I think it was originally high value and made life easier.
However, we have adjusted. My parents talked about having fast food/restaurant food as a treat. It was too expensive to have more than once a month/birthdays. Heck, even school lunches were too expensive and they had to make food at home.
Today, we have more disposable income than my parents, so its easy to afford restaurant food AND get it delivered. The people buying this arent upper-middle class either, this is your general population that lives paycheck to paycheck. There are even people so confused about food prices that they make claims that fast food is cheaper than groceries.
Instead of using fast food as a tool, its become expected.
> There are even people so confused about food prices that they make claims that fast food is cheaper than groceries.
I live in an expensive part of NYC and have to go decently far out (by subway, I don't have a car) to find groceries that are cheaper than local fast food unless I want to eat mostly rice and beans.
Add in the costs of my time to shop, transport groceries, cook, and clean, it's significantly cheaper to eat out most of the time. Even subtracting the one task I actually enjoy (cooking), it's still not worth it most of the time.
The result is that cooking in becomes our "treat" that we do a few times a week and we end up buying the more expensive ingredients within walking distance.
I don't mean the cost of my time that work pays me, just how much money I'd personally pay to avoid doing something something I don't like (schlepping grocery bags on the subway, doing dishes).
In general cooking is the fun part and that's what makes it a treat, not the rest of it.
Some prepared food within walking distance most definitely is cheaper than all unprepared food within walking distance. 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.
>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.
Not sure if you're being facetious or just don't understand the reality of living in NYC...
I can probably walk to a dozen different big grocery stores in 15m and they're ALL more expensive than the cheap fast food in the same area. Not including the smaller expensive bodegas where you can pick up stuff 24/7 every block (kinda like the equivalent of a gas station). A half gallon of milk is $4 at any of the big stores and even more at a smaller place.
Anything cheaper requires a subway ride, which adds more walking and is annoying to do with multiple grocery bags, not to mention adding a flat ~$5 additional cost.
If five fast food workers can prepare 100 meals in the time I can prepare 1, there should be some monetary savings shared with me (the customer) unless my time is truly worth close to 0. That's how economies of scale work.
Need to include real estate, marketing, and profit. If its not a mom and pop place, HR + corporate.
Labor is typically 15-70% of the business's cost. (The 70% is in fields like medicine where regulatory capture has limited the number of licenses)
Its also not perfectly efficient. The worker may only be making 5 meals due to a slow day or slow hours. You may find processed foods in a grocery store more similar to '100 meals in the time I can prepare 1'.
Is some places (maybe mostly in the US) it's bad. But the idea of fast food -- to have ready-cooked, mass-produced food that you can get quickly -- isn't all that bad.
Is Ekiben (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekiben) is fast food? It's ready-cooked, it's mass-produced, and you can get one very quickly. Is sushi take-out fast food?
They are still not as good as a meal that is carefully prepared by a housewife/househusband. But I do think the mass-produced substitution can be good enough, and that's why I don't think we should make the conclusion that AI therapists/companions must be so bad too early.
Evidence seems to point that both are worse for you than cooking it with highly processed "food" and has a direct correlation with rising rates of diabetes and obesity. https://youtu.be/l3U_xd5-SA8
Our bodies digest it too quickly as it's been designed to make money and make us want more.
However, we have adjusted. My parents talked about having fast food/restaurant food as a treat. It was too expensive to have more than once a month/birthdays. Heck, even school lunches were too expensive and they had to make food at home.
Today, we have more disposable income than my parents, so its easy to afford restaurant food AND get it delivered. The people buying this arent upper-middle class either, this is your general population that lives paycheck to paycheck. There are even people so confused about food prices that they make claims that fast food is cheaper than groceries.
Instead of using fast food as a tool, its become expected.