Restaurant/fastfood chains are preferred over local ones as well. I have no clue why (outside money, but cooking yourself is cheaper and nicer): if I wanted to eat plastic, I could just eat a garbage bag. But it is what it is.
Same goes for wine, beer etc; you fav craftbeer is probably owned by Heineken, while the local brewers are going out of business, even if their beer is far better.
Stimulating local businesses starts with completely cutting out the companies that own everything. People will never do that though for many reasons. It starts with money; without subsidising local companies by the gov, there is no way they can compete.
Edit: as I get downvoted, let me reformulate as I guess it reads different than I meant (not native English). I am curious why she doesn't like; my wife being a brewer has nothing to do with it.
The joke is that he is enjoying local brewers so much that he has gained a lot of weight or has some behavior changes due to increased alcohol intake that bother his wife :)
Cooking for myself costs me more per calorie than fast food, probably even more per meal, especially if I want it to be nicer.
Obviously there are cheaper fast food options than a Big Mac, and I've used average prices which doesn't help you, and I've assumed you're in the US, and I haven't accounted for things like fuel and water, but there's something seriously wrong with the market economics of where you live if fast food is really cheaper than cooking for yourself.
Ofcourse not counting time; counting time makes all cooking crazy costly, but yeah, it does so with a lot of other things as well; actual eating (fastfood or otherwise; why not a nutrients drip next to your computer?), going to the gym, shopping, cleaning, showering, going to the toilet and most people probably did not optimise any of those either.
I think you missed a subtle point though: Cooking takes time and energy, which you should not value at $0, unless you really enjoy cooking, in which case you probably don't eat at McDonald's a lot.
If you're not being paid for your time then the value is $0. Most people on HN are on salaries where the hours we work have no direct impact to what we earn.
I'm not suggesting there's no value in choosing what you should spend your time on, but rather that using some imaginary hourly wage to define it is stupid. There are much better ways to choose how to spend your time than dreaming up a threshold of "things that aren't worth $x/hour" vs "things that are worth $x/hour" because it will always end up being the boring, tiresome jobs that fall below that threshold even if they're actually useful or important.
I know a lot of people who claim they don't have time to cook or clean their houses or do gardening, and use the dollar value of their time as a reason. Most of them seem to have time to watch the latest Netflix shows or play videogames though. For some reason watching Stranger Things is apparently worth $100/hour.
Is it that simple?
When deciding whether to do something myself versus paying somebody else, I factor in the time taken multiplied by the pleasure or displeasure of doing the task myself, probably sometimes multiplied by the probability of the outcome being above or below ideal.
I’d therefore argue that my unpaid time does actually have a dollar value: it’s the amount I’d be willing to pay to not perform a task myself in that time. It’s complicated by the other factors, but a relationship still exists.
Now, if you like cooking, perhaps it is like leisure, perhaps it actually replenishes you. Otherwise, you might as well put a dollar value on it, because you are effectively working overtime.
Another way to look at it is that you're really using dollars as a way to better manage your time. Let's say you work 8 hours a day, but you put in another 2 hours into learning something new, maybe a side business, anything that isn't just leisure. Of course that doesn't translate directly into a salary, but the expected value is not zero dollars.
At some point, the system will run out of suckers who put their lifeblood into a venture rather than a cozy job.
Small businesses struggle because people are too poor to afford anything more than cheap crap at Walmart and McDonalds. We should focus on providing basics to all americans instead of getting upset when the pop-up barbecue ice cream truck doesn't make any money and went under when people's health became more important than someone's life long "dream" to become a barista at their own cafe.
There's always the argument "the town won't be the same if they're gone". That's true, but change isn't bad, it's just different.