It makes sense that dining out is expensive, but it's weird that premade meals in grocery stores are so expensive, and that there's not a super cheap middle ground where they use economies of scale to have 1 person cook cafeteria slop for 100 and sell it for pennies. Is it a food safety thing? Is it that kitchens are available enough that anyone willing to eat that would just make it themselves?
I guess there's labor in portioning or serving, and a lot of labor on the back end for cleanup? It's an interesting problem, because I know that I can make a ton of food way more easily and cheaply than small individual portions, and when I look at breakdowns of restaurant costs, somehow rent isn't an outlier, labor and materials contribute a lot to the costs. But I feel like having already purchased the necessary equipment (or amortizing it across 100,000 meals or whatever) I could feed 100 people with less than $100 at Costco. But you can't go to a restaurant and get something bad for $5 that fills you anymore, not easily. Where's the money all going?
Eating out is just treated as a luxury good in the US. It’s weird because we’re all aware that food can be made inexpensively in a cafeteria. K-12, some universities, even some workplaces have them.
Of course, luxury food is a fine thing to have. The lack of a basic option is weird, though.
> It makes sense that dining out is expensive, but it's weird that premade meals in grocery stores are so expensive, and that there's not a super cheap middle ground where they use economies of scale to have 1 person cook cafeteria slop for 100 and sell it for pennies. Is it a food safety thing?
Most of what currently ails the restaurant sector can be traced to real estate costs. Even if your food and labor are free, real estate kills you as you have to put your restaurant where your customers can get to you.
And the problem is being exacerbated by private equity having piled into commercial real estate. I can point to all manner of restaurant sites that closed up because the rent got jacked up and then were left idle for 5+ years. Standard landlords simply can't eat that level of rent loss. Private equity, however, will take an almost infinite loss in cash flow as long as they can kick the can down the road indefinitely and never have to pay actual cash.
I guess there's labor in portioning or serving, and a lot of labor on the back end for cleanup? It's an interesting problem, because I know that I can make a ton of food way more easily and cheaply than small individual portions, and when I look at breakdowns of restaurant costs, somehow rent isn't an outlier, labor and materials contribute a lot to the costs. But I feel like having already purchased the necessary equipment (or amortizing it across 100,000 meals or whatever) I could feed 100 people with less than $100 at Costco. But you can't go to a restaurant and get something bad for $5 that fills you anymore, not easily. Where's the money all going?