I remember endless restaurants in Spain. They cover the ground floors of nearly every block.
The same is true in most Chinese cities. Much of Asia, in fact.
If anything, I think Holland (which I agree, is sparse) is the outlier with less than a normal number of restaurants. I quite like it there, but it is unusual.
sounds like the UK too.
Restaurants in Spain are really, imho, social hubs as opposed to more functional (i.e. places to serve food) restaurants that I remember from the USA.
And Spaniards are very social, so these places do quite well with a minimal of food offerings and some decent drinks, all reasonably priced.
I love(d) it.
ShivaX
3478
Mostly I was just, okay whatever, but then I hit this part:
But Smith and other Postal Service officials also testified that no one at Amazon has been provided keys to access the outgoing mail or, in this case, election ballots. A pro-union Amazon worker told the hearing that he saw security officers working for Amazon opening the mailbox.
I mean it’s one biased person, but that’s also just kind of tossed in the article like it’s nothing.
Sabotai
3480
In The Netherlands going to a restaurant is mostly done for a special occasion or celebration. In my experience, it is also pretty expensive compared to most other countries. Supermarket groceries are on average pretty cheap.
What I still find baffling in the US is that eating out or getting take out food is often cheaper than going to a supermarket, buy ingredients and make a dinner from scratch.
Alstein
3481
It isn’t really, if you’re just willing to make a cheap meal.
That said, sometimes you can hit specials that come really close, like Moe Monday here.
It’s really, really not. I mean, this is just amazingly wrong.
We don’t often talk about how awful Leopold the 2nd was, do we.
Sabotai
3484
Maybe I went to the wrong supermarkets then. But I am someone who makes his regular pasta sauce with white wine and fresh herbs 😜
There are some really expansive Grocery stores out there, sure as Target.
But, you do have Lidl and Aldi in the US, which are usually the cheapest options, but even local super markets, like Giant, Weis, or Food Lion will be cheaper then restaurants (even if you elect to buy fresh herbs, instead of growing them yourself).
Even then, it’s going to be cheaper to buy the ingredients in a supermarket and make it yourself than it would be to get pasta with sauce made with white wine and fresh herbs in a restaurant.
I like the idea of just doing 100% wealth tax over 1 billion dollars. I say we go for it.
This was the case when I lived out in Bellevue, WA for a few years in the early 2000s. Fast food I could eat a meal for $2 (two double cheeseburgers from McDonalds, for example). But shopping at Kroger or Safeway there was really expensive. They didn’t have Aldi there (at least at the time), and everything was so much more expensive. Even the asian grocery store I used to go to that smelled like rotten fish used to have fresh veggies for way more than Aldi had them in the Midwest (I heard Aldi expanded to the west coast since then though).
Yeah, those chains do seem expansive, especially if you don’t have any other stores to compete with them.
We have Giant, Weis and Food Lion, but being in South Central PA, none of them are too expansive, but unless you are good with coupons or store deals all of them will be pricier then our local Aldi.
Used to go to Wegmans when I lived in NJ. Giant store with great Store Brand Options, but pricey.
A McDonalds double cheeseburger contains about 3.6 ounces of ground beef. A pound of ground beef in 2000 averaged $1.63, so the cost of the meat in the burger was about 40 cents. The hamburger bun could be had for less than 10 cents. The cheese and condiments would have been nearly free.
In this particular case, it’s actually unfair to compare apples to apples. (Though I don’t think I could find hamburger buns at Safeway for 10 cents a bun. And I think the ground beef was more expensive too). If you’re going to go to the trouble of cooking for yourself, you’re likely to make something healthier with fresh vegetables, and other ingredients. If all I wanted to do was make my own double cheeseburger same as McD’s, then just the labor of doing so wouldn’t make it worth it. Might as well buy it from them and save myself the time.
And doesn’t McD’s pay far less per unit than you or I?
You can buy the buns for 10 cents a bun at Costco today, so I’m pretty confident they could have been had for that price in a supermarket 20 years ago.
Sure. Fast food exists for convenience, not because it is cheaper than cooking for yourself. And ‘convenience’ isn’t really a strong enough word. It exists to a great extent because of dual-worker families with parents who don’t have the time to deal with preparing meals.
But it is not the case that it is cheaper to eat in restaurants than shop in supermarkets and cook for yourself.
That’s really the key. The average consumer does not have the power to purchase, transport, store, or prepare ingredients at the scale of McDonalds.
