HN Pizza Index: Cost of living by city

While most fast food outlets in America are seen as quick and (relatively) inexpensive food sources, they have been identified as upper- to upper-middle class brands since they first arrived in India. (IIRC, that was mid- to late-90s.)

IMHO, when they arrived the prices quoted on their rate-cards seemed to be directly converted from their parent locations, e.g. the daily-special dollar-sub was priced at INR 50 (roughly equivalent to a dollar) and standard subs were about INR 110 - or about $2. The standard chicken burger was priced at INR 60-ish and a happy meal combo was approx. INR 150 (roughly USD 3-ish back then).

(There isn't an Indian equivalent for the Pizza, so I can't make an adequate comparison here. :( )

Compare this with the ubiquitous "Wada-Pav" - the Indian street-food that is considered to be the equivalent of the burger - which was priced at about INR 5 back then. The Indian equivalent of the sub, i.e. the street-sandwich, would cost about INR 10.

As a kid who grew up in a very middle-class family when I was attending graduate (that's undergrad for you Americans, BTW) college, my weekly allowance/lunch-money was INR 100. With that kind of money, visiting a McDonald's or a Subway was not something we could do on a lark, you see.

Thus, by association and by virtue of their exaggerated price-points, these fast-food chains automatically became elevated to 'elite' levels, i.e. if you could afford to spend ten times the money for something a normal man considered regular fast-food, you had better be earning ten times as much as the normal guy. (I remember feeling quite nervous and kinda intimidated when I walked into a McDonald's outlet for the first time! :D)

Things have changed since then, however.

Some time in the last decade, McDonalds' and KFC realized that with the kind of prices they started out with, they were missing out the largest chunk of their target Indian market - the college-kids. Ever since, they have initiated reduced price menus (smaller burgers for INR 20, daily specials, etc.) for them.

Just for reference, the "Wada-Pav" I spoke about earlier, costs about INR 10 these days while the smaller-burger costs about INR 25. The street-sandwiches are at least INR 25, while a daily-special dollar-sub is about INR 50-ish. Not to forget, the allowances kids get these days have increased significantly, too!

Of course, my perspective in this matter is quite restricted. Do take it with a pinch of salt, please. :)

In the U.S. it's often considered a cheapo mass food for students, but in other countries it can be something of a luxury, exotic and foreign; if the only place to get pizza targets wealthy expats and the spoiled offspring of the rich who want to seem "western," it's not going to be particularly cheap... [and many countries are of course somewhere in the middle]

That doesn't mean the cost of living is actually higher in the latter places, because there are very likely to be far cheaper indigenous foods that occupy roughly the same "position" pizza occupies in the U.S.

The price of something, after all is not just the cost of the ingredients and the labor used to make it, it's determined by what people are willing to pay, and people will often pay for very ephemeral qualities...