[dheera]

Reality: A few years ago this would have been relevant. Most people can only afford the knockoffs now.

My Chipotle meal cost $17 yesterday. It used to cost $8. The $9 difference is going to come out of my budget to buy authentic brands and buy local stuff.

If you don't like it, make my Chipotle meal $8 again or double my salary, reduce my taxes, and don't pull random geopolitical shit that crashes the S&P500 every other weekend, and then we'll talk.

[jcranmer]

> My Chipotle meal cost $17 yesterday. It used to cost $8. [...] make my Chipotle meal $8 again or double my salary

I don't know what the date brackets are for your meal ranges there, but the largest component of the price increases in things like takeout meals over the past few years has in fact been wage increases for low-wage workers like the people making your Chipotle meal. In other words, it's more expensive because their salaries have doubled.

[inetknght]

That's a great excuse. Meanwhile, there are billionaires whose investment incomes could pay those salaries many times over.

Where do those investment incomes come from?

Ahh, yes. Profits.

[jcranmer]

If we're being pedantic, investment income comes from a bunch of people who trade pieces of paper for a living deciding that a particular piece of paper is now worth $1 more today than yesterday. Well, okay, it's not paper anymore, just entries in some computer database in New Jersey or Delaware or something.

Investment income--in the form of capital gains--isn't coming from profits, it's coming from the mass delusion in the value of stock assets (which is somewhat correlated with profits, although the existence of stocks like SpaceX or Gamestop show the possible disconnects).

If you wanted to complain about the salaries of billionaires, or the stock grants on the other hand... but you said investment income!

[tptacek]

This is the problem with populism; it's thought-terminating. Do the math on this. Liquidate a mega-billionaire to cover Chipotle's payroll. What happens next year?

[pocksuppet]

That is because the value of the dollar is half what it used to be. In other words, inflation has been 20% per year for 5 years.

So why do they keep telling us it's 4%?

[Brendinooo]

Depending on your date range, much of this difference might be the same inflation that has happened everywhere in the market.

[bluefirebrand]

You're not wrong. People are going to be on about "just cook at home" but the general point still is correct. Life has just become a lot more expensive.

We need to realize that the cost of food at grocery stores has gone up a lot too.

[dheera]

Exactly. My point is the price of everything has gone up, and the authentic "original" brands are no longer affordable. The knockoffs are still affordable, and with them I'm doing great.

I have no incentive to change anything about my spending habits. If the "system" changes itself so that I have a ton more disposable cash lying around then sure I'll re-consider the authentic brands.

About the only situation I still buy authentic brands is if there's an electrical safety or lithium battery involved. But yeah, I'm not spending $52.99 on a nice-looking bike bell ([1] with shipping and taxes) when there's a $10 knockoff of it that looks exactly the same and works just as well.

Back in the days when the original was $5 and the knockoff was $1, I might be willing to pay for the original.

[1] https://us.knog.com/products/oi-luxe-bike-bell

[Cyberdog]

Make your burrito or bowl at home, and it'll cost $4 or less.

[mindslight]

Do you enjoy eating just rice wrapped in a tortilla or something? Burritos are a harsh illustration of the economy of scale. Doing a quick tally with sale prices, and I'd think buying all the ingredients to make one single burrito would be upwards of $20-25, at least. Never mind the time to cook each ingredient that needs to be cooked. And most of these supplies and prep are going to last what, ~4 days before they spoil?

[Auracle]

> And most of these supplies and prep are going to last what, ~4 days before they spoil?

Rice lasts a very long time. Tortillas last a long time in the fridge (you can probably freeze them?). Freeze the meat. Beans last forever. Sour cream and cheese last a long time in the fridge and you'll certainly use them for other things.

Guacamole/avocados/other veggies are potentially harder to deal with for long term storage, but that depends and it looks like there are some options. Salsa also keeps for many, many months.

As far as time goes, if you're single, many of the ingredients could be cooked in a batch and then frozen, even as whole burritos.

[mindslight]

You're expanding the scope to a much larger process and pattern of behavior that has to be undertaken and managed. Sure it's doable, and you can save a bunch of money that way. But as a one line throwaway comment it's still nonsense.

Also freezing things or letting them sit in the fridge for weeks tends to change the texture. A main point of a burrito shop is the fresh ingredients.

[Auracle]

Well, you also don't have to freeze anything. When you cook almost every meal, you end up using most ingredients before they go bad. The ingredients for a burrito are pretty basic and can be used to make all sorts of things.

[mindslight]

"cook almost every meal" is exactly the type of "expanding the scope" I was talking about. Cooking food yourself is a well-known way of saving money. Starting by trying to reproduce burrito shop burritos is not the way to get there.

[bluefirebrand]

> You're expanding the scope to a much larger process and pattern of behavior that has to be undertaken and managed. Sure it's doable, and you can save a bunch of money that way

No, absolutely not. This sort of thing is seriously just the baseline of how we should be expecting people to act in society. Buying stuff for one meal at a time is ridiculously decadent behavior and should not be affordable

[bluefirebrand]

> I'd think buying all the ingredients to make one single burrito would be upwards of $20-25

Sort of yes?

But with those ingredients costing $20-25 you would be able to afford to make how many burritos?

There's no way your purchases wind up being $20-25 per burrito, right? That would be nuts.

[mindslight]

> But with those ingredients costing $20-25 you would be able to afford to make how many burritos?

It doesn't matter. The post I was responding to said that you could create a substitute for a burrito shop burrito with $4 and some work at home. Spending much more money and then amortizing it over multiple burritos is out of the scope of the original comment. It would be nonsensical to say that you can get a burrito for free by making three burritos and selling two, right?

There is obviously an underlying time-money tradeoff here, and my point is that focusing on burritos is the wrong place to start trying to optimize that for saving money.

(Although I do question why someone would go to Chipotle for anything other than "I'm on a road trip and need food". Their food is so bland it was the literal inspiration for the term premium mediocre. Support your local burrito shop!)

[ssl-3]

I see what you're doing, and you're completely correct. It's expensive to make meals solo.

But it's an uphill battle and you won't win.

Nobody cares that buying new ingredients to make tacos for a party of 1 is expensive.

If they aren't doing it yet, they will soon be telling you that you aren't holding it right, wherein:

You should enjoy leftovers. You should embrace and cherish the idea that electing to have some tacos one night dictates your meal choices for the days that follow.

That extra chopped onion that is all stinky and sulfurous by day 2? The meat that isn't ever going to be remotely the same again? The tomatoes that are reverting to slime? All that extra lettuce? That fresh cilantro that doesn't have any other culinary use in your chosen diet? Buck up and eat it, or shut up.

People are broadly incapable of having non-disingenuous conversations about the cost of preparing fresh food in small quantities.

---

Tacos for 2? Or 3? Or 8? Or 16! That's really easy and efficient to make for a one-time meal at home. It scales up very well, indeed. It's a great way to feed a bunch of people relatively inexpensively.

For a person cooking for themselves who isn't inclined to eat the same thing for multiple days in short succession, tacos get do kind of expensive -- expensive enough that buying them hot, fresh, and pre-made becomes very attractive.

(My personal favorite is when they tell me that I should try having different taste and just change my preference for the foods that I eat instead of complain about the price. Or when they tell me that I'm a very poor meal planner just because I want only one burrito: FFS.

Sometimes a burrito is just a burrito, and that's OK.)

[mindslight]

The funny part is that I'm currently at the home-centric cook-for-multiple-people end of the spectrum. But burritos are just such a comically bad example of things to make at home to save money. Switch to pasta or basic sandwiches and then there is a point.

[bluefirebrand]

> For a person cooking for themselves who isn't inclined to eat the same thing for multiple days in short succession

For this person: too fucking bad, that's life

If you don't want to live that life then you should pay a premium for the privilege

[ssl-3]

Does that mean that folks are not free to complain about the price of a burrito at a restaurant? What's your end goal, here?

[bluefirebrand]

People can complain about whatever they want and Other People are free to tell them "your problems are trivial, quit whining"

My end goal is hopefully to give people some perspective that "I don't want to eat the same meal two or three nights in a row" is a ridiculously entitled, childish mentality and they should get over themselves

[Cyberdog]

But you wouldn't be making a single burrito. You'd be making several over several days, and/or using the leftover ingredients for other meals.

Economic literacy is truly dead, isn't it? Good lord.

[mindslight]

This is what you said: "Make your burrito or bowl at home, and it'll cost $4 or less"

That statement implies you can straightforwardly save by substituting that one meal with a made at home meal. The reality is much more complicated, as shown by your backpedaling to making several burritos and other meals.

I could just as easily lob that economic literacy jab right back at you. For example, perhaps OP has a burrito once a week, to break up the monotony of eating a home made sandwich every other day. That would be savvy, right?

[Cyberdog]

I mean, I figured the concept of buying ingredients to make a single meal for one person and then just throwing whatever's left away is so ridiculous on the face of it that I wouldn't need to qualify it, but apparently I was wrong.

I currently live by myself and I bought a pork loin to barbecue for Independence Day as a treat. I bought one of the smallest ones I could find, then ate about a third of it that night. Then I put the rest in the fridge and ate it over subsequent days - one night I had it on its own with some veggies on the side, and another I sliced it up thin and topped some ramen with it. The loin cost me about $5, but to say that the meat for that one meal on Independence Day cost me $5 is baffling logic.

Maybe we can simplify this. Do you eat breakfast cereal? If you buy a box of breakfast cereal for $4 and a gallon of milk for $4, then have a bowl of cereal with milk the next day, do you think that means that one bowl of cereal cost you $8?

[mindslight]

You're talking about meals that take 2 prepped ingredients (pork/veggies, pork/ramen, cereal/milk) versus something that takes on the order of 10 (tortilla, rice, beans, some kind of protein, cheese, pico, lettuce, guac, sour cream, hot sauce), many of them individually seasoned. That's exactly where the economies of scale come in!

Point out that prepping meals at home is a great way to save money, sure. It just falls flat when pushed in the context of burritos. I would posit that the majority of people who set out to save money by trying to make burritos at home do end up wasting a significant portion of the ingredients, and end up considering the experiment a failure. So I'd say if you're trying to encourage financial savvy, focusing on burritos actually hurts that goal.

[dheera]

I have work to do. I'd probably get PIP if I did that every day.

[inetknght]

So you're doing work but not willing to pay others to do?

[dheera]

Nope, because I don't get to keep much of the money that I get from my work.

[IncreasePosts]

That sounds really cheap, if you don't consider that you need to do all the shopping, you need to prepare all the food, and deal with probably a bunch of food waste.

[otikik]

This was actually tried. Cheaper and healthier

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRtoUoBgjDw

[ssl-3]

That video shows a person spending more than $34 on groceries and making exactly 1 burrito.

[otikik]

You didn't watch it then. The leftovers would allow him to make way more burritos than just one.

[ssl-3]

I saw what I saw.

If there are more burritos in the future, then: I eagerly await Episode 2: One More Burrito [from last week's funky leftovers]

[IncreasePosts]

My point is it's cheap if you value your time at $0.

[otikik]

Actually given that in the US especially you would have to drive to chipotle, queue and then wait for them to prepare it, and you are already doing groceries anyway, you are exchanging driving and waiting at a Chipotle by cooking things at home. I find the second more enjoyable, but I understand that for people that don't like cooking it might not be the case.

[mplewis]

is this your first time being introduced to the concept of cooking?

[coryrc]

Why is it a sin in America to take advantage of economies of scale for cooking but not for anything else?

[Cyberdog]

Are you someone who has the capability to be constantly making money any time you want to? If not and you just have a normal 9-5 job or something close to it, you have plenty of time to shop for an hour once a week, then spend 10-30 minutes a day making your own lunches and dinners and still come ahead financially -- way, way ahead.

I have no idea where you're coming from with the "dealing with food waste" part so I'll just ignore it.

[IncreasePosts]

Are you someone who has the capability to create extra time in your day? If not and you just have a few hours of free time per day, you can choose to spend some of that free time cooking, or you can let someone else cook for you and use that time on other things you value more than saving $10 or whatever.

The strategy is dependent on what is more precious to you - time, or money. Telling someone they should spend their time to save $10 is pretty pointless if you don't know what their financial situation is and whether that $10 has any meaning.

Food waste is food that you buy which is not ultimately consumed , which increases your cost per meal. This might be trimmings, it might be something you burn, it might be leftovers you don't get to.