chapotraphouse @hexbear.net bubbalu [they/them] @hexbear.net 1 mo. ago

Totally out of steam and was going to use doordash for the first time then I saw how much this shit costed

No way! If you told me in 2008 that a taco bell taco was going to be $3.65 I would have looked at you like you shot my dog.

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US food prices are always wild to me because in mexico you can get 4 tacos for that price and sometimes even more
- Here at actual restaurants it's $1.50-2.50 each. There's this one gas station that makes fancy ones during the day or $1/each after 8 PM though.
- I worked at a fancy place that had a nice taco app for $9, it was 3 tacos, so still a bit cheaper than this and
  
  Big Taco got to them first before they could tell us more
- I can get an absolutely stuffed double corn tortilla "soycurl"(pollo asada style) taco for $3. Stacked full of soycurl, beans, and fajitas. Best deal in town.
  
  Soycurl is basically tvp but not in a "ground beef" texture, closer to shredded or diced chicken. Seasoned up real nice
To be real I've looked at DoorDash or fuckin, Ubereats or whatever once or twice and even getting cheap Wendys delivered would be like thirty bucks at the end of it. Fuck that?
- On top of that, your food is going to be cold and sad.
  
  Jus like me fr fr
  
  And usually missing a bag and at least one drink, if you're ordering for multiple people.
What if cheap fast food took a long time and was expensive?

GROWTH!
$3.65 is.. A lot? It's double that in Australia, easy. I guess that's the privilege of living in the country that runs the empire.
- Looks like that's $5.39 Aus dollars
  
  Not taco bell, because there aren't any in delivery range.
- That's horrifying.
nah at that point im just gonna starve. $3.65 for a soft taco at taco bell? the absolute audacity
- Taco Supreme, which is bourgeois decadence
American food prices make me sad i guarantee that'd be $6 here. Maybe 5.50
- A Taco Bell recently opened near(ish) me. I'll never use it but just checked what it would cost...
  
  The most basic taco possible is $5 but if you add delivery and service fees it's $13 plus tip.
  
  That's the price through delivery Taco Bell's regular menu price is cheaper
I don't know, I'm kind of surprised anyone, especially here, would be shocked by this. In fact, I'm surprised the price is that low! It seems downright cheap to me. If it were just the taco you were ordering yourself at tacobell, I'd think "yeah, that's pretty expensive for a single fuckin taco, but that's just how expensive it is to eat even cheap food now, it really sucks and is wrong." But when you add on to that the food is being delivered to your home? To me $3.65 is ridiculously cheap. It's not just the taco anymore. There's not an insignificant amount of additional labor that someone has to do to get that taco from the place its made to wherever you are, even if you're close.

I've never used doordash. I'm poor enough that buying dry beans in bulk in person at the grocery store strains my food budget. But if someone delivered food to my house, even if it were just a single taco, I would tip them at least double the $3.65.
- That 3.65 isn't going to be including any sort of delivery fee or tip, so, everything you're thinking about the justification for the price based on labor is wrong
- That $3.65 is not the regular in-store menu price. DoorDash charges something like a 30% commission to the restaurant, so the restaurants mark everything up by at least that amount. Then at checkout time, you get nailed with surcharges ("operating fee", etc.), sales tax, and the delivery fee. Even with the default (~10%ish) tip, it usually works out to roughly 35% of your original subtotal (with the commission pricing factored in). That same taco will cost you significantly less at the drive-thru -- looks like it should be $2.79, which is still highway robbery, but yeah. (Also, that's a roughly 30.8% markup.)
- Per my post, I never get delivery for that reason. My thought was that there is a delivery fee on top of whatever the prices from the restaurant is.
  
  Oh, so $3.65 is what you pay for a single taco regardless of whether or not you have it delivered? If so, then yeah, that is
  
  I maintain that if $3.65 is the total for what you pay for a taco delivered to your doorstep, then that is actually cheap. But maybe I'm just misunderstanding something here.
I can get actually good tacos for that much
- sometimes you don't want 'tacos', you want 'taco bell'
  
  do not ask for whom the taco bell tolls, it tolls for thee
You inspired me to look at the menu for our local Taco Bell – even without the DoorDash fees, it's only $0.86 less here in southern Ohio 😐
- lol! I just looked on the website and not through doordash. My buddy lived in Kansas City for a while and they still actually had a dollar menu. Instead of the big mac index, he looked at the taco bell index for cost of living.
yesterday i grabbed a sandwich from a nearby deli in person and it was $4 cheaper than the listed price on doordash! i think everyone also upcharges on these delivery apps too
- They do. I have a pretty good memory for prices (thank you, autism and poverty!), and the delivery app prices are inflated. I have downloaded them a couple times while hanging out with friends who live closer to town, started looking at menus, and then deleted the app and lobbied the group to just order from a place that has its own drivers.
No where had delivery drivers on stsff anymore cause of them too, so now I don't get delivery and if I want crap or not to cook I gotta walk and usually just making something feels easier. Which is probably for the best, but I'm cooking as a job all day and sometimes don't wanna have extra food making after
- Jimmy Johm's still does. I used to work for them doing bike delivery in-house. It was nice I got paid to ride my bike. Since I only did the lunch rush, it worked out to $25/hour with the tips which was really good money for me. Somehow I got really lucky and had only about 2 shifts in the rain.
  
  I bought a frozen dinner for the first time a while ago so I would have something in the house for days like today and completely forgot I had it lol/
  
  Good for them. Where I work does it too, but we're pretty delivery light. Higher end of midrange Italian place that specializes in pizzas so we get a lot of takeout orders for pickup but delivery is only 4 days a week cause that's when we have an extra dude with a car. Delivery drivers do pretty good, a lot better than Ubereats guys and it cost the customer less. Also as a cook, if you were to order through an Ubereats or whatever and we happened to use them, I would see it on the chit and I would make the food worse. It sucks that they've basically monopolized delivery cause it's a scab employment firm with extra steps to hide that fact
A wingstop order I like which usually works out to two full meals costs $20 if I pick it up myself, or $50 if I door dash it, and that's with Door Dash premium which I bought a year of and realized a month later was a terrible idea and the only thing I could do was cut my losses by deleting the app and not using it anymore.
In 90s soft shell tacos were < $1, its wild how expensive fast food / junk food it getting
- To be fair, so was gas for a hot second there
Had to look at what this costs in my country, have never eaten this myself. It's currently 3,95€ (4,3$) so a lot closer than I assumed.

Edit. When I visited AmeriKKKa a little over 10 years ago what blew my mind was how cheap all the food was and how big the portions were.

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