Why Restaurants Are So Fucked

Yea, a döner can be made for far less money.

They're using over-the-top expensive premium ingredients, but if you just use regular supermarket ingredients, you could make a döner for far far less. Let me attempt a prices breakdown:

I'm in the U.S., and the nearby Aldi sells boneless, skinless chicken breasts for $2.49 per pound (a restaurant could probably order in bulk, and get that an even lower price). A pound is 453 grams. There's probably only 100 grams of meat in a döner. So 113g of chicken in a döner should cost around $0.50. (It cost them $2.50, a 5x premium.)

Pre-packaged pita bread (döner wrappers) probably cost far far less than $0.75. I'm not going to analyze, but I'm going to guess it actually costs closer to between $0.05 and $0.10. Then there's the sauce. It too, when bought it bulk, likely costs less than $0.10 per döner.

So that's all to say you can definitely make a good döner in the U.S. for less than $1 per döner in terms of ingredient costs.

In terms of labor cost -- if you pay someone $15/hour, and if they take 1 minute per döner, which is definitely possible if you do things assembly-style, then the labor cost is $0.25 per döner. If you're less efficient, then maybe the labor cost is $0.50 per döner.

So now labor + ingredients is somewhere between $1.25 to $1.50.

Lastly, there's rent/utilities/etc. This totally depends on where you're located, but assumeing you're in a non-super-expensive area, let's guesstimate it costs around $1 total per döner purchased to cover these things.

We've reached a final cost price of $2.50 per döner. I can see how a 3 euro price is totally achievable in Germany.

Food can be cheap in the U.S., even in nice neighborhoods. As an example, I offer "Tara Inn", a tiny old local restaurant in Port Jefferson, NY. (Their menu: https://zmenu.com/tara-inn-port-jefferson-online-menu/) They sell pretty darn good hamburgers for $1.00 each, cheeseburger for $1.50 a piece, a grilled chicken sandwich for $2.00, etc. And the food there is actually good. This, in a neighborhood (North Shore Long Island) where the typical family income is $100k+. (Although the immediate vicinity of Port Jefferson is not considered super-bougey by north shore folks.)

There's another reason why döners can be fairly expensive in the US (even at a places using non-premium ingredients). Turkish cuisine is still somewhat exotic here. The US doesn't have the huge fairly-recent immigrant Turkish population that Germany has, so döners fall under the realm of "exotic mediterranean" foods. Hence their higher-than-typical prices.

You (and me) sound like the target market of Soylent. I don't think it's bad.

If everyone treats nutrients as necessities and dining as treats, reckon over time people will be willing to pay more for dining than they do now, making the whole sector more financially sustainable.

People like us helps uncommoditize dining.

Ah, that's starting to explain the difference here. 5 EUR is approximately 8 CAD.

> it reads as the typical piece from the "bro culture" that massively ignores the rest of the world.

Why should articles need to be generalized to the world? It certainly fits the Canadian and US markets. You can't have comprehensive coverage of everything and everyone in an article.

May I introduce you to the video games industry? While there are good paying jobs out there, I'd risk saying the vast majority of people working in games are hugely underpaid. At my first job I was literally told "yeah the pay is crap, but you get to work on big titles so it's fine". And it's not just demand and supply - we're having a very hard time recruiting for senior positions as there just aren't any candidates around, but the pay is still very poor compared to other industries.