[VMisTheWay]

I'm totally with you on this. People pay other money to prepare food?

It's not trivial either, restaurant food is 7 to 20x more expensive than home cooked (source- Efficiency Is Everything)

The only other business model for a restaurant is to sell drugs(aka alcohol and caffeine). Then your business model exploits customer addictions.

I think we've spent far too much money/resources/manpower on lazy food habits.

[danpalmer]

> restaurant food is 7 to 20x more expensive than home cooked

I suspect Efficiency is Everything is measuring a very different thing. They seem to focus on calories per dollar, which is not how restaurants or home cooks typically think.

The rule of thumb used in the restaurant industry is 30/30/30/10. 30% for food, labour, rent, and 10% margin. Anecdotally, for dinner I spend about £3 a meal to cook at home, and could probably buy that meal out for £8-12.

As Efficiency is Everything says, you can live on $1.50 a day, but it requires using only a very limited subset of ingredients and allows little room for preference. For some people this makes no difference, for most it's a huge handicap, which is why it's limited to the min-maxing fringes.

[mennis16]

I'm not sure laziness is the main factor here though. I suppose it depends where you are ordering from, but I enjoy picking up from restaurants still largely because I enjoy the food and would not be able to recreate it. In some cases it introduces me to new flavor combos that I wouldn't have tried otherwise and maybe will eventually make its way into my cooking. Hell, I even just occasionally crave McDonalds. If I were feeling lazy I would have Soylent or throw together a sandwich with whatever is in the house, it feels like more effort to place the McD order than do that.

Food is a large source of enjoyment for a lot of people, even removing the social benefits of in-person restaurants, I don't think it is a waste. Although certainly many restaurant owners would benefit from some business training.

I also think you'll find you could say the same thing about a lot of life chores- people pay other people to sew? People pay other people to mow their lawn? People pay other people to trim their hair? And so on. A lot of these things could be done sufficiently yourself, but 1) they will generally be done better by the professional and 2) as these things pile up the total time spent will become a legitimate burden.

I found it interesting to read about the daily schedules of housewives back in the 50s or so, some of their tasks could be automated now or would be considered unnecessary, but even adjusting to be a bit more modern it sounded like a difficult full time job. And there are increasingly less people "employed" in this sector. So I don't know why I see so many objections to outsourcing something like cooking (not even all the time).