Yeah, I was being somewhat facetious by my post.
I’ve always promoted the axiom that a penny saved is MORE than a penny earned, when you account for income and payroll taxes. In other words, if you can easily save an extra $100 per month, that is equivalent to earning slightly MORE than $100 per month before tax to net $100 afterwards.
But there is a cost to cooking at home and eating leftovers, mostly time in cooking and cleaning up afterwards. We shouldn’t ignore that. You are largely paying for convenience and the time saved when you eat out. Otherwise, people wouldn’t do it so often. There is a benefit there which people value.
I agree though on the food quality. Restaurants are businesses, usually operating on a very slim margin. So they have to cut costs wherever they can, and those savings are usually found in buying less-than-premium food quality. I buy fresh, free-range eggs for home use, and the difference in taste and food quality is tremendous. Restaurants buy the factory-produced eggs, probably under less than humane conditions, and they taste much more bland than my store-bought eggs, are far less nutritious, but cost a lot more when prepared for me at a restaurant.
*** But there is a cost to cooking at home and eating leftovers, mostly time in cooking and cleaning up afterwards. We shouldn’t ignore that. You are largely paying for convenience and the time saved when you eat out. Otherwise, people wouldn’t do it so often. There is a benefit there which people value.***
Well, I guess I don’t eat out other than with these friends very often. It usually means getting dressed up with make up on, which I don’t wear around the house every day. I don’t dress up to run to the grocery store either. When I go out, I have to use gas to get there, and then the time involved is in choosing a dish, letting them cook it for me. I usually reserve at least an hour to 1-1/2 hours for eating dinner out (sometimes more), and close to that much if we meet for lunch instead. My meal prep usually takes less than an hour from food prep to serving, though occasionally it takes longer (usually multitasking with another chore if something is baking in the oven). If I make two or three times as much at one time, I freeze those portions and then it’s a quick meal the second and third times.
I don’t think eating out takes much less time than making things myself, including clean up. There are times when the food is good enough to warrant going out, but that’s not usually the case for me. Plus, I get a lot of pleasure from preparing my own dishes. Maybe not every single time, but many times, yes. Cooking is fun, and it’s a great skill to have.
If you’re talking about fast food, that’s pretty repulsive to me, and we only do that when we are on the road and need to stop. We very rarely eat FF otherwise. It’s pretty yucky stuff most of the time. There are a couple of outliers to this, but not many, and none of those “better” places are close to my home. I’m semi rural and there are only a handful of places within a 10 minute drive that I would even consider eating at, and none of them are FF places
There is one place that’s within that 10 minute drive that makes much better fried chicken than pretty much anywhere in the whole country, so they will always get my business when I’m in the mood for that. Other than that one restaurant, I can make the meals more economically and they taste better, too.