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Yeah, I love my local pizza place and I'm on good terms with the owner, but the prices have gone up enough that I've set a hard limit of only going there once a month, and there are some menu items that I explicitly just will not buy because they're so overpriced.
Cost frankly does define my dietary habits. The number one reason that I don't decide to grab the odd piece of vegan chicken to put in a bagel is because it costs 50% more than regular chicken.
The devil's bargain that the American Middle Class struck in the 70s was that women would enter the labor force and all the domestic work would be handled by a professional service sector. Rather than cooking at home, we all eat out at cheap kitchens. Rather maintaining a home, we just rent. Rather than spend a day cleaning, we have dishwashers and rumbas and cheap immigrants to do maid work. Rather than spending time outdoors, we get a gym membership. Rather than providing child care ourselves, we outsource to daycare centers. Etc, etc.
That deal has been breaking down since at least the Housing Crisis of '08, but its really kicked into high gear after COVID. What was supposed to be cheap industrialized outsourcing has climbed in cost by leaps and bounds.
You can argue that the original deal sucked. Establishing a permanent underclass to do the grunt labor of civilization had all sorts of awful knock on effects, not the least of which was the food getting saltier and sugarier and generally more awful for our physical health.
But the alternative is what? Tell half the population to get back in the kitchen? Boycott Big Agriculture? Just eat smaller portions?
Nothing has made me cook at home more than fast food prices.
I mean… the reason isn’t good, but the outcome is. Maybe this’ll actually make a dent in the obesity epidemic, which fast food exacerbates immensely.
Makes it easier to not eat that trash.
Taco Bell’s app is a game changer, can still get a box for like $6. But that’s the only place I’ll get fast food anymore
In theory this will mean a more healthy population, as people start cooking food at home, instead of eating fast food.
Sucks for people on the move though.
I can make tastier, cheaper and healthier burguers than McDonald's at home faster than the delivery itself. It's just a matter of practice. I really don't get how they can justify their prices at this point.
Re: the comments here I'm not for a moment buying the "too busy to cook, must eat fast food" argument or similar arguments portraying fast food as, why, almost necessary in this busy day and age! If you don't want to cook (I don't want to if I can avoid it, but do it anyway occasionally and usually make several days worth of dish X at a time to minimize my cooking time), you can easily go to you nearby Winco/Walmart/Aldi/etc and load up on some interesting frozen dishes for way, way less $ than the prices I'm seeing mentioned here. And I'm not talking about some kind of 1960s "TV dinner" things either - bogus stereotype of the concept. Even Trader Joe's (where you shouldn't shop b/c anti-union) is comparatively cheap and has super interesting frozen stuff. No time to cook tonight? Well just pop your frozen dish out of the freezer and into the microwave and five minutes later you've got an actual "meal" of sorts in front of you, and likely one with 1/10th the calories of that "meal" you got from McFatsos at 5x the price.
Ah, but it won't be DEEP FRIED goodness and lots and lots and lots of volume and lots and lots of pure concentrated sugar in that totally mandatory fast food dessert. No, you'll probably be getting a relatively (to McFatsos) small-ish portion and it probably won't have started its life being deep-fried and it might just have some interesting veggies ... and no dessert unless you explicitly microwave something else.
This Will Not Stand! Must have fat and more fat and more deep fry and more sugar .... that's a "meal" ... and must have it because, er, oh yeah, "no time". Yeah, that's it, no time.
Americans are simply addicted to garbage food (fat/sugar) and in tremendous quantities and if they don't get it, well now, the world is going to hell clearly.
Partial source: worked in fast food in HS (McD's clone) for a few years and did pretty much every task there was to be done in the "kitchen". The "kitchen" being, in that case, a grill for cooking greasy burgers and prepping greasy bacon and a deep fat fryer for frying up those potatoes in bulk and also the "tots" (same grease as the fries) and also the frozen "pie" concoctions (same grease as the fries).
Eating this crap if you have a grocery store anywhere nearby and a microwave is completely unnecessary but people do it anyway because it tastes soooo good! .... because of grease and sugar.
OK if you're on the road all the time, a trucker or on an extended road trip, you have to figure out something cheap/healthy, but pretty much every motel room I've ever rented has come with a fridge and a microwave and I've had no problems figuring out a workable solution with the hardware available.
Say "no" to garbage "food" addiction and you'll save a fortune.