This food was never cheap tbh
The point was convenience - a hot and ready to eat meal that you can grab at any time and don’t have to prepare yourself.
They had a thing called the dollar menu for decades.
During the 90s-2000s, they’d have hamburger Tuesdays where you can buy a hamburger for like $0.29 cents.
They had ads where families would come with “a few bucks” and feed everyone.
I survived on one meal a day at McDonald’s when I was stuck doing day labor in Seattle around the 2002 crash.
Back then it was actually cheap to get enough food to survive on for under 5 bucks. I remember the 20 cheeseburger and hamburger deals they had twice a week.
The price increases to cheeseburgers really hurts, when that was usually my main dollar menu deal.
during that time, you could get whopper or jumbo jack or big 'n tasty, etc. for 99c just about everywhere. 3 bucks was all it took to eat lunch…
even less if you ordered the ‘all american meal’ at mcdonalds: small hamburger or cheeseburger, small fries, small drink. was only $1.79 or $1.89. wasn’t always on the menu board, but i never encountered a store that didn’t sell it even if it wasn’t.
its almost 12 bucks just to get a whopper ‘meal’ here now.
BK around us has the 2 for $6 deal and I’ve found it very useful when we run late and can’t cook. Not dollar menu prices by any means, but most affordable option we’ve found among the fast food joints around us
It used to be cheap. It wasn’t that long ago there was a dollar menu. Now a cheeseburger is $2.79.
You could always make a cheaper burger yourself. Yeah a pack of buns and and pound of burger would cost more, but per burger it was always cheaper.
Time isn’t free.
Saying it’s cheaper to do it yourself is almost always true with cooking. It doesn’t really make sense to bring up because you’re comparing apples to oranges.
In reality, you just want to feel superior to people who eat fast food. Come on, admit it.
I really don’t think you could’ve back in the dollar menu days. A double cheese burger for less than $1? Unless you’re buying you’re ingredients in a pretty bulk size (which if you’re regularly eating off the dollar menu, you probably can’t afford to do), I doubt you could have gotten much better than that
I used to get 3 double cheeseburgers and a large tea for $4.20 including tax. McDonald’s and Little Caesars were by far the cheapest meals I could buy unless you want to count ramen noodle packs. Groceries were way more expensive. Now both are expensive LOL.
You could get a pound of ground beef and a pack of burger buns and I think the one time I did the math it came out to 80 cents a burger.
So $0.80 for a burger or $0.99 for a double cheeseburger. I’ll take the double.
Besides that, if you only had $5 to spend you could not have bought the supplies to make a single burger for $5. Have to buy at least a pound of beef, a whole pack of buns, etc. Even in your example I’d argue fast food was cheaper.
