model itself.
Capital will always blame Labor for their problems
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Or you could not jump to completely inaccurate conclusions about someone’s viewpoints, movement participation, and policy positions based solely on one comment on a single post. You could ask questions for clarity, or challenge specific assertions, instead of leaping directly to bad faith arguments (“why don’t YOU take a pay cut?” maybe because I’m not a CEO with a compensation package in the millions of dollars a year?) to support a pre-supposed conclusion you refuse to waver from.
C’mon, ya’ll, I expected better from HN commenters. This is arguably the worst thread I’ve been in with regards to the quality of discourse.
I mean this nicely: I would really not expect much better from HN. This is ground zero for Capital's public social media discourse; I'm actually quite surprised your top-level comment hasn't been downvoted to oblivion or even flagged, since you dared to utter the unutterable: that workers deserve more and Capital deserves less. I'm with you, friend, but be careful here.
Actual title: ”Fast food is losing its low-income customers. Economists call it a symptom of the stark wealth divide”
If you're ever in GA/TN/NC, check out Cook Out and Pal's fast food establishments.
They cost just a little more than national chains, for a much more satisfying meal (still fast food tho).
Things I miss most about Austin (2nd-gen that left, a decade ago): H-E-B Grocery and P'Terry Hamburgers.
Pal's is a regional GOAT. They also have a unique "Sauceburger" with a ketchup-and-relish based sauce that takes me back to my childhood. Highly recommend.
in response to an article about high costs, I'm not sure suggesting a more expensive option serves a purpose...
You pay about 15% more for twice the food (at much higher quality).
From Cook Out, for $11, I can make two meals with two deserts.
It's very odd there are few comments in the realm of, "Maybe McDonald's has grown to be bad at 'fast-fooding.'"
Yes. You can still get over 2000 calories at Taco Bell for $8 (this would be five of the Cheesy Bean and Rice burrito, my personal favorite). Even a Cheesy Double Beef burrito for the meat lovers can get you over 2000 calories for just over $11 for four. And their box meals will throw in a drink for a decent price. You can spend a lot more, but you don't have to.
This isn't meant as a Taco Bell commercial, just a comparison to todays McDonald's.
You can also get 2000 calories by eating an entire box of supermarket donuts, but that doesn't make it a good idea.
Taco Bell's prices are absolutely through the roof, too. I'm not seeing the "decent price" at my local TB that you're seeing.
Thanks, it's actually been a few years since I've been to one.
I don’t think that person is right. If you’re price sensitive and don’t just look at the default [combo] prices then Taco Bell is still elite and known for giving you cheap ways to get calories.
They always have a combo that’s cheap and rotates monthly. And like you said they have a few cheap value food like Bean and rice burrito which is also one of my staples.
Also you’re supposed to use the apps if you’re price sensitive. I work outside all day and couch surf without access to a kitchen. I never look at the actual menu of any place if there’s an app available. Apps also let you see prices between different locations.
However almost everyone I see go to any place in the real world is always buying stuff just looking at the default menu prices.
You can get > 2,000 calories in 3 sticks of butter which is like $3-4 if the cost per calorie is the only metric that matters.
Agreed. Food now is made to order, rather than being ready and waiting (likely to reduce stock waste). Last time I went there was hardly a queue, wasn't rush-hour (was quite dead actually, few staff, fewer customers).
Food still took 15 minutes, fries were cold, the main meal was nice but was overall disappointing for the eye-watering cost compared to days gone by.
And a few guys collecting for delivery which has split their focus from in-resturant customers.
Can see why people have moved on.
Remember, being bad at your job doesn't mean you can't be profitable.
Ha, saw my points on this comment go up, then down.
Y'all some sheep.
The cost increases are real: beef, wheat, labor. Some of it is from inflation during the covid period, some it is from the Russia-Ukraine invasion causing havoc in fuel and grain supplies globally.
There is currently a beef shortage in Europe (of sorts). The reason is that buying cow feed has gotten too expensive/unpredictable.
I think people generally underestimate the global impact of shutting down production in Europe's bread basket, Ukraine. There is a reason Russia wants this land. It's, as usual, a war for natural resources.
We should consume a lot less beef. Wages haven't caught up with inflation in a long while, I'd hope McDonalds paying more would trigger a nationwide increase in wages (I know, too optimistic).
I'm not sure that's true about wage growth, especially at the low end:
https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2023/
> In stark contrast to prior decades, low-wage workers experienced dramatically fast real [inflation-adjusted] wage growth between 2019 and 2023
Your source lists wage growth during that period as 13.2%
Meanwhile inflation over that period is significantly higher at 19.18%.
So, no, low end wage growth has not kept up with inflation.
13.2% real wage growth, not nominal wage growth. Real wage growth is what you get after inflation is subtracted out of nominal wage growth. 0% real wage growth would be keeping up with inflation.
That says "real wage growth" of 13.2%. IOW 13.2% on top of the 19.18% for nominal wage growth of >33%.
1 decade of decent growth doesn't exactly negate multiple decades of negative growth though either.
Agreed. Sheep are a much more sustainable ruminant and we should all shift that way. I always heard it was spoiled cans of mutton fed to GIs that killed Americas taste for sheep. More importantly, we should stop eating food shipped in from far away. Not as easy as it sounds.
I bought some canned corned mutton (from Australia, I think) recently on a whim when I was at a caribbean foods store, and it was incredibly delicious. Not much in the way of gamy flavor (which I don't hate), and more tasty than corned beef. I think this is the recipe I used: https://www.alicaspepperpot.com/guyanese-style-corned-mutton...
That stuff wasn't cheap but I'm gonna make two cans worth next time, since my guests absolutely devoured it.
I live in Oregon where I know we have tons of sheep (you can see them when you're driving on I-5); would be great to get stuff like this with local sheep!
Shipping is really a tiny proportion of the environmental cost of food, especially meat.
Meat-based proteine is important in so many different ways.
Yes, it is possible avoid meat and still have a child develop well. It was also possible to install Linux on your PC in 1991/1992. Most people couldn't, but the really smart (or special) ones could.
I meant beef specifically, not meat in general. Our ancestors didn't eat bovine meat every single day like we do now. Plus cows take up lots of grazing ground, and I'm not happy about how they're treated worse over time because we keep eating more of them, and that requires more and more cruel ways of supplying that beef.
Chicken and sheep seem to be more sustainable. But either way, I think it is good for our health to rotate the types of meat we eat and lower the portions a bit? But it's easier said than done for sure.
Ok. Just noting: Realistically, your concerns are not going to change the eating desires of actual humans in the real world.
So the plan is a beef tax, then?
Here's a reality check from Sweden:
https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/svenskarna-dissar-kottska... (the public service broadcaster)
https://www-svt-se.translate.goog/nyheter/inrikes/svenskarna...
I think just raising awareness is enough. Trends come and go. People are drinking a lot less milk these days than in the 80's or prior for example. But on the flip side, ozempic and similar weight loss drugs are probably promoting over-consumption now.
Beef and wheat are expensive because there is a small handful of companies who produce these for the United States, and they all sit around the same table announcing how much they're going to increase their prices every quarter. It's not collusion, you see, just a fun little coincidence. Because curiously, these particular prices have gone up way faster than inflation, despite having leveled off a year or so ago. Of course, maybe it's the arbitrary taxes the unitary executive has been adding to imports. Oh well. Becoming great again has sacrifices, I suppose, like Big Macs.
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Awkward writing in this article. "McDonald’s executives say the higher costs of restaurant essentials, such as beef and salaries, have pushed food prices up..."
Beef and... salaries? I think I found the name of my new fast food place.
Crazy how nobody ever talks about bonuses or executive pay or stock buybacks. Oh, I guess those are just the cost of doing business, eh?
What is awkward about it?
It’s weird two have those to things in the same category. Beef is.. not at all similar to salaries. The only overlap is that they are costs.
They are inputs into a business. I agree that it's bloodless but it's very typical of business language
How many low income customers are going to sit there and figure out how to min-max the McDonald's App(tm) to get the best possible deal for their money?
They're not. They're priced out from the efforts and hoops required to get the deal.
And while there's deals in the app, not every deal is the best deal (leading to the min-max situation).
(I live somewhere super-rural where McD is one of the only lunch options. I've figured out that depending on promos, one of the 'cheapest' options is to take advantage of the "buy one get one for $1" double cheeseburger every day offer, then check the 'deals' section to see if there's a cheap fry offer (because fries are always expensive). Drink offers are never worth it when the sodas are always $1-$1.49 for a large soda, but sometimes there's a "free medium fries with purchase of drink" that definitely maximizes the value offer here. Combined, this 'meal' is often less than even the new Extra Value Meals they offer at below $6-7 depending on deal applied.)
You found the exact combo I build when the cravings hit.
Use the coupon for free fries any size with drink purchase; get the $1 bonusburger, and be out with more food for less money than the two cheeseburger combo.
Annoying as hell to order.
Where I live (Switzerland), cost of going to some proper burger joint vs mcdonalds costs roughly the same, or its very mildly cheaper for mcd. Plus unlike say France they don't serve beer here(canned heineken but at least its still technically beer).
The only reason to go there is their method of handling tons of customers (restaurant experience this ain't thats for sure), their opening hours and often location.
That's it, if you look for quality or pleasantness of experience or actual good food in statement above you don't have to bother. Worst burgers Swiss market can offer, we have different food and tasting standards here.
My experience in many countries is that for 10 to 30% more price you can eat a real hamburger made of real beef, with real pommes. But that 30% is for sure prohibitively high for many folks.
Perhaps this is a good thing? Are people eating healthier home-made foods now?
I do not think this is exactly true. People may stop eating junk outside. But having a healthy balanced diet is more expensive than buying junk and eating at home; and not only in money, but more importantly (maybe) in time. Cooking takes time and effort, which families with both working parents may struggle with. Please do not forget often those people have more exhausting and abusive jobs.
I know from first hand, how difficult can it be in that environment with limited money, time, and energy to go to the grocery store often, buy fresh things, and cook. It is much more convenient to buy things that go in the freezer, when they are in offer, and throw them into the oven when arriving home.
The problem is that people don't know how to cook. Something like pressure cookers (or crock pots where appropriate) are amazing for this sort of scenario. There are endless recipes you can find online that are toss a few ingredients in, wait, eat. Easy clean up, and delicious. I increasingly think cooking should be a part of basic education for everybody.
Stuff like rice, beans, and chicken breast are extremely cheap, and most of the way towards a balanced diet by themselves. And cookers are like magic - just toss a bunch of stuff in, some spices, and it will come out amazing. I like a bit of yogurt as my fat, but you can go way cheaper - just toss some lard in there, it'll taste great.
I agree with most of what you're saying, but here in Canada, chicken breast is so not cheap.
Costco has been 2.99/lb for chicken breast about as long as I can remember now here in Chicago. It’s only sometimes better priced than the local supermarket, but the quality is consistent and price stable.
If I have spare time on a weekend it can be picked up far cheaper in bulk from a food services supply store. 2 weeks ago when I last walked through the cooler section it was sitting at $1.29/lb in 40lb cases. Costs maybe 10 cents per food saver vacuum bag or so to freeze them in packs of 2-4 each.
A lot of folks are price takers and have forgotten how to comparison shop or buy on sale and stock up. These were skills lost over the past few generations - likely since stores thought they were competing on price far more than they actually are. Covid taught them the average consumer simply isn’t as price sensitive as the business classes teach you, and have engaged in aggressive price segmentation.
I don’t bother buying most shelf stable or freezable products these days unless it’s on a very large sale - which I’ve found tends to happen roughly quarterly for most things. Beef is the current exception, but we buy a half cow from a local farm and eat off that for a year or more.
Not everyone lives near a Costco. Not everyone is a fan of the environmental cost of their cheap chickens, or whatever. When I lived in San Francisco there was a Costco but it was more inconvenient to get to via Muni than most of the alternatives. Their parking garage is an absolute zoo.
Not everyone has the luxury of being able to store perishable items in bulk. Personally I struggle a bit to store a whole chicken in my fridge. Six and a half pounds (what you'd have to buy to get Costco's $3/lb price) is quite a lot. And if you want to cook that chicken first and then freeze it, you run a high risk of it just tasting weird.I just checked around and for boneless, skinless chicken breasts:
At least out here there's a lot less variability than you're claiming, unless you're buying enough to fill your entire fridge/freezer.Maybe people don't want 40 pounds of chicken at a time?
About $5 bucks per skinless boneless chicken breast where I'm at in Canada. That's $20 in just the chicken for a meal if you happen to have a family of four.
I swear my growing boys have hollow legs. How do you eat more than I do?
Thas fucking cheap! LOL
Chicken well raised and fed, is usually good starting at around 30-40 EUR / kg. I supermarkets selling 1kg of chicken for 4-5 EUR / kg - I would not touch this.
The one who downvoted me obviously has a problem with high quality food.
Animals held and then sold for 4-5 EUR per kg is pure shit. Period. I would rather eat groceries instead.
Most people have no idea what high quality meet is because they buy their stuff always at large chains - remember: None of the sustainability-interested local farms sells to any of those supermarkt chains. You have to GO there to get your stuff.
Such animals you can also eat without having remorse.
The folks that this article is about are not the sort of folks who can afford €18/lb for protein. In the US, at least, cheap chicken can often be identified as it cooks up with a woody texture or suffers from a variety of visual defects. Out here I can't think of any farms selling chickens directly to consumers. More well regarded farms like Petaluma Poultry do, in fact, sell to the big chain grocery stores and that's closer to $5/lb for a whole "organic" chicken.
well.... Im not in the US :-)
This is total nonsense.
There is the thermodynamics of calories in and out. Then there are micro nutrients.
Everything beyond that is bullshit marketed to suckers.
From a thermodynamic perspective this is somehow true; but not regarding taste, structure etc. of the meat product: There is a clear difference between superlarge chickenfarms and my local farmer with only a couple of hundreds?
Also, depending on how the animals are fed, you have different substances in the final product, like Antibiotics.
So feel free to optimize only for the "thermodynamic calorie perspective" ;-)
i’m interested in using my pressure cooker more. Do you have a favorite recipe?
This [1] is amazing, and also prep freezes extremely well. There are so many great recipes online, just search - it's also referred to as an instant pot in many places.
[1] - https://kristineskitchenblog.com/honey-garlic-instant-pot-ch...
Thank you very much!!
I'm afraid home cooking is the first victim of "big tech" strip mining our attention. When you are hooked it's too difficult to plainly keep concentrated on the cooking/cleaning process and on procuring of individual ingredients. No matter how easy it is, still needs capability to deal with messy physical stuff. And it's too easy to get demotivated by mediocre result.
An harbinger of things to come, widespread crippling executive dysfunction.
Not knowing how to cook isn't the main problem. Really poor people don't have time to cook and don't have any disposable income to buy a luxury like a pressure cooker, so this is fantasy. Really poor people are on SNAP (which doesn't cover a lot of fast food) and food banks (which provide random/useless stuff like unhealthy ultra processed food, dented canned food like canned corn and tomatoes, and random produce that requires a lot of time to use).
I think this really mischaracterizes the modern poor, especially in developed countries. It's not uncommon to see poor families with things like recent model phones worth hundreds of dollars, designer clothing/shoes, and the like. In many ways these are the sort of traps that keep people in poverty. Or referencing this article itself, apparently they decided to go eat at McDonalds and managed to spend $20 on two coffees and one coke. I mean that'd break the budget of just about anybody outside of well into the upper edge of middle class.
And a pressure cooker is not a luxury, nor is it something that's outside anybody's price range. On Amazon it looks like they start around $20. And the whole point is that it takes basically 0 time, and saves a ton of money, and even time, relative to things like eating outside the house.
Also, if people cam scroll on their phones and tables hours-on-end, then they can cook for an hour but scroll a little less.
A good microwave oven is extremely cheap, about the same as the food for a few weeks.
I eat only food cooked by myself from raw ingredients, in a microwave oven. Previously I was cooking with traditional methods, but some years ago I have eventually discovered that I was misusing a microwave oven only for reheating, when it can be much better be used for cooking.
In most of the cases, I cook everything that I eat immediately before eating it, which rarely needs more than 20 minutes for cleaning/peeling/paring/slicing vegetables, cooking in the oven and washing dishes.
This is short enough. If I would go out to eat somewhere, I would loose much more time than that. The only thing that I do not cook immediately before eating is meat, as depending of its kind it may need up to 30 minutes of cooking in the oven, so I cook all the meat for a week during the weekend and I just reheat it and combine it with the garnish in the other days. When you cook for a large family, you can cook all the food for a week, for a few hours during a weekend day, and you can reheat the food in less than 5 minutes in all the other days.
You can even bake bread very quickly and with excellent results in a microwave oven. When I want bread, I bake it immediately before the meal. Cooking at home and using only raw ingredients results in a cost for food that is frequently even 10 times less than a similar dish would cost from a supermarket, while being more healthy due to the use of high quality ingredients without any dubious additives. Even for bread, home-made bread is about half of the price of supermarket bread. Eating in a restaurant is of course much more expensive than buying processed food from a supermarket, so the difference in cost is even higher.
Therefore I agree that most poor people spend too much on food that is also unhealthy, and that is because they do not know how to choose wisely what they eat and how to cook that quickly and inexpensively. I believe that these are essential survival skills that should be taught to everyone in elementary school, but, even if I had a much better education than most, that did not help me, so I have learned most of them only when old and after a lot of failed experiments.
Microwaving fresh bread... WHAT??
You gotta drop a recipe or something, that is fascinating
You can use a traditional recipe, e.g. wheat flour + 75% water by mass + salt + either yeast or baking powder (e.g. for 500 grams of flour either 7 grams of instant dry yeast or 10 grams of baking powder), then you knead the dough for a few minutes (until the dough becomes homogeneous, elastic and sticky; after you do it a few times it becomes very easy to recognize the moment when you have kneaded enough) and when using yeast you leave it for an hour to grow.
Then you bake for a time depending on the oven and on the amount of bread. I normally make breads from 500 grams of flour, which need about 13 minutes @ 1000 W. The advantage of a microwave oven, besides the short time, is that after you have determined the right time through experiments it will be always correct.
For baking you must use a glass vessel with lid, to prevent the bread from being too dry. The vessel must be much bigger than the dough, at least twice bigger, because the bread will grow tremendously and it will be very fluffy.
The alternative to traditional bread is to make unleavened bread, which can be made even faster and I actually like its taste more.
Even with a traditional recipe, unleavened bread will grow a lot at microwaves, due to the expansion of embedded air and water. It can be made to grow more, almost like traditional leavened bread baked in a traditional oven, by increasing the amount of water in the dough. Instead of using 75% water as in traditional bread, you can increase the amount of water to around 120% by weight. With so much water, there is the additional advantage that the dough becomes very thin, so there is no need to knead it, you just have to mix it very thoroughly for a few minutes with a spoon or with an electric mixer.
Such an unleavened dough with excess water can then be baked in a glass vessel without lid, also for 10 to 15 minutes. With unleavened bread, you can have delicious bread in less than 20 minutes from start to finish.
For improved taste, you can add to the dough various spices or seeds, either whole or ground. You can also add a sweet filling when you desire it.
Microwave-baked bread normally does not have the burned crust, but if you desire it many ovens have an infrared lamp that can be used for this purpose.
Thanks for the infodump. This sounds insane to me but I'm 100% going to try it.
Unleavened bread is trivial to make in this way. You weigh the water and the floor in the baking vessel, you mix them, then you bake.
Leavened bread is slightly more tricky, because you need to know how to knead.
For kneading dough made from 500 grams of wheat flour (high-protein flour, which is usually sold as "bread flour"), I use a big glass bowl and I knead with a single hand, while keeping the bowl in the other hand. This is much less messy than when kneading in the way used for big amounts of dough. At the beginning, kneading consists mostly of opening and closing the hand through the dough, while at the end it consists mostly in pulling the dough upwards, which becomes very elongated while one end of it sticks to the kneading bowl, then pressing again the dough into the bowl.
At the end of kneading, the dough becomes extremely sticky, so I keep ready a so-called "pie server" that I use to remove the dough from the hand that has been used for kneading, and for aiding in the transfer of dough from the kneading bowl to the baking vessel. The same pie server is also useful after baking, to detach the hot bread from the baking vessel.
I’m not American but my perspective here from Europe is that what most poor people I know have an abundance of is time.
Are you interpreting "poor" as "unemployed"? The OP was talking about people who are employed full time but at a low level job (at a shop, or as a janitor or something like that).
That definition of poor would make the majority of people poor.
Yes, exactly. There's a lot of poor people.
The idea you can't eat a healthy and cheap diet is just absurd.
This is exactly how I eat. Lean chicken breast is some of the cheapest protein. Eggs have come back down to be a good deal.
Oatmeal, sweet potatoes and rice are cheap. Olive oil is cheap.
Walmart has frozen kale in a bag for $1.50.
People don't eat healthy because they don't want to eat healthy. It doesn't taste as good and is not as much fun.
My weekly grocery bill is not that much more than cost of eating one meal from door dash.
In term of taste, of course it sucks compared to door dash. For me, that is a feature and not a bug or else I would over eat and it wouldn't be a healthy diet.
Cheap isn’t just money to buy ingredients, but also the time to prepare them. If you are working two 8 hour shifts a day, your time and energy for cooking a real dinner might be limited.
Where do you live that chicken breast is cheap? It’s about £7/kg for the crummy water filled breast here in UK
Can't really say about the UK but the cheapest options here are in order 1) frozen chicken leg quarters and 2) an entire chicken (fresh, not frozen) which you have to break down yourself. Both options are around 3-3.5€/kg
> But having a healthy balanced diet is more expensive than buying junk
In which country? Not in Central Europe, and it was never the case. Healthy food here has always been cheaper than junk food. I come from a poor family and a visit to McDonalds was always a special occasion, yet my mom cooked every single day and they were all healthy and balanced.
More expensive? Absolutely not. Never has been and is unlikely to ever be true.
More difficult? Time consuming? Requires practice? Yes. Usually overblown though on all fronts, considering the types of families that seem to find ways to make cheap meals compared to those that do not in my experience.
Fast food (and prepared/junk foods) are low friction and convenient. Cheap is not a metric they compete within.
Cooking your own food can generally be more expensive then anything mass produced because efficiency is usually better in centralized setups, but this depends on the meal. Including the time it takes, you will never beat eg. a bakery for more cost efficient bread.
You can have a balanced diet based on frozen meat, fish and vegetables. Add there pasta, beans, rice, oats, etc.
Also I'm pretty sure they are spending more time on social media than cooking.
Hmm.. I see your point. Grocery stores do have a lot more unhealthy foods than fast food I suppose. Lots of snacks and drinks. Even sugary breads, canned food,etc.. But because you're not eating out, it feels healthier.
Anecdotally... No they are not. My middle school daughter says many of her friends just eat ramen packets every night.
So even crappier food. The people have to be blamed for this at some point. Lower income Indian and East Asian families cook fresh food every night that probably costs less than $0.50 a plate. Beans, lentils, rice, eggs, pork and chicken can take you very far.
Some people aren't taught how to cook (though I suppose they could jump on YouTube these days). And for those who are, at the very lowest incomes, they may not have a working range or oven. While a cheap microwave can be had for under $100, the cheaper plug-in stove tops don't last if used daily.
Also those people may not have time or energy to learn cooking by looking youtube. From an armchair, with good economic position and time and money for hobbies anyone can learn to cook by yt. But man I know some families where both parents (when there are 2!) come completely exhausted after 10 hs of hard work.
We changed the quality of food on our home. The amount of money and time invested was much more than we expected. Everthing from a decent equipped kitchen, with enough room, knives and other tools are needed… I lived once in 15 sq meter flat… I can tell you, is difficult to cook in a kitchenette.
No, this is just the definition of excuses. It’s very cheap and easy to cook and everyone in many parts of the world cook after 10 hour work days. It’s not the end of the world or really even optional if you want to be cost-effective and healthy. There’s only so much blame you can shift to society because this is staunchly within the realm of personal control.
>>> decent equipped kitchen, with enough room, knives and other tools are needed
But you don't need too much to cook a healthy food. One pan, one pot, one knife and a spatula. Yes, not everything could be cooked with such setup, but tons of healthy cheap food.
The per person time commitment and food options for cooking for one is difficult. I would contend it's harder to cook a balanced meal for one person than it is for a family of four.
Buying things with portions for single servings has a premium on the price. Buying things at family size portions means that you have to have that for four nights in a row otherwise you've got wasted food (that is more expensive than the single portions).
For example, I've got a wok and can do a reasonable stir fry. Going and getting chicken for it meant that I had to get a pack of four chicken breasts... and I need to cook it before they spoil in my refrigerator. The vegetables (broccoli, pepper, carrots) were a bit better for keeping but you tended not to have one or two carrots unless you shopped the more expensive organic section. You get a 1lb bundle of carrots... and a lot of times, I'd end up throwing out some at the end of the week.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MealPrepSunday/ just isn't something that I can do and stay sane.
I can get a 3500 calorie deep dish pizza from Little Caesars for $15 ... and that's a good two days of caloric intake right there (there are even less expensive ones - I'm a fan of Detroit style). Four meals for $4 per meal. I think it was $12 when I was unemployed for a while a couple years ago.
I still have difficulty with grocery shopping portions for single servings and getting enough variety. I currently have a meal delivery / ready meal subscription that sends boxed raw ingredients that are 2 minutes of prep for a toaster oven and is about $12 per meal (600 - 800 calories). It's less expensive than door dash, the local diner, or the sit down casual dining and is portioned for cooking for one (and a lot healthier than four meals of pizza).
... However, being able to pay that much per meal isn't something that people who are getting priced out of McDs are able to do.
Or you can cook for 4 people and simply freeze 3 portions for later.
Same about veggies, you can get a frozen mix of veggies and cook with it.
That's the idea behind meal prep Sunday... and you get things like https://www.reddit.com/r/MealPrepSunday/comments/1p365m1/ten... or https://www.reddit.com/r/MealPrepSunday/comments/1ov08r8/get...
That is certainly cheaper than individual and gets benefits from the scale. It isn't something that everyone can do (or tolerate eating the same thing every day for the next week).
Caloric intake != healthy, good food to be obvious
No, it doesn't. It does serve as an ok proxy for "if I eat 600 calories, will I be hungry in an hour?"
The people who are buying pizza or McDonald's aren't after healthy food. They know it isn't healthy. They're after the an inexpensive way to not be hungry when they go to bed.
I don't know why you all have such good opinions of McDonald's, but when I went there I was maybe full, but still hungry. Not an hour later, but immediately. To me it is an absolute waste of money.
It is not cheap, the local kebap or pizza store is cheaper, and the local grocery store has hot dishes for way cheaper. The ordering experience is crappy, you need to use that weird screen instead of ordering directly, long waiting times, the food tastes awful, you have a huge garbage pile on your plate, even larger than the "food" you ate, and you are still hungry after.
Not knowing to cook is a personal failing. Like you mentioned cooking basic things is something you can pick up in one session of doomscrolling on TikTok these days.
Anecdotally, a pressure-cooked pot of beans can take over 40 minutes to knock together. So it is not that simple.
Only if you lack the planning skills to soak them in the morning or the night before. Besides, hydrated canned beans are perfectly affordable.
Like if the single mum living of a minimum wage has time and energy while dressing the 2 kids to not forget such things.
Sorry I know such people that I profoundly admire. I feel is just unfair such a comment. I have enough time and little stress in my life, I can plan what I’m going to cook the next week. But I could never criticize that people for not being able to.
Critique isn't necessarily just mean spirited. It's rather difficult to know what you don't know, and so many people do awful things without knowing there are alternatives.
The example he gave of beans is perfect. They can be done almost completely passively, are healthy, and dirt cheap. Add some rice, a meat, and you have a delicious dirt cheap meal that takes probably less than 5 minutes of active effort, and also has minimal cleanup time as well.
Like this article had some quote about somebody in it spending $20 at McDonalds for some drinks and bemoaning there being nothing healthier. That's simply ridiculous. And if somebody told them that and explained why - they could very possibly dramatically increase the quality of this person's life.
All your comments are painting yourself as a victim and it’s really irking me. I also feels like you’re making a mountain out of a mole hill. This is not rocket science. It’s cooking stuff. It’s cheap and easy and you should be able to do it after 10 hour work shift.
You really need to stop being such a shortsighted techbro and assuming you know anything about other people's lives.
Planning ahead is the #1 problem for people with executive dysfunction, many of whom work in IT.
If we replaced half of schooling with simple planning courses and classes half the world’s problems would be solved.
Of course, it’d crash the consumer market so of course it’ll never be done.
Let me introduce you the concept of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert
Instead of blaming people, perhaps it is better to look at the systemic factors that we can change to help people who are already playing life on hard mode.
But if people cook more (like its typical in european folks around Mediterranean), who will then do all the necessary TV watching and doom scrolling on social cancers to make them feel even more miserable and inadequate?
Btw that portion you mention won't be 0.5$, more like 2-3$ if if balanced and healthy enough. Tons of rice as is still very common in south east Asia ain't very healthy neither. But its sorta proven once folks start to cook for themselves more, they cook healthier than preprocessed junk food. And I don't mean some exquisite stuff, spending even 10-20 mins ever second evening can provide enough for whole family.
You just listed eggs, pork and chicken. They will run you way over $0.50 a plate. Even if you shop at absolute dirt cheap groceries, it’s more like $4-5 per plate when you factor in all the costs not including labor.
I'm not saying the people aren't to blame, but no one is blameless in the cultural decay. If US natives learned to live like immigrants, many ills would be solved, dietary and otherwise.
That same pattern of the poor eating instant noodles is true in Asia as well.
The origin of a number of those products is US food aid. Governments in the 60s and 70s set up facilities to convert the wheat they were getting into a product people would eat.
Usually in college age kids, that situation quickly changes in married couples and families.
The sales volumes are too high for the only consumers to be a small age range like that.
If it was a product only university students ate, it'd only be sold near universities.
And when people are homeless due to ballooning rents, think of how much weight they'll lose!
Let them eat home cooked meals?
I never understood how can eating at McDonald's be cheaper than cooking your own meals.
I'm not from US, but checking US grocery shops, you can eat meals made of chicken breast, bread and vegetables well below 5$ per person, well below 20$ in total for a family of 4.
Yet every time I see those discussions, fast food is always presented as a cheaper option?
Well, you see, the entire wink-wink, nudge-nudge premise of America was this: everything is cheap, but you don't have the best safety net in the world. This sort of worked, for a while, especially because we actually DID have an okay social safety net here and there for people: Medicare/Medicaid, SNAP, Social Security, ACA, etc. Now, though, these programs are being gutted, AND ALSO the Big Macs are expensive. So now, the people who run this country (like the people who own McDonald's) are giving us neither our bread nor our circuses, and that makes the F150 class very angry...
But sure, I guess there's no cost of living crisis, actually, because you have the perfect shopping list. I'll inform the nation.
When you are a single person, the math changes. It can be cheaper or even break even to eat out every day. Especially if you lack the ability to eat and/or store the minimum package amount before it goes bad. This was a massive issue in my youth before I could save up buy stuff to make things last longer in the freezer while still tasting good. It was literally break even to cook vs eat out. Thus it was actually more expensive to eat out because we have to factor the time I spent cooking and I ruined food a lot as I learned how to make and store well what I liked.
As someone with a family now, it could never work. Even without just being better at cooking and preserving food, I can buy bulkier items that have a lower cost per unit.
I guess if I were truly destitute as a young adult, I would have cooked, but I wasn't. I wanted to have s nice salad wrap and/or hot meals fancier than beans and rice.
> When you are a single person, the math changes.
No, you just have to cook meals that freeze well and learn to use your freezer.
I'm not sure where you're getting numbers but I can't buy just chicken breast for two people for less than $5 at my grocery store unless I buy in bulk. And I do not have the space to store it.
I literally see chicken breast at walmart at 2.57$/lb, that's well below 5$ per two servings.
Add some simple mashed potatoes and you're still below 5$ to feed two people in one meal.
You can also eat bens, rice, lentils, eggs, add some cheese. There's countless simple, cheap, non processed food around.
The reality is that it's "more convenient", or at least it was, because if you had to choose between spending 3$ for a complete meal you still had to cook, and some 5/6$ McDonald's processed tasty food, you'd go with #2.
But stating that it's cheaper because of "scale economy" is just false, it isn't and never was to eat out. Let alone the impact of eating such junk food.
Cool. My local grocery store chicken is between $5-6/lb today. $2 if I buy a whole chicken and butcher it myself.
Whatever prices you're seeing are not my reality, living in a major urban area in the United States. Maybe if I bought at the Walmart in Iowa next to a factory farm I could buy it for $2.50/lb, but I can't.
Simple conomy of scale. McDonald's buy chicken in bulk from vendors, and get a better deal than Safeway/wherever you shop does, they get industrial bulk handing deals and yeah they have to pay for employees to cook the food, but that's amortized over all the other customers. So it can be cheaper, the same way that it's cheaper to get oil out of the ground, refine it, do a bunch of chemistry to it, form it into plastic knives and forks, make a box for it, decorate that box, put the cutlery into the box, ship that box halfway around the world, put it in a store, and all of that's still cheaper than getting someone to wash a metal fork for you to eat dinner with.
What blew my mind is when someone explained to me the cultural difference with some places in south east Asia. In the US, eating out at restaurants is what rich people do. But in certain places in south east Asia, having a kitchen, having appliances like a fridge, having electricity for them, having dining space, having the time to go to the market to haggle with vendors, all of that adds up so it's the rich that can afford to eat at home, and everyon else eats out. So it's location dependent.
Just a small note worth mentioning: McD do not buy things from anyone. They literally do it all from scratch. Vertically integrated.
Wait, you misunderstood my point. I was stating that regardless of scale economy, it's cheaper to eat healthy at home than at McDonald's.
The feeling for me is the market has bifurcated into: delivered expensive shit in a bag, or omakase sushi. The middle ground of cheap decent made to order food is largely gone or on the way out. There are diners in my area still but nearly everything is over 10 nearly 20.
The quality for delivery is astoundingly low for unbelievably high prices.
I cook way more and am healthier for it.
I feel like this whole article is seeking to 'maximize engagement', which I'm using as a lofty euphemism for trolling its readers.
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Mariam Gergis, a registered nurse at UCLA who also works a second job as a home caregiver, said she’s better off than many others, and still she struggles. “I can barely afford McDonald’s,” she said. “But it’s a cheaper option.”
On Monday morning she sat in a booth at a McDonald’s in MacArthur Park with two others. The three beverages they ordered, two coffees and a soda, amounted to nearly $20, Gergis said, pointing to the receipt. “I’d rather have healthier foods, but when you’re on a budget, it’s difficult,” she said.
Her brother, who works as a cashier, can’t afford meals out at all, she said. The cost of his diabetes medication has increased greatly, to about $200 a month, which she helps him cover.
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> The three beverages they ordered, two coffees and a soda, amounted to nearly $20
I don't live in CA, but this just seems insane? Even in "captive" locations like airports etc. where prices for stuff are higher than a typical brick-and-mortar location, I don't even understand how two coffees and a soda could approach $20. If they'd DoorDashed it, sure. But those numbers don't make sense.
You're probably imagining two black coffees, and all three drinks being of modest size like medium.
But if you turn those into "specialty" coffees and upsize them, and then add ~10% sales tax, it's very plausible that the price was closer to $20 than $10.
Between prices inflating and people's tastes being pretty unmoderated and indulgent for a long while now, the total cost of "everyday" expenses adds up quick.
Even the simple black drip coffee drinks that have basically no material or labor cost are priced at $2-4 in a lot of places now because people have become so dependent on the habit of treating themselves to one, and often a very large one, that they've become price insensitive and easily exploited by any coldly calculating business.
> black drip coffee drinks that have basically no material or labor cost
Raw coffee prices have been rising for a while now[0], and I assume even in the US people are more attuned to decent coffee.
And I kinda hope producing countries get enough power to get better deals (thus increasing coffee prices further...) as they're usually getting shafted pretty hard.
[0] https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/coffee
> if you turn those into "specialty" coffees and upsize them, and then add ~10% sales tax
Right off the bat, it's McDonalds, there are no "specialty" coffees. And the sales tax is irrelevant, what matters is what comes out of the pocket.
$20 for McD-quality coffees and soda is insanely expensive. It puts it above places like Starbucks which makes no sense because there's a Starbucks literally 50m/150ft away from that very same McD.
Pictures of the menu at the closest McDonald’s to MacArthur Park show the coffees at ~$4 and sodas at ~$2-3 all large, which is a more realistic number but still only around half the quoted amount.
Huh?
Of course there are "specialty" coffees at many McDonald's. Well over a decade ago, recognizing the margin and admitting the public interest in sweet, creamy, coffee drinks, they began a shift into direct competition with Starbucks, et al and offer a full menu of Americanized espresso and blended coffee drinks. Like at Starbucks, these easily run over $5 for the large sizes, and they're widely available.
Because of both brand loyalty, or because they also want other things from McDonald's that Starbucks don't carry, it's a extremely successful and profitable product segment for them, even when a Starbucks is "literally 50m/150ft away".
https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/full-menu/mccafe-coffees....
https://www.mac-menus.com/mccafe-menu/
McD’s made a huge push into the “upscale coffee” market about a decade ago (e.g., competing directly with Starbucks) and it’s paid off.
The gas stations that did similar are also doing well. The era of Irma’s coffee is past.
One of my kids favorite drinks from McDonalds has been an iced mocha for roughly a decade
> simple black drip coffee drinks
I visited London last year and was surprised & disappointed that the McDonalds across from the Trocadero did not have any such thing as simple black drip coffee (to which I could add half-and-half). The closest I could come was "flat white", which I never heard of before in the U.S.
A flat white is just a small latte (i.e. with a higher espresso to milk ratio). It's not based on filter coffee.
Half and half does not exist in the UK (or Europe more generally, AFAIK).
Filter coffee exists but is less common, especially now that office coffee tends to be handled by coffee machines that make espresso(-style) coffee.
It does seem a little bit high... but "two (large) coffees" comes in at $5.20 each and a large soda is $3.20 https://www.mac-menus.com/#McCafé-Coffees - that's not California prices though. Without additional costs (and how much more is it in CA) we're at $13.60 there. Add another $1 to each item for a guess of pricing and sales tax and round and you're at $20.
> “but when you’re on a budget, it’s difficult“
Life is indeed difficult if you’re on a tight budget yet still buying large coffees for $5.20 and somehow concluding you’re making frugal choices because “But it’s a cheaper option.”
If you’re in an airport or highway rest area, you might not have other/better choices, but if you’re on your home turf, I guarantee you can find a way cheaper option.
I can believe McDs offered to charge around $20 for 3 drinks. What I find harder to believe is the common case of people who accept that offer and then sip them while complaining about their budget.
Those are close to Starbucks prices so I imagine McCafes. You can get a mediocre McD coffee for $1.
You can easily reduce the cost of coffee and drink much better coffee. A relatively inexpensive home setup can easily get you to $.75-.50/cup and that's using good beans.
The CEO said, a few years ago on an earnings call, that this was the goal.
Low income customers are disorderly, rude, argumentative and generally not worth the effort.
My lower middle class family of 4 kids was raised on $1 McChicken sandwiches through my teen years. I don't know if there is an equivalent today.
Value menus still exist: https://www.eatthis.com/restaurant-chains-with-most-affordab...
But meat is more expensive than beans and rice.
The problem for me is that I can't eat a lot of rice due to digestive issues with it--it just backs me up like glue even when I drink tons of water. I don't think rice is a very good type of food, honestly. Beans are fine, good fiber and protein. Rice, nah.
Does this happen with Jasmine rice?
If no: check for MTHFR gene mutation.
American rice is often washed in folic acid - don’t ask me why - and that’s toxic to MTHFR mutated individuals.
The folic acid helps prevent certain complications early on in pregnancy.
As long as you, or your child, aren't one of the 60%+ of people who can't properly break it down.
In that case, all of the "enriched" bread, folic acid, certain forms of vitamin B, will be difficult to process (often causing problems).
https://www.mygenefood.com/blog/mthfr-and-folic-acid-build-u...
Folate, folinic acid: those are safe to take, and pass through, for the entire population.
If you’re going to go so far as downvote, at least acknowledge the fact that it’s a debated topic in the field, and that you disagree with the new findings because [].
You need to add salt and butter to rice when its cooking.
In the 90s I knew families who’d buy bags of McDonald’s $0.29 hamburgers (I think the special sale day was Wednesday) and live on that for the rest of the week.
McDonald's is awesome and yummy. Why all the hate?
I only ever enter a McDonald's for coffee and there seems to be an issue with my order more often than not. And there is always someone very upset about their order.
It's really not an inviting place.
That's pretty standard for fast food coffee. Dunkin is notorious for just winging it.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MCD/mcdonalds/gros...
Every time I go to Mcdonald’s, I just think wow, I should have gone to Chipotle. Less expensive and healthier. Better in just about every way. Except no drive thru and you get less food if you order online with Chipotle
McDonald's is in far more places than Chipotle, somewhat sadly
You're not going to get value at Chipotle anymore, also somewhat sadly. Order a burrito and you're going to get a big flour wrap with a tiny lump of rice and meat in the very center. These guys have cost-cut themselves to death, just like everywhere else.
Do they still allow you to get the tortilla on the side with the bowls?
Perhaps the cost of goods has risen disproportionately to incomes?
I think the sad thing is that "high earners" are eating at McDonald's now.
Are they though? I work in an office full of high earners and can’t remember the last time I saw a McDonald’s bag. I actually have access to McDonalds foot traffic data (also due to my work) and will have to run an analysis to see what trends I can uncover.
I mean, near me there are a couple of places that sell sometimes even better quality than McDonald’s for lower prices, so McDonald’s loses the competition in the financial convenience factor.
That has been huge. I used to be able to be absolutely sure that if I picked McD’s, at least the bill would be smallest.
No longer. They’re more expensive than Culver’s sometimes!
Throughout my 20s that was about the only factor that led me to McDs - a cheap, fast meal. The 2/$3 McChicken for a lazy dinner or a McMuffin for a hangover fix was always too cheap to pass up.
Nowadays McDonald’s feels like a Seinfeld bit: _Whats the deal with fast-food, it’s not fast, and it’s not food._
I’m pretty much guaranteed to spend so much on a biscuit and coffee that I could go to the local coffee shops in town and get a coffee and breakfast sandwich for the same money and oftentimes faster, somehow.
When you're too poor for smelly clown meat, you know things are bad.
It could be worse if millions of low-income customers were already as poor as ever in living memory, for quite a number of years and still enjoying McDonalds as regularly as expected.
As recently as a year ago and now the only difference is in the decreased value of the dollar :\
I’m trying to be illustrative through glibness here, but…
If consumers can’t afford the prices required to pay a restaurant’s labor living wages, then perhaps they’re not viable customers of that restaurant.
Minimum wages above the market-set rate are a form of price control. The distorting effects of price controls—in this case, contributing to shortages of low-margin restaurant meals—are economically inevitable.
Wage is not a determining factor for McDonald's pricing and has nothing to do with that.
They successfully converted from a neighborhood fast food shop into a new chain of automats with almost no staff once touchscreens got cheap enough and the necessary software could be suitably amortized. They ditched the employees, minimized community features like playplaces and tables, dropped the low margin dollar menu that many poorer people relied on, and focused on getting higher-margin products with better photography to busy professionals with brand attachment.
Trying to turn this into the tired debate about minimum wage just distracts from a discussion about what's actually happening to this brand.
OK so what’s the problem then? Surely if McDonald’s made their own decision to move up-market, competitors have swooped in to serve the customers they’re leaving behind?
It is quite the juggling act: you have employees demanding to be paid more, the cost of goods/inflation steadily rising, while customers wanting everything to be cheaper.
Something has to give somewhere, the challenging part would be to know where.
Don't forget company leaderships and stock owners taking more and more profit out of companies than ever.
Take 100% of their salaries and profits and it would make a negligible, likely unnoticeable difference in this issue.
I find that hard to believe when their margins are double what they were a decade ago.
I'm not sure if there's a more sophisticated way of doing this. But just looking at revenue vs net income for 2024 suggests McDonald's operates at about a ~33% margin.
I'm not suggesting everyone would be a millionaire with a more egalitarian distribution of wealth. But, to suggest America's skyrocketing inequality has nothing to do with the poor being unable to afford a burger is a bold claim to make.
Because if the wealthy are not extracting their fortunes from American companies, what then?
Sounds like a great start!
Amazon made $311B in 2024, they employ 1.5 million people.
That's $200k an employee, on top of what their regular salary is.
McDonalds made $15B and employ 150k people, that's $100k per employee.
So no, not negligible in the slightest.
Where did you get the $311B number? Because I get a net profit of $59.25B which is only 40k per employee. This assumes that the company doesn't need to keep any profit for future usage which may or may not be case depending on how big their war chest is. Not to say that 40k couldn't be life changing for many of the Amazon employee but the 311B number seems to be pulled out of thin air.
You're correct, it's wrong. I googled it, guessing AI just hallucinated that.
Are you under the impression the only expense a company has is payroll?
Profit is after costs+investments removed, not just payroll.
According to AI, they paid 5.3 billion in dividends and a have about 2 million in employees.
That's been said forever, but only ever said.
Markets are the best mechanism ever invented to resolve that challenge to maximum aggregate benefit.
True, but to prevent those restaurants from hiring children, feeding us poison, and dodging all taxes the market must be regulated. And we're back to the same discussion we've been having for 150 years - how do we best regulate markets.
There’s an entire academic field studying ways in which it’s not that simple. Housing, employment, and transportation are somewhat famously areas where markets need help due to information and power disparities.
Can't wait for the glorious day when Big Macs are $100 because the Market has willed it. Verily, I say unto thee, for mine eyes have beheld the Market's glory, thou art blessed to pay $100 for a Big Mac, and thou ought to bend thy knee and worship at the feet of the Market, for it is all-knowing, and all-powerful, and perfect. Selah.
Maybe the mcdonald's stockholders can have a few less yachts
How about executive compensation?
That would make everything maybe 1 cent cheaper, so it's not really significant.
Yea whenever the idea of a company's profit is under a microscope, people often reflex to exec "greed" but it's typically because it's easier to blame a fictional disney villain, than it is to dig into the root of the problem.
If you can explain why anyone needs $8.469 billion of profit (2023), I'll gladly hear you out about greed. But something tells me I'm not going to get a great answer. :)
It would however have second-order effects; having less wealthy people would drive down rents/etc. If the wealthy just keep getting wealthier you'll end up in a situation where the wealthy just trade between each other out because of higher margins and the working class has nowhere to buy things.
I don’t think this is very related to what’s actually going on here.
It used to be that fast food was always cheap. But now, fast food is a broad market that’s aimed at a wide variety of demographics.
McDonald’s just so happens to be closer to the “premium” side of the market. They have a strong brand and don’t have to be the cheapest fast food restaurant on the block. People don’t buy McDonald’s because it’s cheap.
There are plenty of fast food restaurant chains that still mainly serve lower income demographics.
Rally’s/Checkers, Church’s Chicken, Popeyes, Sonic, and maybe you could even count Arby’s, or Taco Bell depending on what you’re ordering.
Some of the bigger brands like McDonald’s do have some deals to be found but you’ll need to be on their apps hunting for them.
> Minimum wages above the market-set rate are a form of price control. The distorting effects of price controls—in this case, contributing to shortages of low-margin restaurant meals—are economically inevitable.
The article cited analysis which said California's $20 minimum wage increased fast food prices 2% approximately.
Is McDonald still a labor intensive shop? Last time I visited one I had the impression that it had become vastly more automatised: you order on a machine, and most customers just grab a bag from their car before they drive away.
Yeah, if you make below a certain amount of money every year, you're a net drain on society and we should politely march you into a wood chipper.
Can you afford McDonald’s food if you work at McDonald’s?
You usually get a free meal per shift if you have any sort of half decent owner at basically any fast food restaurant.
So, that's a "no" since that meal costs less that it would if bough over the counter?
I’m just going to sidestep this and point out the stupidity of this comparison.
Does it magically prove I’m making a bad salary if I can’t afford my employer’s product?
Is a five star general making a bad salary because he can’t afford a nuclear submarine?
>Does it magically prove I’m making a bad salary if I can’t afford my employer’s product?
Yes, if the entire premise of your employer is "here's the cheapest hot food imaginable".
>Is a five star general making a bad salary because he can’t afford a nuclear submarine?
No, because the entire premise of the military is not "here's the cheapest nuclear submarine imaginable".
What a ridiculous strawman you set up, although you swung pretty earnestly at it, Mr. Quixote.
A better example would be Walmart, whose entire premise is "we sell the cheapest goods imaginable". Despite this, a lot of Walmart (and McaDonald's employees, actually) are on government assistance. If you have a justification for why there should ever be a society where someone working at a job that boasts "we have the cheapest shit" still can't afford their job's cheap shit, then please, be my guest.
> if the entire premise of your employer is "here's the cheapest hot food imaginable”
My argument elsewhere in this thread is that this description is not what McDonald’s is nor claims to be. It might have been that at some time in the past but it’s now a relatively well-regarded and reputable option. Low end cheap would be a restaurant like Rally’s or Church’s Chicken.
Regarding your last paragraph, I think you’re completely misunderstanding what point I am making. I am not defending employers paying low wages or putting employees on food stamps. Our society shouldn’t work that way.
I’m just pointing out that whether an employee can afford a good their employer makes is essentially an irrelevant detail in isolation.
Even comparing McDonald’s to Walmart for this purpose is pointless because Walmart isn’t a franchise. McDonald’s restaurant wages are determined by local franchise owners and vary a lot.
When I worked in fast food, they gave you a meal allowance, but it didn't really matter because I would grab a hamburger patty right off the grill and chow down. God damn, now I'm getting hungry.
Supposedly you would get fired for doing it, but when the managers accused me of doing it I would just deny it with my mouth closed while still chewing, and the managers would do it too.
They probably have cameras now or something. Those were the days.
You are eating in the same place were the cooking happens, without going outside replacing your gloves, putting of your hairnet, apron and mask, and without washing your hands? That sounds like a fast way to get your store closed by the food regulation authority for insterile handling and contamination of food.
>> You are eating in the same place were the cooking happens, without going outside replacing your gloves, putting of your hairnet, apron and mask, and without washing your hands?
I'm not now, that was decades ago. We didn't wear gloves, hairnets, or masks. The guy working the grill would wear an apron.
I mean there was a bucket of dish rags under the sink there once that had maggots in it. I worked in two restaurants and as far as I know the "food regulation authority" never showed up at either of them.
I don't have any illusions that things are different now. Sometimes it's just better not to know.
You are correct.
But how do we address the wealth inequality in America?
I like Michael Hudson's answer: repress financial rent-seeking. Inequality is driven by rents that siphon wealth from the productive economy. Therefore: nationalize natural monopolies and destroy monopolies of privilege.
I think the bigger issue is the 500 mil/quarter stock buybacks and the several million compensation packages for the executives than the burger flipper wanting enough money to make it worthwhile to leave their house.
McDonald’s is a franchise. Franchise owners bear the burden of employee and goods costs.
Franchise owner also bear the burden of franchise fees, which pay for these exorbitant executive compensation packages.
And they've been complaining for decades at this point that corporate is failing them. Not enough new products, bad business and advertising strategies, store renos, the list goes on.
The burger flipper making a lot more money is doing a lot more for their franchisee's than the executives are as of late.
The exec comp is a rounding error compared to the other costs of the business.
The numbers are interesting when you run them.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6920afb3-5f84-8008-827d-907e5f0a0a...
"People don't want to spend $9 for a Big Mac"
No shot?
When I was a boy quite a few decades ago, McDonald's finally came to Tampa.
Burger King already had a few locations in other towns after getting started in Miami, and they were a bit like after-school soda shops of the 1950's that Northerners were more accustomed to. Which most people don't realize had not existed up until then in Florida because of the very small fraction of students and young people in general compared to all other states.
There were no Whoppers yet or fancy logo but they did have an overhead sign with a jolly fat king sitting on a burger with lettuce and tomato. Which you got for 10 cents. Burger King was just trying to become a chain. A major attraction at the time was of course the air-conditioning, which was seldom seen outside of banks and supermarkets at this early time. The meat was not as small as the major chain at the time, Royal Castle, which had locations up the East Coast. Royal Castle was very much like the Krystal mini-burgers from the Northeast, they were 9 cents in Florida and most kids would have no less than 2 or 3. These were small tiled breakfast/lunch/"dinner" grills that served any of their fare around-the-clock. The one in our neighborhood even had a jukebox like we figured was real common up North.
Most tourists from the Northeast never took the Turnpike or even considered passing through Orlando before Disney World was built, so they all came down US-1, and it was dotted with Royal Castles all the way to Miami, people would stop in any time on a long drive for coffee, on the door it said "open 29 hours a day". This was when 7-11 was only open from 7am to 11pm (not Sunday though) and nothing else had shopping hours that late. Gas stations closed Sundays and at night too, and self-service pumping was still not the least bit primed for consideration since the arrival of the automobile. When I was about 10 I kind of figured that the Royal Castles had only been there about 10 years themselves, without threat of a hurricane up until that time, when one was on the way they had to scramble to put locks on the doors because they had never closed before.
Anyway, people knew McDonalds was going to be a California-style approach and it was not near downtown, not far but on then-undeveloped property and you could see it as they built the characteristic golden arches. Big tiles too, not the small ones. They were proud of their growth and often updated their signs with the increasing number of hamburgers sold, striving for their first million.
When they opened of course they had the longest french fries anybody had ever seen. Sticking way out of the smallest little paper sack that looked so absurd it actually got people's attention. No large orders of fries, and Big Macs were not even a dream, nothing but regular hamburgers in the white wrapper for 12 cents, cheeseburgers in the yellow wrapper for 15 cents, fries and Cokes for 10 cents, shakes 13 or 14 cents, slightly more than a burger. Grilled with onions, plus mustard, ketchup, and pickles on every one assembly-line style, and not nearly as small as the mini-burgers, but they were always ready when you got there, and nobody had realistically thought about drive-through yet.
Beef and salaries? They mean executive salaries right? Because average McDonald's hourly pay ranges starts at $8.94 per hour.
I live in the middle of nowhere in the Midwest US, and McDonald's hourly pay here starts at $14.45/hr
The average wage of McDonalds my entire state is only $12, which means considerable amounts of people are working for less than that. But even at your local wage, that's only $29,000 a year for full time work before taxes, it is still a garbage wage.
Certainly, but it's also not $9/hr :-(
McDonalds food is disgusting and overpriced compared to competition. A Happy Meal is ~$8 and the food is awful. I can go to Five Guys and get the classic combo for ~$13 and then I just have them cut the burger in half and I feed two kids. It ends up being about the same price for MORE food of a higher quality that is made to order. McDonalds locations are also really dirty inside. Kids aren't interested in the playgrounds as much and most McDonalds don't have them. AND McDonalds changed their design and look hideous now. I think they've done this to themselves. Make food with real ingredients, make it to order, and bring back the playgrounds and birthday parties for kids.
This is a trend that's probably going to continue and widen the rich-poor divide. Take airlines, there's only so many seats they can offer day to day, and with planes retiring from service and new planes slow to be delivered the inequality will only increase, and the market will shift to more affluential customers.
The likes of McDonald's will need to understand who their new customer base is quite carefully and market around that if they are to stay relevant. Sadly their products to me are garbage now; slow service, cold fries, awful oil. Obviously they've had to adapt but it's just expensive slop.
And in the UK they have had scandals around sexual harassment, which hasn't helped their image/branding.
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> First they complained that restaurants like McD's were poisoning the lower classes with fast food, now they're complaining that they can't afford it?
Are they the same people?
Is it possible there are 2 problems?
Who complained? Reporting is not complaint.
Well the situation changed
You're right, the McRib is back just in time for the holidays.
Who is "they"? Someone, somewhere, will always complain about anything, no matter how good it is. The world is filled with critics because (my hot take) it's easier to tear things down than build them up.
Both things can be true, you know. Yes, its food is abysmally unhealthy, but it’s effectively the de facto national cafeteria of the continental United States by virtue of its widespread footprint and (previously) low prices.
In an ideal world, we should be challenging both, rather than throwing up our hands and pleading confusion because someone can’t hold two truths simultaneously.
"In an ideal world, we should be challenging both"
Not really. Calling food poison and then complaining that poor people can't afford it implies that you support poor people eating poison and or eating the food.
The first complaint implies that they shouldn't be eating it at all and result is that I just can't take the second complaint seriously.
It's just a way to shit on big corporations without having to take responsibility.
You’re grossly misunderstanding the broader arguments through misrepresenting the claims as tied together, rather than the standalone grievances they are. A single system can have multiple flaws that interact on each other without necessarily creating a single, larger issue.
McDonald’s food is unhealthy and should be improved. At the same time, they have become too expensive for the poorer working classes to afford. These are two different problems, with different solutions.
You’re basically arguing that because I cannot demonstrate “one easy fix” to a complex issue of nuance that I’m essentially advocating for poisoning people, and it demonstrates your complete inability to grasp simultaneous truths or discuss complex issues effectively without misrepresenting opposition to score points.
Go away.
There is nothing valuable about the trash McDs serves. The bread is diabetes inducing.
Well in the past you could get unhealthy but cheap, convenient food. The cheap+convenient combo no longer really exists for families that for some reason will not cook.
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Fire sales and foreclosures would tend to be bought by those who already have the money to buy them.
It's still downward pressure. Tax impediments to non-personal home ownership would be great too!
The lack of vegan options — and Trump flexing his one-day McDonald’s internship — finally pushed me to boycott McDonald’s altogether. Also it became slow with all the delivery drivers queuing up as well. Burger King might be raising prices too, but at least their deals are still decent, and every burger has a vegan option (which is supposedly even cheaper for them to produce).
My actual favorite “fast food” is IKEA — surprisingly good as a coworking spot, and their vegan Köttbullar are great. And honestly, in Germany who needs McDonald’s when there’s a good Döner place around? It’s basically a 5-in-1 burger: real bread, salad, sauces, and your choice of meat/halloumi/seitan.
From what I see here, McDonald’s mostly survives in low-density areas or as car-dependant late-night junk food where alternatives don’t exist. But if people go out less, or can’t afford a car anymore, that model gets shaky fast. There are simply too many better options now.
It reminds me of the same shrinkflation/bloat cycle we see with American pickup trucks: beds get smaller while prices balloon, and then people act surprised that these wank-tanks fail in Europe where efficient vans just work better. “Free market” also means that bad products eventually lose.
Same story with phones: everything keeps getting bigger, heavier, and more bloated with features nobody asked for. Bring back the iPhone Mini — not everything needs to be Super-Size Me.
The US has efficient vans to like the Ram ProMaster City or Ford Transit/E-Transit, pretty popular.
"The Ram ProMaster City was a compact commercial van made by Stellantis, which discontinued the model in 2022."
Also, people in the US started importing Kei-Trucks so there is a demand and a certain level of resistance to the car bloat.
Don’t forget Trump‘s one day flex as garbage man.
> “Happy Meals at McDonald’s are prohibitively expensive for some people, because there’s been so much inflation,” Josephson said.
I find the phrasing odd. It is because corporations have raised prices that inflation has increased. Rising prices aren't a result of inflation.
OTOH, no company or item exists in a vacuum. If McDonald’s suppliers have increased prices, and their employees expect higher wages due to inflation, then McDonald’s must increase prices or eat the cost (unsustainable in the long-term). Does this only contribute to inflation? Yes. But so does every worker who wants higher wages - unfortunately everybody in the chain has such little influence on the wider economy that they must simply prioritise themselves.
This is an overly simplistic view, of course, not least because it presumes good faith, but that is really my point: the economy has too many moving parts to simply say “you’re to blame for inflation because you increased your prices”.
No, inflation is a monetary and political phenomenon. Companies cannot set prices arbitrarily, in particular not the fast food industry which faces what is probably the strongest competition on the planet. The entire restaurant industry does not collude on the prices of burgers.
In this particular case it's wage-push inflation. The lowest quintile of workers has seen very strong wage gains among other reasons because of tight labour markets and minimum wage legislation, which on the consumer side prices a lot of people out of the service economy.
That's a nice excuse from the executives, but it doesn't align with reality. McDonald's profits have been rising every year. [1] If those dastardly minimum wage workers and their fat paychecks were putting even the slightest bit of pressure on struggling McDonald's, the expectation would be some sort of reduction in profit. But it's the total opposite. Profits are outpacing whatever losses they're (not) experiencing from whatever supposed wage increases they have.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mcdonald-q3-2025-profit-sales...
What are McDonald’s profits adjusted for inflation?
McDonald's net margin doubled from 16% to 32% in 10 years.[1]
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MCD/mcdonalds/prof...
You’re repeating generic right wing-ish talking points. Yet profit margins have increased. If your reasoning was correct, profit margins wouldn’t be increasing as they are.
> Companies cannot set prices arbitrarily
[Source required]
Edit: how are you downvoting me? Go look at corporate profit margins now, 10 years ago, and 40 years ago.
If you believe you can hand wave with simplified BS like "Supply and Demand" you probably have some heavy reading on price elasticity to catch up on.
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Then why are profit margins bigger? Supply and demand as the reason for profit percentage increasing margin makes no sense. I’d be interested in how you’d debate that.
> Supply and demand as the reason for profit percentage increasing margin makes no sense. I’d be interested in how you’d debate that.
That was never my argument. The commenter I responded to edited his comment to add those points after I replied. This was his comment before:
> Companies cannot set prices arbitrarily
[Source required]
That is pretty obvious from where it says “Edit:”, what isn’t obvious is how Supply and Demand prevents companies from setting prices arbitrarily. Which is and always was what your comment said.
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.. no, corporations raise prices in response to the falling value of the dollar which has been occurring predictably since 2020 when the money supply was increased 20% (remember the "printer goes brr" memes and the "stimulus checks")?
Make more money supply -> money is worth less -> prices go up
simple stuff
I guess the next step is: blame corporations, nationalize them, see it causes economic problems (we're here), and then repeat (Trump promises $2k checks to everyone, this is coming soon)
The inflation boom was caused by the free money handed out to everyone. Inflation is inevitable when the dollar is devalued.
Why are you ignoring the more-than-doubling of McDs profit margins here?