[chiefalchemist]

I'm not so sure about this.

Cooking at home means going to the supermarket (or going online and ordering from the SM). If you have to cook for more than yourself, then you probably need to also put sometime into planning the meals for the week. And then of course there's the time to cook the meals. There's also cleanup. Also, let's not forget that there are plenty of people who never really learned to cook and now fear the kitchen.

Sure meals from the frozen section are an option but they're maybe only slightly less expensive than FAFH.

In any case, FAH takes time *and* effort. Perhaps not a lot of time + effort - and habit - but enough to make it easy to say, "F** it. Let's FAFH..."

If FAFH establishments start closing, local towns are going to turn into ghosts towns. FAFH is about the only thing left in a lot of cases; aside from web dispensaries.

People should have been FAH'ing long ago for health reasons and that obviously didn't workout at all.

[neogodless]

> Cooking at home means going to the supermarket (or going online and ordering from the SM). If you have to cook for more than yourself, then you probably need to also put sometime into planning the meals for the week. And then of course there's the time to cook the meals. There's also cleanup. Also, let's not forget that there are plenty of people who never really learned to cook and now fear the kitchen.

There's a sort of gut instinct that going out is easier. After all, the sitting and ordering is a lot more passive than the prepping and cooking.

But time wise, it seems like getting in a car, driving, finding parking, walking, waiting for a table, and then the slow drawn out steps of getting drinks, appetizers and a meal over a long period of time, before repeating all the travel again... adds up to even more time!

[chiefalchemist]

But going out...

1) It's less friction and any give point. Driving is easy when the reward is a meal. Driving is not so easy then the "reward" is the supermarket.

2) Is an event. It's exciting. It's an adventure. Again, compare than to the supermarket and cooking a meal.

At the objective level, your analysis is spot on. I do agree. I tend to not eat out or order out. But aside from myself - and yourself? - that's not how human decision-making and human behavior works.

The majority's decisions are driven by the quest for comfort.

[paxys]

Everything follows economics. If you can't cook but don't have the money to eat out you will learn to cook. If you don't have the time you will cut back on some other activity.

[chiefalchemist]

Good point. And that raises the question: Where are consumers spending less?

[hateful]

My wife and I both work full time jobs. It's easy to do meal planning when one member of the family doesn't work - but when everyone [has to] work - planning a meal every night of the week is nearly impossible.

Currently we're trying to eat at home 3 nights a week, and even that's hard. We don't want to eat the same thing for multiple days. If neither of us has time to cook, then a lot of time the ingredients are perishable and get thrown out (so now instead of spending money to go out, we're spending money on food to cook AND going out - it's a gamble).

I would even add, that I think, as a society we should move to towards eating out and delivery being the norm - It's like anything else, I specialize in Programming, my wife specializes in Medicine. When we order food - they specialize in that. It's way more efficient than us having to do it.