>Especially not in my butcher, brewer, or baker. Pure self interest gets you McDonalds, Bud Light, and Debi cakes. I consume exactly none of those things and have no desire to consume any of those things. They taste terrible, are bad for me, and the companies themselves are generally bad for their communities and the world.
Whoever you do buy your food from has recognized there’s a portion of the market that values what you do and is happily selling it to you, out of their own self-interest.
I, for one, like McDonalds and sometimes prefer a Bud Light.
>I’d rather be the one to lay hands on all my own products.
I've seen this, and similar, opinions about grocery stores that just illustrates how detached the public is from modern food supply chains.
Do you have any idea how many hands touch your food before it gets on your plate? From the fields (where works probably urinate while on the job) to the shelves, it passes through probably 10s if not 100s of hands.
Joking aside, when is McDonalds a good decision? At least in Denmark where I live, you can get the same equivalent food (say a burger, fries and a soda) for half the price (if not even less) if you go to a supermarket and buy the stuff, and it will also be healthier (more good nutrients, less bad things). You can cut the cost even more if you decide to make everything from the ground up, and then it's even healthier than both the McDonalds and the supermarket alternatives.
I can see how something like coffee or ice-cream could be an okay choice at McDonalds, but the ignores the fact that the coffee is bad and the ice-cream isn't very good either compared to what you can get in other places.
McDonalds isn't ever a good choice. It might be the best out of a bunch of bad choices, though.
> I think this is pretty cool. Maybe I’ll buy some McDonalds today too.
Plenty of people will have plenty of issues with a major corporation. But it's worth pointing out that McDonald's is one of the most prominent fast food chains which has no problem with animal abuse in terms of products from horribly treated livestock animals. They have trouble even making their french fries livestock-torture free .
Maybe this issue doesn't personally matter to you, but it does create a huge problem for a company that does something so shamelessly unethical.
> Also, the society is more conscious about not having someone to do stupid things for them like collecting their trays after they eat at the McDonadls, this is YOUR responsibility as a member of a society, to look for others as well.
To play devil's advocate, why? If my time is more valuable than a McDonald's worker's, why should I be wasting it on cleaning up trays?
Your argument could easily be extended to saying that restaurants are in general frivolous. Isn't feeding yourself a fundamental responsibility as a member of society? Except that destroying restaurants would actually be quite economically negative.
> It used to be more common to purchase restaurant food, and home-cooked meals were a luxury for the rich a few hundred years ago, but income and sales tax have imposed higher transaction costs, and made restaurant food more expensive.
The point you tried to make with that seems twisted. Home made food was the norm, so when something like MacDonald started, it was actually not junk food, but more like food that only the rich could afford.
In the present environment, even with income and sales tax, restaurant food is cheap - relatively, of course. You can get a lot for $2 USD. The problem is that type of food is bad for you in the long term.
> Things like fresh produce, dairy and meat I need to choose myself
The thing is, you don’t need to, you prefer to.
Plus if you’re buying meat at a grocery store, you’re already so removed from the source of your food that letting somebody else pick it out is like adding another inch to a marathon.
> Restaurants and mom and pop grocery stores/convenience stores are very low margin, super long hours, and stressful.
Sorry to hijack off of your comment - none of what I say is meant as a negative about you or your parents.
I've seen two types of people start these:
1. People from low income backgrounds who don't have many other options and don't have the means to gain good knowledge. I sympathize with them.
2. People who are somewhat wealthier (have a good degree, work for an engineering company, etc) who complain about how poorly people are running restaurants and how poor the food is and know for certain that they can run a restaurant that makes the food really well and everyone will come to their restaurant and business will be good. Very common for this to be about ethnic restaurants but doesn't need to be.
I have little sympathy for this group. They really should know better. I've talked to them about it before they put a huge chunk of their savings into starting a restaurant. They typically do no background research. They don't ask other business owners. They have no idea about the margins (hint - the other restaurants who make food poorly do it for an economic reason - not because they can't find good chefs).
Recently one of them opened a restaurant near my home. And their food was great - I would put it in the top 2 of their category in the city. But their prices were too high. Normally I order this type of food once in a while when I don't want to cook or am busy. But the price was beyond that threshold. I went there only when special friends visited me in town and took them there.
And not many people went there. The reviews everywhere (Yelp, etc) were awesome. But people didn't go there. Partly because of prices, but partly because of the location. Why did they pick that location? Because there's a big company in the neighborhood. Surely there are plenty of well paid people there who would come for lunch? Yes there are and no they won't. Over the years living there I know this plaza well. It's a graveyard for restaurants - most of them likely relying on employees of that company eating there. All these guys had to do was spend time in the restaurants in that plaza prior to signing the lease to get an idea. "Ah, but they don't go to those restaurants because their food is crap!" Yes, the food is crap. No, that's not the reason.
And then there's the food. Great food they made. But they weren't making a profit. So did they revise their menu to focus on items that would give good margins? No. They raised the prices. Fewer people came. They raised the prices again. Even fewer people came. This spiraled out of control. Within a year they had shut down. One of the co-owners told me there wasn't a month where they made a profit. I asked "Did you talk to any restaurant owners for their advice prior to opening?" Nope. If the food is great, people will come.
These guys work (or worked) pretty good jobs prior to opening the business - sometimes in senior management roles. Is that how decisions were made at their companies?
> Who doesn't like the sound of buying a home cooked meal from a neighbor?
It'd take a lot for me to consider it, because it creates all kinds of awkwardness if the quality is poor, and I'd have little reason to trust that they'd deliver consistent quality.
It'd need to be far cheaper than any alternative, and I'd need to not afford the alternatives, before I'd consider something like that.
> When I go to a restaurant, I want the food. I don't want to pay, it's just a requirement of obtaining what I desire.
IME, most people do want to exchange something for the goods and services they consume. For some, if not only so they can complain about them. I personally don't like handouts, and will go to lengths to avoid them.
> I can pay someone to change my oil, I can pay someone to cut my grass, but for some reason cooking healthy food, the most essential service, is difficult to find.
> Why has our economy failed us in this sector specifically?
Because it's incredibly inefficient for a chef to cook a meal for a family, because people want their food to arrive warm, thus preventing factory-food-production, because delivery is expensive, because everyone has a refrigerator, thus making cooked-to-order food have compete on price with long-shelf-life refrigerated staples, and because people vote with their wallets by buying food that tastes good, as opposed to food that's healthy.
Do you know what makes food taste good? Sugar, fat, salt, and alcohol. Do you know what's not healthy for you? Sugar, fat, salt and alcohol. [1]
The other problem is that a lot of Americans don't know how to eat well - because eating well is a skill that you inherit from your parents. If your parents were feeding you crap food as a kid, you'll turn into an adult that craves that same crap.
There's a huge class divide, here. My parents were immigrants with lower-middle-class means, but upper-class habits. As a kid, soda was a treat for me. Soda was a staple for my lower-class friends - which was not by their choice, but rather by choice of their parents. They grew up into adults with bad diets, bad teeth, and bad overall health, and they find it really, really hard to change what they eat.
This sort of thing repeats, generation after generation.
[1] Yes, I'm aware that fat and salt aren't unhealthy in themselves - but are probably unhealthy in the amounts we consume.
> Imagine going to McDonald's where your friend told you that you could get a Filet o' Fish for $1 but when you get there you find out that McDonald's was charging $5. You'd be mad.
Yes. At my friend, for being wrong, and for suggesting I eat a Filet o' Fish. I wouldn't be mad at McDonald's.
>It works out just because the places I can walk to for groceries are incredibly overpriced and the restaurants obviously don't source their food there.
I typically don't buy my groceries from the gas station despite them having a half gallon of milk for $4 and it being 3 minutes walking away.
I also don't use gas station numbers to determine if something is cheaper or more expensive.
> Also, cooking at home doesn’t really make sense from an economic standpoint when you think about it.[1] Like everything else, cooking has economies of scale and specialization, so it’s cheaper to cook for many families at once.
Cheaper for the restaurant, yes. In don't see why it's cheaper for me if you add the restaurant's margin to the price.
Not even talking about taxes, labor, equipment, housing and food safety costs the restaurant has (and will pass on to me) that I don't have when I cook myself.
(The quality control I have is another point, though not a purely economic one)
> When you go shopping for the cheapest sushi, you should expect worms.
No, I prefer paying a government taxes so they can hire restaurant inspectors who work to ensure the probability of being sold food with worms approaches 0%, regardless of how much the food costs.
I have no interest in keeping track of the price of sushi. My main concern is knowing the product being sold meets a very high probability of meeting a certain minimum standard, such as not being infested with parasites. Otherwise, I just opt out of the market and make my food at home.
>...Which is why you probably will choose not to eat those burgers and will spend your money on more expensive products and that's fine. Other people might have less money to spend and they'll look for the 'biggest bang for their buck'
No, that's not fine for me. Basic human decency doesn't stop at the middle class.
Why should poor people eat a subpar and dangerous food just because a chain wants to maximize their profits? Are they less human?
Whoever you do buy your food from has recognized there’s a portion of the market that values what you do and is happily selling it to you, out of their own self-interest.
I, for one, like McDonalds and sometimes prefer a Bud Light.
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