/ck/ - Food & Cooking

[Anonymous No.19313648]

Why did fast food get so expensive relative to other kinds of food? I spend like $25 when I go to Taco Bell just for myself. That's like the same price as eating at Applebee's. On the other hand, I could eat my fill of pizza for $6-10. Back in the day taco bell actually used to be cheap compared to those other places.

[Anonymous No.19313669]

Good. I want this idea that "poor people can't afford to eat healthy food" to collapse under its own absurdity.

[Anonymous No.19313696]

>>19313648
Idiots paying that much for delivery showed companies they could get away with it.
In reality though they cannot and they are quickly going to find that out.

[Anonymous No.19313700]

>>19313696
No one is getting away with anything, that is not how anything works

[Anonymous No.19313765]

>>19313648
A constant need for quarterly profits to be higher and higher
At a certain point you've squeezed your employee and tech and logistic margins as much as they can be squeezed and your only option is to raise prices

[Anonymous No.19313790]

God damn yeah, I went to taco bell earlier, or yesterday, paid $25 for like 3 things. Not thongs, for sure, but things. Black dyke told me to use the kiosk. Cartoon seargant voice. Pizza, taco, drink, maybe burrito, like $25 or something.

[Anonymous No.19313798]

>>19313765
Or maybe yknow it's the inflation

[Anonymous No.19313804]

>>19313648
For now customers are still going out of habits. At some point new entrants with more affordable options and a better service overall will enter the market and attract their customer base. At least that's what economic theory tells us

[Anonymous No.19313880]

>>19313804
This. My local Olive Garden is DEAD. Most locals are going to a local Italian restaurant now and they’re paying the same price or less to eat fresh ingredients and handmade pasta. You can go to Olive Garden for lunch and pay $10 for a child’s portion of fettuccini alfredo using box pasta and likely canned sauce, or go to this local place and pay the same for CHICKEN fettuccini alfredo made with handmade pasta, house-prepared sauce, and the portion is so huge you have enough in your go box for a second meal. Corporations have gotten too greedy now. That shitty Olive Garden used to have a line wrapped around the building.

[Anonymous No.19313921]

>>19313798
It’s not all due to the inflation. Local restaurants are killing the corporate restaurants in my area. What happened was >>19313765 combined with Covid. Everybody was told to shut down and stay the fuck home. Corporate chains who were allowed to stay open (because fuck those filthy little disease-spreading mom and pops) made INSANE profits on delivery, and with a limited menu at that. They want to continue reporting profits to their stockholders and there is no blood left to squeeze except from the paying customer, so every couple of months or so they eliminate more expensive menu items and creep their prices up. I was appalled the last time I glanced at a Taco Bell menu. Seems at least half of what they sell has fucking potatoes in it, there’s no chicken, their salads are gone, and the prices are ridiculous. Classics like bean burritos which consist of rehydrated beans and take 20 seconds to assemble are still pretty cheap but just their basic shitty meat tacos where you have to *gasp!* wash and slice the lettuce are close to $2. They’re closer to $3 if you get one with sour cream and tomatoes. I’m sorry but that’s simply unreasonable.

[Anonymous No.19313926]

>>19313921
>wash and slice the lettuce
hahahaha you fucking wish it all comes in bags

[Anonymous No.19313929]

>>19313926
Ugh. I should have known. So they don’t even have the excuse of labor costs for their taco prices.

[Anonymous No.19313953]

>>19313804
I mean if taco bell was a monopoly trying to raise prices that would happen

>>19313921
What are you implying, that trying to make shareholders profits is self destructive, or that a gold rush kills a company? At any rate the evil corporation theory is nonsense, there is nothing predatory about upping their prices, they put their product on the market like anyone else. A kid charging $5 for cups of lemonade isn’t greedy, he is just a bad businessman.

I don’t like to speak on things I don’t know but there are ideas about the life cycle of a business and contrary to the saying too big to fail rather businesses could get too big to not fail. Lots of stuff has been written on the life cycle of societies/civilizations too, and considering that governments are essentially corporations themselves maintaining a monopoly on varying industries but always the industry of force, it doesn’t seem so far fetched that all companies have to die someday.

I once saw a neat diagram about the evolution of blizzard as a company over time on /v/ which said over time the company bloated with less talented employees while the customer base shrunk, can’t find it now.

[Anonymous No.19313959]

>>19313669
It's more like working your ass off, coming home on Friday evening and deciding for the wrong thing. I was always lucky, I could get a fantastic Buffalo wing meal for less than a tenner. I could just walk in, order a beer and either take it with me or stay. Some days, it was possible to taste they over did the oil.

[Anonymous No.19313982]

>>19313953
If they’re strictly beholden to their shareholders (which they appear to be) then they’re caught in a death spiral. There’s nothing left to trim. They won’t give raises. They’ve cut hours and employees by adding kiosks and incentivizing the use of apps to place orders. They’ve gutted their menus. What other options have they left other than to continue raising prices? They’ve hit a wall on that. There’s one McDonalds that does well in my town, because it’s adjacent to a college campus where land-locked students (no cars) can walk there to spend less on food than Aramark tries to extort from them as captive consumers. Other fast-food restaurants or chains are suffering as well. People who were for a period of time captive consumers unless they learned how to cook are now making their own food at home or going to locally-owned restaurants that are CHEAPER NOW than most fast food. The key selling points of fast food were speed and it was cheap. It is no longer cheap. I’m going to be very interested to see what kind of profits these corporations report in the coming year. I’d like to know if it’s just my town that has people driving by all these places now.

[Anonymous No.19313994]

>>19313982
Yeah, well as fun as it would be to speculate on the future of fast food it is hardly a cop out for inflation. Inflation affects the capital goods market too so all these corporations scamming the consumer would have to be double scamming to keep up with the own scam being ran on them.

[Anonymous No.19313995]

>>19313798
>maybe the problem is causing the problem

[Anonymous No.19313996]

>>19313648
Because they can get away with it, lardass addicts will continue to pay their bottom dollar for their favorite goyslop

[Anonymous No.19313999]

>>19313995
>quarterly profits need to go up because of inflation
Who are you brainlet wojaking

[Anonymous No.19314011]

>>19313929
The prepackaging is the cost. If only people knew how much money can be made if you have good employees and bulk raw product. The balance has to be right, but training dishwashers to prep during downtime and breaking down all of your food in house saves so much cash. Fast food companies can't afford to fuck around with injury and contamination risks, plus the retards they hire aren't capable. When you cost out making mashed potatoes from scratch vs. ready-to-heat-n-serve boil-a-bag, there's no comparison. 5x cheaper with a little skill and labor cost.

[Anonymous No.19314465]

>>19314011
Well when you advertise $18 an hour on your sign, then when people apply go, “Yeah, uh, haha! That’s the uh, top starting, haha! You can work your way up though, haha! Based on your experience you can start today at $8.50, haha!” you’re going to be employing mostly retards, stoners, or people scamming as few work hours as possible to not get kicked off their gibs. Pay shit wages, get shit workers. It’s money down a hole trying to train those kind of employees because of the turnover, and they’ll probably wind up lopping a digit off and suing you to boot. These companies have simply painted themselves into a corner.

[Anonymous No.19314477]

I haven't had fast food in 5 years now. Don't miss a thing.

[Anonymous No.19314481]

>>19313994
Combine inflation with shareholder mandated greed and you got a good recipe for whats happening. One does not exclude the other.
>Well, to keep the same profit we have to raise the price.
>Okay, but what if we raise it a little more than that for EXTRA profits?

[Anonymous No.19314532]

Testing if I'm banned

[Anonymous No.19314880]

>>19313648
well, when an entire generation of retards have grown up being completely incapable of taking care of themselves, the people who have a monopoly on feeding you can raise their prices at will. what are you going to do, learn how to cook? not likely.

[Anonymous No.19314883]

>>19313798
>oey vey goyim its the inflations, line goes up we cant help it :^)

you economically illiterate retard.

[Anonymous No.19315339]

>>19314481
That is pure nonsense, private monopolies and price gouging are not actually possible, it can only be accomplished through government protection from the market. Even every single company joining together into a cartel just doesn’t work, someone always cheats and undercuts under the table. Raising prices is not the only way to raise profits, in fact it should be obvious it isn’t even the best way, if you charge $11 for what your competitor charges $20 for an attract both customers you win. Value is subjective and they can price their fast food however they want, maybe they decide a higher priced product for a smaller clientele is the better business model, this doesn’t explain inflation across the board. Inflation is the only explanation, no corporation wants to raise their prices because raising prices isn’t even greedy it is just a different business model and probably not the best one. What you are suggesting is that capitalism is liable to clam up and not sell anything to anyone because nobody can meet its ridiculous infinite prices, that is definitely not the case.

>>19314883
The inflation is literally the line going up retard, it is the cause of inflation that you absolute mongs are trying to make a debate. Your dollar is just worth less now, that is all there is to it. More dollars now circulate the market to meet the same level of goods (or a less rapidly increasing amount of goods). This is the supposed reason for the existence of a federal reserve, to control the rate at which the currency is printed to keep prices the same as they naturally fall due to increasing production, basically its official reason to exist is to scam you, not just its secret reason to exist.

[Anonymous No.19315407]

>>19314011
The real redpill is that the ones in charge of these companies regardless of industry don’t give a remote fuck about the long term effects of the visibly retarded decisions they make in favor of maximum short term profit to their pockets. They basically run a big pump and dump on the company then bail whenever the cow is near death from how much they milked it, only to do the same to another company.

[Anonymous No.19315547]

>>19315339
In 1971 Nixon took us off the gold standard the dollars value today is 19% of what it was in '71, they are crashing this economy with no survivors except for a small tribe

[Anonymous No.19315624]

>>19315407
If that’s true it isn’t a market failure, and if you insist it is a government failure is met by throwing more money on the fire and is a much worse thing to happen. A business does badly it goes under, a government does badly and it prints money. Also occams razor, the inflation is the main issue. One could even argue it is because this government system of bailouts that this is even happening, failure is incentivized.

>>19315547
1971 is hardly as significant as 1913 with the creation of the fed and income tax. 1971 was just an inevitability, gold standards are worthless, as long as government can print money it will and a gold standard is just a fleeting safety rail slowing them down. All gold standards will eventually fail, we don’t need a gold standard we just need gold with wildcat banking.
Government is not supposed to have anything to do with money. Government did not invent money, the free market did. People will naturally trade their commodities for liquid commodities that can be traded for widely, this creates a reciprocal effect where more people want the liquid commodity which increases the value which makes it more liquid. Over time the market settled on gold and silver as the best forms of money due to various qualities like durability and fungibility.

[Anonymous No.19315674]

Btw on topic with how the free market creates money, the free market also creates hyperinflation by the same process in reverse. Government has no control over hyperinflation, in theory they could print forever without it occurring or it could happen without them printing at all, it could happen if they were burning dollars to try and force deflation even. Hyperinflation occurs when people take the value of money back into their own hands, it is literally a natural revolt against the system. For simplicity’s sake lets observe how hyperinflation happens out of inflation. People see prices going up regularly and decide to start stocking up on things as they are priced now, by doing this they are valuing the goods at a higher price and valuing the money at a lower price, this creates a similar reciprocal effect where the money starts to rapidly lose value causing more people to trade it away making it less valuable and wa la, you get hyperinflation. Hyperinflation is just people no longer saving basically.