It’s not healthy, but it’s cheap: a hamburger at McDonald’s — €1.40, if I buy fries with it, €3.50.
3.50€ for a meal isn’t cheap and nothing a poor person can afford on a regular basis. I can cook a great meal for under 2€ that doesn’t consist of trash. What a detached asshole.
Same here in Lithuania. McDonalds is way too expensive for people on a tight budget and what you get for the price is disappointing too. It’s cheaper and more delicious to make some burgers at home (which aren’t so dry that you must wash down every bite with a sip of Coke) or just to get a street kebab (which is slightly more expensive but actually fills you for the entire day and is full of meat and veggies).
The 1,40 burgers are barely enough to satiate a child, even with fries.
A menu that can fill an adult, that’s 13-14€ easily. And that’s still just one meal.
The quality 3 meals a day I consume and make at home average 5€ per portion. resulting in 450€ food budget per person per month, I generally go for white label products if the quality is good enough.
That’s 900€ a month for 2 people for food alone (this was 300ish before COVID).
850-1000€ for entry level 1 bedroom rent here, brings us to 1750-1900€ a month for a roof and food, another 75-100 for electricity (and then you have to be very usage conscious) brings us to 1825-2000€ a month, add required insurance (fire/health/accidents) for another 50-100€ brings us to 1875-2100€ a month.
Now, a phone and internet sub are pretty much a requirement these days, so say the cost of a cheap phone, internet and gsm abbo combine to be another 50€ a month per person.
So we’re at 1975-2200€ a month to cover the very basic living expenses for a 2 person household.
You’d need to have one person with a decent wage or two people working minimum wage to barely get by.
Any surprise or extra cost and you’re in the red.
Eating McDonnalds to cover breakfast, lunch and dinner every day, you’d need over 2000€ for food alone.
The quality 3 meals a day I consume and make at home average 5€ per portion
That’s really very high, are you guessing or did you actually work it out for an average day?
Tbh eating quality food is simply expensive. It’s a thing where i wanna say you could easily save 10€ a day but it’d definitely be less healthy and eating unhealthily is ideally something people shouldn’t be forced to do because they’re poor.
Personally I eat out for lunch whenever I’m in the office (3-4 times a week) for 10€ and I spend less than 15€ on food a day. My regular meals at home are like… noodles with store bought pesto where ~4€ feed me an entire day, or frozen pizza which varies from 1-3.5€ per pizza. Though with some effort i could easily make my own pizzas for a similar (or even less if i make my own dough) price and have them be not unhealthy.
I also find 100€ for electricity to be pretty high (certainly not “very usage conscious”) given that I consume around 80kwh a month, and 2 people shouldn’t just double that since around a quarter is probably my fridge.
If I could afford almost 4 quid per meal I’d be laughing! Think of all the nice food I could eat!
We grow all of our vegetables for most of the year. Potatoes, carrots, leeks, onions, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, beetroot, lots of berries for jams, etc etc. I don’t know how we’d manage without that.
We live in the outskirts of a major city in England, not a stereotypically poor blackwater somewhere. This is how bad things are these days.
As of July 2023, the price of a Big Mac (just the sandwich) in the US is $5.58 (€5.27). https://www.statista.com/statistics/274326/big-mac-in@dex-global-prices-for-a-big-mac/
Exactly. Not only is it not cheap on a regular basis, but it isn’t even that much food from my experience at the cheaper end of McDonalds.
You’d be far better off cooking your own food if you have the time, but the problem is a lot of these people are so busy working their arses off to stay afloat that they don’t have that time.
Those 1€ (1.40 in Austria apparently) burgers are barely enough to satiate a child, if combined with fries. They are nowhere near enough to feed an adult.
