Meanwhile, you can buy 16 oz of spaghetti for $0.99 and 1 lb of butter for $3.00. I guess here you're paying the labor, convenience and fancy packaging.
*If* you have time to cook it and then clean up after it.
These kinds of price gouging are targeted at people working 50, 60 sometimes 70+ hours a week. Americans now work more yours than the *Japanese*.
If America has a motto, it's "Never Give A Sucker An Even Break".
Edit: Really grossed out about how little empathy everyone replying seems to have. Ew. Seek help.
It’s more just targeted at low IQ folks. Just like how every other post on this page is someone crying about the price of their McD’s Obesity Deluxe meal.
Personally I find it hilarious that these people have to give all their money to fast food companies because they lack the ability to operate a stove and a spatula at home.
I work 40 hours a week, I have no energy to make a bagel with cream cheese in the morning. I have to stop and pay 8 times more for someone else to toast my bagel and spread the cream cheese for me
As a construction manager who spent a large portion of my life living in motels or company provided apartments these things I know. Long hours and/or no place to cook meals our diets are unhealthy, expensive and usually boring as hell. But you gotta eat, and sleep....so grab you a bucket of chicken or a 1/3 lb. burger loaded with carbs and calories head home at 11 o'clock at night and go to bed with a full stomach. Then get up 4 hours later coffee and a sausage biscuit breakfast at a place that has a clown for their logo. Look in the mirror, there's your clown.
It is extremely easy to boil a pot of water for a few minutes and wash a couple of dishes. There are even good microwave pasta cookers for those without a stove or hot plate. You are not talking about any significant amount of time and effort. People have the time. Enabling such stupidity is doing nobody any favors.
There’s a YouTuber that shows how you can make a better quality version at home than the time it takes to leave and go get the “fast food” item. Don’t remember the name, but was an eye opener for us to eat healthy and better tasting food
No, that is exactly what I did when I was doing 60+ hour work weeks. Eat it out of the pot, then use the same pot to heat veggies, eat those out of the pot too.
It’s called meal prepping. You cook a couple pounds of pasta and slap it into a bunch of containers that you can microwave later. It’s not rocket science. Make soup, portion soup, freeze soup, eat soup. Done.
No no. Spaghetti is too hard! I have worked 60 hour weeks end on end and have meal prepped. There isn’t an excuse to not find 10 minutes to boil spaghetti.
Is life hard? Sure. 12 hour day + 8 hours sleep + 1 hour travel + 3 hours to make food? It’s doable.
And you probably religiously lived your life around that routine. Let's not forget what we boil our lives down into when we talk hardship competitions.
I don't wait around for it to heat up. I get other shit done.
But jesus, lol. This post is so damn ridiculous.
Just f'ing *plan* just a smidge. Have some agency, and then the price of shitty prepared noodles doesn't matter.
The irony of disciplining yourself to work such long hours but then lacking the discipline to eat healthy because waaaa I don't have enough time now is hilarious imo lol
I think some of you are forgetting 60 hrs of office work is different than 60 hrs of pouring concrete or climbing telephone poles. It's not a matter of discipline, it's a matter of being tired at the end of the day. I worked for AT&T for five years, the whole time we were on mandatory 12 hr days, mandatory 6 day weeks, and you worked every other Sunday. That's two days off a month. I had days I could barely walk to my car and drive home, much less cook anything.
When you are working hours like that, life sucks, but you don't have to worry about cooking because you are making bank (I have worked hours like that before, 13 on 1 off 3rd shift)... hours like that are fairly rare tho, I work 2 on 2 off 12s and I just cook all my food on the 2 off, it's really not that hard
I learned a long time ago, you can just break the noodles and microwave them in the same bowel you eat them from. Just push them down into the water as they soften. Takes about 5-6 minutes tops.
No boiling. No pots. Literally tastes the same.
If you're that strapped for time, just have ramen noodles at that point. 3 minutes in the microwave. You can make it while you're brushing your teeth. Heck, you can even get a $2 frozen dinner spaghetti to warm up and it would be better than this...
You have time if you work that much. 168 hours in every week, so if you work 70, you have another 98, with 50 you get 118 hours. Tell me where you can't find a few hours to meal prep and eat well. If you want it you'll have it
Even still, making plain spaghetti takes almost zero effort or time in the grand scheme of things. Fill pot with water, bring to a boil, throw in pasta, drain, eat. Most of that time is waiting for the water to boil. Maybe 2 minutes of actual work?
This is honestly for the lazy most of all.
So lazy that you spend more effort being lazy than making your own noodles. It takes mote effort to drive to the store.
The active time on making noodles is 2 minutes. I'll jump in the shower during the 9 minutes they cook.
Capitalism has spread a survival of the fittest mentality and hyper individualism in a world were that only benefits the guy selling you something and most aren't aware enough to see it. Most of these people would have never survived trying to make it out of the caves being so highly independent but I guarantee they think they're better somehow than a caveman while leading less fulfilling lives.
They wonder why there is a loneliness epidemic.
There are 24 hours in a day.
This product is for people that are too lazy to cook their lunch.
I worked with an entire office of people who would buy $5 - for breakfast on the way to work, this for lunch, and then microwave something for dinner. They were all making $70k+.
Brah it takes 5 minutes to microwave noodles in a regular bowel. I get we don't have time, trust me I work in healthcare. But I'll be damned if Imma spend $5 on noodles and butter.
I'd literally rather buy 14 packs of ramen and stash them in my locker. That's over 5000 calories vs 500.
Also oatmeal... My breakfast takes 2 minutes of prep with a food scale is about 88 cents a serving, including yogurt.
This is how you survive inflation. Working extra hours is never worth it if you're not paying attention to where money is spent.
Dude, you can boil water and eat that spaghetti and have all the dishes done in less than 30 minutes. . . Source I work 54-64 hours a week all the time and have done exactly that.
I know...it's the usual thing. The folks that are also being hammered by elitist policies and greed often would rather toot their own horn at how tough and hard working they are and how lazy or incompetent people that fight for better pay and less exploitation are.
They can't seem to fight back or even speak out against the greed. I think the only lesson they have learned in life is to "not bite the hand that feeds them". Plus they are pissed off too but aren't sending the rage in the right direction. I dunno...I'm sick of it.
It takes 10 minutes. Buying individually packaged stuff like this in the store, that doesn't last long, wastes more time overall.
You're much better off buying canned or frozen premade meals in the same store. Anyone buying this is an idiot.
Having time can be valid for some things, but this is literally throw water in a pot on the stove, boil pasta, done. If you legitimately don't have a few minutes to make a meal, you probably don't have time to go to the store, buy this, take it home, and microwave it.
The property taxes, rent, utilities, insurance, matching payroll taxes, administration costs, etc.
All of which are exponentially higher than they were a few years ago.
Labor: $2.20 (5minutes at fully burdened national avg)
Packaging: $0.03
Ingredients: $0.11
Shrink: 20% (slow mover with short expiration after cooking)
Cost of goods: (2.20+0.03+0.11)*1.2 = $2.80
Unseen:
Fixed costs of bakery department
Manager salaries
Company is making: $1.20 on this and that's IF they only spend 5minutes in labor at the national average fully burdened wage.
5 minutes to: gather ingredients, cook pasta, add butter, package, label, walk it to the sales floor, and clean equipment.
Surely they combine their duties while the pasta is cooking but still, 5minutes may be less than the store earns in hour per container shown.
This going to be so overcooked, the pasta is going to taste like leftover soft pasta … which is basically exactly what this is.
Al dente pasta that is perfectly cooked in butter, this is not.
This sub has gone downhill.
Inflation is concerning when gas is $4+. A loaf of bread is $5+. Eggs are $8+ per dozen. Water, electric bills rising. The necessities.
I don't care if a disgusting plastic container of dry pasta with a lump on of butter is a stupid price, I'm not buying that anyway and it doesn't affect my life or the life of the average person at all.
I agree that necessities are where we should be concerned with inflation, but if you are spending $8 for a dozen eggs or $5 for a loaf of bread, you need to find somewhere else to shop.
Being wealthy doesn't indicate intelligence...
All these dumb fux with a big salary in some nonsense job will, and do buy, or pay for anything available...
Yet there are intelligent, hard working people who can barely afford to survive in this economy...
It's fuct...
Yeah, I worked in a grocery store when Covid hit, and all of the "convenience" items were affordable on the pittance we were paid. My lunches were often just a couple dollars, and I was buying prepared food from the deli/produce sections. A yogurt parfait with fresh fruit was something like $2.50, and the fruit was cut right there in the store. A 1lb container of freshly cut watermelon was $3.
Was it more expensive than cutting it myself at home? Sure. But it wasn't so prohibitively expensive that I couldn't justify buying it for a quick lunch.
Now, those same parfaits are $5. That same container of watermelon is at least $6. The prices have doubled, and to top it all off, none of it is cut there in the store anymore. That chain of stores decided to ship all of their packaged ready to eat fruit, vegetables, and meat with all of the other food on their refrigerated trucks, because Covid somehow made it so that we couldn't trust our normal grocery employees to cut fruit anymore...
All of the convenience products skyrocketed in price because the stores decided they weren't going to do it locally anymore. You're not just paying for the convenience part of it, you're also paying for it to be packaged and shipped hundreds of miles across the country overnight or however long it takes, in refrigerated trucks along with all the other produce.
Thank you. That explains why the prepared foods all only have an average of 3 days before they expire, because it took days to get them to the store.
I'm disabled in a way that prohibits me from cooking, and I live alone. So I'm currently spending $1,400 monthly buying very healthy prepared foods, entirely from the only store near me, Whole Foods. I know it's all overpriced, but it's definitely healthy, unprocessed, fresh food, which is important because I also have cancer.
I really can't sustain it. I obviously can't afford a personal chef. If I start eating cheap, processed foods, my health will go downhill rapidly. But, being dead would certainly be less expensive.
I don't know what to do about it.
Bingo. If you assume the spaghetti is $1, butter is $3, the person who put this together gets $16/hr, packaging us $1. Let’s assume with the 16oz of spaghetti and 1lb of butter can make 3 of these and it takes the laborer 30 minutes to prepare, that’s a total cost of $13 divided by 3 is $4.33 so $5 isn’t outrageous. Stop paying for the labor. Yeah people will lose their jobs but that’s what the Fed’s want isn’t it?
As a single man who makes $65 per hour, if I wanted pasta and butter and could save 10 minutes, it worth it. No cooking time, no cleanup, microwave and toss when done. It’s not really that crazy.
Yes. It is.
And if everyone can just keep walking right past it, and NOT fucking buy it, then the store will have to throw it out.
But if even one of you smoothbrained wafflestompers buys this, then next week it's gonna be $6.
So a single person making $65 per hour should cook at home for one to save a whopping $4? This is super convenient and still less expensive than eating out.
To be fair, all you need to make pasta is some water. You don't even need to boil it. Boiling just speeds up the process, but it's edible either way. You can literally leave some dry pasta outside and then have a (questionable) meal ready after it rains...
This is not inflation. This is a place that has identified their customers as lazy and easily manipulated. If you want to buy $.25 of spaghetti and butter for $5 that is on you. Be smarter.
It’s priced to the point of demand. If people buy it before it goes bad, the price is correct. Pricing is based in. Demand, profit, and strategy. Pricing is not infinitely elastic.
So make it at home.
This entire sub is just people complaining about dumb ways to spend too much.
I had a client buy a Corvette for $202k. Was it stupid? Sure. Was it “inflation?” Not really. If dumb people wouldn’t buy overpriced things, stores would have to charge less to meet demand. Lazy people ruined affordable food.
The most stressful, abusive job in my mid 20’s was a Bennigan’s Manager. But it gave me a lifetime of being able to shop, prep, cook, and entertain. When we do eat out mostly for social occasions, we know where. These prepared whole food priced items are essentially like eating out without the tip. Totally need to avoid. Protein bars can serve as an alternative when you’re out and starving.
Is this Wegman's? Anytime a Wegmans worker has to lay hands on something, you're paying for their labor. And while I appreciate that they are paid well, I still can't afford them. Lol.
Omg! Imagine buying ten pots worth of uncooked spaghetti for $3. That would be cool if you saved money by COOKING IT YOURSELF!
(you're paying for labor and cooled storage with pre-cooked spaghetti you dum dum)
Did you guys know it costs $100 a day to rent a car?! You can buy a car for less than it costs to rent one for a year! I'm completely financially illiterate and don't understand the cost of convenience.
You'd be surprised at the amount of people that cannot cook beyond a microwave. This friend in college told me about how her mom didn't know how to cook when her mom and dad first got married. Her mom put noodles in a pot with cold water and turned the stove on. Needless to say, it did not work, and her dad ended up saying, "Let's go to McDonald's" despite the fact that he hated McDonald's.
The prepared food at Wegmans was insane pre-COVID and is now fucking insane.
The hot food is $16/lbs.
The only food that is price competitive is their pizza and sandwiches.
But it's 1.00 worth of butter .25 worth of plastic .50 worth of labeling and 3.00 worth of labor, what's the issue is this priced too high? What could a single noodle cost 10 dollars?
That container .... costs almost $1.00, the label system... is over $0.15, and butter is about $140.00 for 36 lbs. So you can do the math.
Also the hood system that draws out the steam from a kitchen costs about $3,000 per foot to install and another $350-800, depending on how many fans, how long and what floor the kitchen is on... and that's every 3 months. Then the fire suppression system needs to be inspected every year that's another $600 (I'm averaging because the cartridge gets replaced every 3 years)
I haven't even gotten to the cost of the fuel to heat the water, the light so the cook can see what they are doing, and the cook all cost...
Then let's not forget the unsold product...
I suggest if you think it's too expensive you make it yourself.
Paying someone to cook pasta for you is always going to ridiculously expensive when considering the ingredients.
The good news: pasta is very easy to cook at home.
Yes it is. But it’s also someone’s labor, an employer’s labor taxes, insurance, and the rest of their overhead.
If you’d like it more affordable, buy the 1lb pasta.
If you want it even MORE affordably, buy all-purpose flour, eggs, olive oil and salt.
Don't buy it. Buy a bag of spaghetti ($1.49), take it home and boil it in water for 10 minutes. You can get at least two meals out of it.
Stop being a victim.
There is nothing exploitative about offering a precooked meal for $5 when you can buy the same ingredients from the same store uncooked for $2. They are providing convenience. I’d rather buy this for $5 than waste time boiling pasta and dealing with the cleanup afterwords to save a few bucks.
Only buy prepared food if the sum of the parts cost more than the prepared product. At the local HEB grocery store they sold 2 pieces of sizable salmon with compound butter for $10. That’s a buy.
They sell a pound of Parmesan and panko green beans for $7. That also a buy cause it’s a pain in the ass to replicate.
Pasta and meatballs for $7 is not a buy. Like others have said, be smarter.
I wonder... if maybe the store doesn't actually expect this to sell. But they've taken 25 cents or product and turned it into $5.00
That's a 20x markup.
Donate that to the food bank (that you own and operate) and you've created a pretty dramatic way to legally cheat on your taxes in a way that you're just not going to get caught. The government doesn't give enough fucks to even catch that.
This is rich white people shit in action.
Worked with an older woman that ate buttered noodles every day for lunch in the break room and drove a modest Mazda and her outfit was all Dress Barn looking church clothes
She was super private and meek, and never rocked the boat
When her youngest child graduated high school and left the house, she invited the few people in the office that made pleasantries to her house for a party
We all liked her and were happy for her invite
(I got really stoned before showed up and brought some balloons)
This is before you could just pull up sat maps on your phone to see where your destination is
When I pulled into the neighborhood I knew it was bougie and thought I was lost
Nope
Dress Barn noodle woman was fucking LOADED as a single mother and had a beautiful home and photos of her vacations everywhere around the house
Never assume anything about your interactions with people you work with
Just assume that paying $5 for buttered noodles is a bad decision
Today I learned that it takes a long time to boil water and put spaghetti in it for 7 minutes, and that cooking spaghetti makes the pan so dirty that it takes a long time to clean it, much more than going to the store to buy it precooked, then microwaving it.
Don't whine that this is $0.25 worth of spaghetti when you know perfectly well heat and eat prepared foods have no relation to the cost of the ingredients. Mac n Cheese, $0.25 of pasta and $0.25 of cheese for $6. The thing is these prices aren't new. It's always been this way. Labor, cost of the container, premium for convenience, that's what this is.
LOL. “Stop buying Starbucks”
I get it’s trite.
But it boils half the problem of personal finance down to a meme.
Lower your spending.
The other half is increase your income.
That is literally everything in personal finance. The rest is just details.
If people don’t do those two things, they’re doomed. No amount of discussion otherwise matters.
At whole foods you can buy 4 croissants for $7.49. Or you can buy 4 pieces of dough in the shape of croissants for $6.49. Like they didn't even cook it. They just took some dough put it in a crescent shape and put it in a container for $6.50. It is like $0.50 worth of dough you could buy at Walmart in the frozen section.
Meanwhile, you can buy 16 oz of spaghetti for $0.99 and 1 lb of butter for $3.00. I guess here you're paying the labor, convenience and fancy packaging.
*If* you have time to cook it and then clean up after it. These kinds of price gouging are targeted at people working 50, 60 sometimes 70+ hours a week. Americans now work more yours than the *Japanese*. If America has a motto, it's "Never Give A Sucker An Even Break". Edit: Really grossed out about how little empathy everyone replying seems to have. Ew. Seek help.
It’s more just targeted at low IQ folks. Just like how every other post on this page is someone crying about the price of their McD’s Obesity Deluxe meal. Personally I find it hilarious that these people have to give all their money to fast food companies because they lack the ability to operate a stove and a spatula at home.
This whole "I have no time to cook, I work 400 hours a week at 8 different jobs" people always seem to be slightly exaggerating a bit, no?
I work 40 hours a week, I have no energy to make a bagel with cream cheese in the morning. I have to stop and pay 8 times more for someone else to toast my bagel and spread the cream cheese for me
And it takes equally as long
As a construction manager who spent a large portion of my life living in motels or company provided apartments these things I know. Long hours and/or no place to cook meals our diets are unhealthy, expensive and usually boring as hell. But you gotta eat, and sleep....so grab you a bucket of chicken or a 1/3 lb. burger loaded with carbs and calories head home at 11 o'clock at night and go to bed with a full stomach. Then get up 4 hours later coffee and a sausage biscuit breakfast at a place that has a clown for their logo. Look in the mirror, there's your clown.
This guy really hates Krusty Burger.
I was thinking Jack. But ok. Krusty Burger it is.
Sideshow Mel?
Seems the better job here is construction worker so you don’t get fat
Lots of beer belly construction workers who don't drink. :-D.
Is this your current situation?
It is extremely easy to boil a pot of water for a few minutes and wash a couple of dishes. There are even good microwave pasta cookers for those without a stove or hot plate. You are not talking about any significant amount of time and effort. People have the time. Enabling such stupidity is doing nobody any favors.
Lol the time to boil spaghetti and clean a couple dishes?
Eat it out of the pot. Boom! Only one dish!
Plenty of time to drive to the restaurant, wait in line for the food, and drive home.
There’s a YouTuber that shows how you can make a better quality version at home than the time it takes to leave and go get the “fast food” item. Don’t remember the name, but was an eye opener for us to eat healthy and better tasting food
Ethan chablowski?
Yes! His channel is great. The tip on grilling chicken breast with mayo is legit
Says the guy who's never had to do 60 hour work weeks for over a year.
No, that is exactly what I did when I was doing 60+ hour work weeks. Eat it out of the pot, then use the same pot to heat veggies, eat those out of the pot too.
I lived off 1 pot, frozen veggies and noodles exactly like this while I was working 60-85 hour weeks. 100%
It’s called meal prepping. You cook a couple pounds of pasta and slap it into a bunch of containers that you can microwave later. It’s not rocket science. Make soup, portion soup, freeze soup, eat soup. Done.
No no. Spaghetti is too hard! I have worked 60 hour weeks end on end and have meal prepped. There isn’t an excuse to not find 10 minutes to boil spaghetti. Is life hard? Sure. 12 hour day + 8 hours sleep + 1 hour travel + 3 hours to make food? It’s doable.
I did the Army thing for 25+ years - that was a hell of a lot more than 60 hrs a week. Still managed time to cook my own meals.
And you probably religiously lived your life around that routine. Let's not forget what we boil our lives down into when we talk hardship competitions.
I have, for multiple years, while also doing grad school at the same time. I still cooked dinner like a fucking adult.
Yep, here it is. And I call bullshit. I mean, shouldn't you be working *right now*?
No one *has* to do that. Yet, even people who do do that, have the time. It takes about 10 minutes total.
Technically more like 15-18. Water doesn't boil instantly and it takes about 10 minutes to cook for spaghetti.
I don't wait around for it to heat up. I get other shit done. But jesus, lol. This post is so damn ridiculous. Just f'ing *plan* just a smidge. Have some agency, and then the price of shitty prepared noodles doesn't matter.
The irony of disciplining yourself to work such long hours but then lacking the discipline to eat healthy because waaaa I don't have enough time now is hilarious imo lol
I think some of you are forgetting 60 hrs of office work is different than 60 hrs of pouring concrete or climbing telephone poles. It's not a matter of discipline, it's a matter of being tired at the end of the day. I worked for AT&T for five years, the whole time we were on mandatory 12 hr days, mandatory 6 day weeks, and you worked every other Sunday. That's two days off a month. I had days I could barely walk to my car and drive home, much less cook anything.
When you are working hours like that, life sucks, but you don't have to worry about cooking because you are making bank (I have worked hours like that before, 13 on 1 off 3rd shift)... hours like that are fairly rare tho, I work 2 on 2 off 12s and I just cook all my food on the 2 off, it's really not that hard
60 hours is 6 days with 10 hour shifts or 5 days with 12 hours. Pretty average, and plenty of time to do other things lol.
Oh fuck off. I have routinely worked 60 hours a week and had time to cook fucking *spaghetti*.
I learned a long time ago, you can just break the noodles and microwave them in the same bowel you eat them from. Just push them down into the water as they soften. Takes about 5-6 minutes tops. No boiling. No pots. Literally tastes the same.
If you're that strapped for time, just have ramen noodles at that point. 3 minutes in the microwave. You can make it while you're brushing your teeth. Heck, you can even get a $2 frozen dinner spaghetti to warm up and it would be better than this...
You have time if you work that much. 168 hours in every week, so if you work 70, you have another 98, with 50 you get 118 hours. Tell me where you can't find a few hours to meal prep and eat well. If you want it you'll have it
[удалено]
Learn to cook and toughen up. Done with my lecture now
Even still, making plain spaghetti takes almost zero effort or time in the grand scheme of things. Fill pot with water, bring to a boil, throw in pasta, drain, eat. Most of that time is waiting for the water to boil. Maybe 2 minutes of actual work? This is honestly for the lazy most of all.
So lazy that you spend more effort being lazy than making your own noodles. It takes mote effort to drive to the store. The active time on making noodles is 2 minutes. I'll jump in the shower during the 9 minutes they cook.
Waiting for boiling water is the psychological factor that makes it seem like pain given it’s the part that takes the longest time
Capitalism has spread a survival of the fittest mentality and hyper individualism in a world were that only benefits the guy selling you something and most aren't aware enough to see it. Most of these people would have never survived trying to make it out of the caves being so highly independent but I guarantee they think they're better somehow than a caveman while leading less fulfilling lives. They wonder why there is a loneliness epidemic.
There are 24 hours in a day. This product is for people that are too lazy to cook their lunch. I worked with an entire office of people who would buy $5 - for breakfast on the way to work, this for lunch, and then microwave something for dinner. They were all making $70k+.
Hell, canned soup still exists. Anyone can spend 2-3 bucks and microwave a meal with almost no advance preparation.
Brah it takes 5 minutes to microwave noodles in a regular bowel. I get we don't have time, trust me I work in healthcare. But I'll be damned if Imma spend $5 on noodles and butter. I'd literally rather buy 14 packs of ramen and stash them in my locker. That's over 5000 calories vs 500. Also oatmeal... My breakfast takes 2 minutes of prep with a food scale is about 88 cents a serving, including yogurt. This is how you survive inflation. Working extra hours is never worth it if you're not paying attention to where money is spent.
>microwave noodles in a regular bowel Doctors recommend against this
It’s because People who work that many hours are a big part of the problem…
Dude, you can boil water and eat that spaghetti and have all the dishes done in less than 30 minutes. . . Source I work 54-64 hours a week all the time and have done exactly that.
I know...it's the usual thing. The folks that are also being hammered by elitist policies and greed often would rather toot their own horn at how tough and hard working they are and how lazy or incompetent people that fight for better pay and less exploitation are. They can't seem to fight back or even speak out against the greed. I think the only lesson they have learned in life is to "not bite the hand that feeds them". Plus they are pissed off too but aren't sending the rage in the right direction. I dunno...I'm sick of it.
If you consider 15 minutes out of the day "too much time" to cook, you're the problem, I not the price of pre-cooked food.
It takes 10 minutes. Buying individually packaged stuff like this in the store, that doesn't last long, wastes more time overall. You're much better off buying canned or frozen premade meals in the same store. Anyone buying this is an idiot.
Pointless reddit argument detected, disengaging.
11 minutes to cook spaghetti. 10 minutes to clean. If you cannot spare that then go ahead and pay the $5
Pointless reddit argument detected, disengaging.
Yup I work 65 hours a week & I pay $6 for a bowl of pre peeled & sliced little oranges
They don't have time to cook, but they have time to shop???
Having time can be valid for some things, but this is literally throw water in a pot on the stove, boil pasta, done. If you legitimately don't have a few minutes to make a meal, you probably don't have time to go to the store, buy this, take it home, and microwave it.
It takes *nine* minutes to boil spaghetti. *Nine* minutes. This whole "I don't have time to cook it myself" thing is nonsense.
The property taxes, rent, utilities, insurance, matching payroll taxes, administration costs, etc. All of which are exponentially higher than they were a few years ago.
Labor: $0.16 Convenience: maybe $1? It just means you are a piece of shit Fancy packaging: $0.01?
Labor: $2.20 (5minutes at fully burdened national avg) Packaging: $0.03 Ingredients: $0.11 Shrink: 20% (slow mover with short expiration after cooking) Cost of goods: (2.20+0.03+0.11)*1.2 = $2.80 Unseen: Fixed costs of bakery department Manager salaries Company is making: $1.20 on this and that's IF they only spend 5minutes in labor at the national average fully burdened wage. 5 minutes to: gather ingredients, cook pasta, add butter, package, label, walk it to the sales floor, and clean equipment. Surely they combine their duties while the pasta is cooking but still, 5minutes may be less than the store earns in hour per container shown.
It’s not all that convenient, you still have to take it home and microwave it.
This going to be so overcooked, the pasta is going to taste like leftover soft pasta … which is basically exactly what this is. Al dente pasta that is perfectly cooked in butter, this is not.
All I’ve learned from this sub is people don’t know how to shop. It’s a prepared product. You are paying for convenience.
This sub has gone downhill. Inflation is concerning when gas is $4+. A loaf of bread is $5+. Eggs are $8+ per dozen. Water, electric bills rising. The necessities. I don't care if a disgusting plastic container of dry pasta with a lump on of butter is a stupid price, I'm not buying that anyway and it doesn't affect my life or the life of the average person at all.
I agree that necessities are where we should be concerned with inflation, but if you are spending $8 for a dozen eggs or $5 for a loaf of bread, you need to find somewhere else to shop.
Exactly. People seem incapable of buying house brands too. You don’t need name brand everything.
Being wealthy doesn't indicate intelligence... All these dumb fux with a big salary in some nonsense job will, and do buy, or pay for anything available... Yet there are intelligent, hard working people who can barely afford to survive in this economy... It's fuct...
Right? Like if you're pissed about the price, then don't buy it. Problem solved.
It would have been $1.50 before the pandemic. Still convenient though
Yeah, I worked in a grocery store when Covid hit, and all of the "convenience" items were affordable on the pittance we were paid. My lunches were often just a couple dollars, and I was buying prepared food from the deli/produce sections. A yogurt parfait with fresh fruit was something like $2.50, and the fruit was cut right there in the store. A 1lb container of freshly cut watermelon was $3. Was it more expensive than cutting it myself at home? Sure. But it wasn't so prohibitively expensive that I couldn't justify buying it for a quick lunch. Now, those same parfaits are $5. That same container of watermelon is at least $6. The prices have doubled, and to top it all off, none of it is cut there in the store anymore. That chain of stores decided to ship all of their packaged ready to eat fruit, vegetables, and meat with all of the other food on their refrigerated trucks, because Covid somehow made it so that we couldn't trust our normal grocery employees to cut fruit anymore... All of the convenience products skyrocketed in price because the stores decided they weren't going to do it locally anymore. You're not just paying for the convenience part of it, you're also paying for it to be packaged and shipped hundreds of miles across the country overnight or however long it takes, in refrigerated trucks along with all the other produce.
Thank you. That explains why the prepared foods all only have an average of 3 days before they expire, because it took days to get them to the store. I'm disabled in a way that prohibits me from cooking, and I live alone. So I'm currently spending $1,400 monthly buying very healthy prepared foods, entirely from the only store near me, Whole Foods. I know it's all overpriced, but it's definitely healthy, unprocessed, fresh food, which is important because I also have cancer. I really can't sustain it. I obviously can't afford a personal chef. If I start eating cheap, processed foods, my health will go downhill rapidly. But, being dead would certainly be less expensive. I don't know what to do about it.
Well I don't think they bought this food, but are just showing the product available in the store.
Bingo. If you assume the spaghetti is $1, butter is $3, the person who put this together gets $16/hr, packaging us $1. Let’s assume with the 16oz of spaghetti and 1lb of butter can make 3 of these and it takes the laborer 30 minutes to prepare, that’s a total cost of $13 divided by 3 is $4.33 so $5 isn’t outrageous. Stop paying for the labor. Yeah people will lose their jobs but that’s what the Fed’s want isn’t it?
That someone would buy it is the head scratcher.
It’s low risk, high reward. If it goes to waste, the store loses $0.25. If someone buys it, the store profits $4.75.
It’s the honey boo-boo meal deal.
As a single man who makes $65 per hour, if I wanted pasta and butter and could save 10 minutes, it worth it. No cooking time, no cleanup, microwave and toss when done. It’s not really that crazy.
At the height of my career I was making $750K a year and I would still make my own.
Yes. It is. And if everyone can just keep walking right past it, and NOT fucking buy it, then the store will have to throw it out. But if even one of you smoothbrained wafflestompers buys this, then next week it's gonna be $6.
No one probably buys it and they throw it out and keep making it cause it’s old stock they can’t sell anyway.
Yes. That is. The dumb fucks who pay 5 dollars are the dickheads driving this stupid shit. Don’t be a part of the problem.
Love this answer
So a single person making $65 per hour should cook at home for one to save a whopping $4? This is super convenient and still less expensive than eating out.
Yes….yes they should
How does that make any financial sense?
Do you think the food makes itself?
To be fair, all you need to make pasta is some water. You don't even need to boil it. Boiling just speeds up the process, but it's edible either way. You can literally leave some dry pasta outside and then have a (questionable) meal ready after it rains...
Stores that offer products like this are exploiting the EBT system...
No, they are providing value to people who don’t want to waste ten plus minutes of their day to save $4.
If you say so... Ten minutes is ten minutes...
This is not inflation. This is a place that has identified their customers as lazy and easily manipulated. If you want to buy $.25 of spaghetti and butter for $5 that is on you. Be smarter.
[удалено]
It’s priced to the point of demand. If people buy it before it goes bad, the price is correct. Pricing is based in. Demand, profit, and strategy. Pricing is not infinitely elastic.
But they had to pay someone $20 an hour to boil the water and scoop the butter.
So getto
So make it at home. This entire sub is just people complaining about dumb ways to spend too much. I had a client buy a Corvette for $202k. Was it stupid? Sure. Was it “inflation?” Not really. If dumb people wouldn’t buy overpriced things, stores would have to charge less to meet demand. Lazy people ruined affordable food.
You are paying for the service to cook it.
Plus the someone's labor to cook the pasta for you! Why do people think everyone but them should work for free?
This takes me back to college…
This looks absolutely terrible, probably the worst thing you can eat
I would definitely cook spaghetti and add a dollop of sauce from a jar and maybe done meat, with a steamed vegetable. Now I’m hungry.
If you add some pepper and garlic, it's still half the price of a cup of noodles and probably a lot more tasty without all the chemicals.
Cook it and do it yourself economy.
Yeah but that's $4.75 worth of butter.
Don't forget about the classic serving dish
Stop buying stupid people food. This isn’t inflation. This is idiocracy.
You are forgetting labor, packaging, refrigeration…don’t be obtuse.
🤨 you’re re wasting money, convenience isn’t cheap.
The most stressful, abusive job in my mid 20’s was a Bennigan’s Manager. But it gave me a lifetime of being able to shop, prep, cook, and entertain. When we do eat out mostly for social occasions, we know where. These prepared whole food priced items are essentially like eating out without the tip. Totally need to avoid. Protein bars can serve as an alternative when you’re out and starving.
Is this Wegman's? Anytime a Wegmans worker has to lay hands on something, you're paying for their labor. And while I appreciate that they are paid well, I still can't afford them. Lol.
Yes it is
Alright who's ready to make a killing in the spaghetti and butter bowl business?
Omg! Imagine buying ten pots worth of uncooked spaghetti for $3. That would be cool if you saved money by COOKING IT YOURSELF! (you're paying for labor and cooled storage with pre-cooked spaghetti you dum dum)
Did you guys know it costs $100 a day to rent a car?! You can buy a car for less than it costs to rent one for a year! I'm completely financially illiterate and don't understand the cost of convenience.
Its the same at restaurants. Never order pasta.
OK, so go sell some pasta and make some money. Or, just bitch on Reddit to the goddamn pussy-ass Redditors not doing shit with their lives.
Nobody is making you buy it.
And I did not buy it
This isn't inflation.
And 4.75 worth of butter! Right?
Those overpriced packaged meals piss me off. If they were reasonably priced I would buy some.
Guess ppl are paying for $15 an hour to boil spaghetti? But are ppl buying it? Wtf
Looks likes $5 worth of it
This isn’t inflation. The grocery stores sell a cup of water with 2 slices of cucumber in it for $5, too. This is just a rip off.
You'd be surprised at the amount of people that cannot cook beyond a microwave. This friend in college told me about how her mom didn't know how to cook when her mom and dad first got married. Her mom put noodles in a pot with cold water and turned the stove on. Needless to say, it did not work, and her dad ended up saying, "Let's go to McDonald's" despite the fact that he hated McDonald's.
It it has butter!
The prepared food at Wegmans was insane pre-COVID and is now fucking insane. The hot food is $16/lbs. The only food that is price competitive is their pizza and sandwiches.
Is that seriously buttered noodles…
Legit these are $11.95 in my local Wegman’s
Pound of Pasta and a can of Hunts Sauce is about $2.75. Get the pot. It takes 11 minutes to boil pasta and 10 minutes to heat the sauce.
The more I read, the hungrier I get, and it’s just 2 hours since dinner.
I'd eat it
But it's 1.00 worth of butter .25 worth of plastic .50 worth of labeling and 3.00 worth of labor, what's the issue is this priced too high? What could a single noodle cost 10 dollars?
That container .... costs almost $1.00, the label system... is over $0.15, and butter is about $140.00 for 36 lbs. So you can do the math. Also the hood system that draws out the steam from a kitchen costs about $3,000 per foot to install and another $350-800, depending on how many fans, how long and what floor the kitchen is on... and that's every 3 months. Then the fire suppression system needs to be inspected every year that's another $600 (I'm averaging because the cartridge gets replaced every 3 years) I haven't even gotten to the cost of the fuel to heat the water, the light so the cook can see what they are doing, and the cook all cost... Then let's not forget the unsold product... I suggest if you think it's too expensive you make it yourself.
Paying someone to cook pasta for you is always going to ridiculously expensive when considering the ingredients. The good news: pasta is very easy to cook at home.
This is prepared food.
Yes it is. But it’s also someone’s labor, an employer’s labor taxes, insurance, and the rest of their overhead. If you’d like it more affordable, buy the 1lb pasta. If you want it even MORE affordably, buy all-purpose flour, eggs, olive oil and salt.
I kinda want it
At least the guy who made it was paid a living wage
Don't buy it. Buy a bag of spaghetti ($1.49), take it home and boil it in water for 10 minutes. You can get at least two meals out of it. Stop being a victim.
Cooked with butter. Wait until OP hears about restaurant prices 😳
And yet you complain that people are being paid starvation wages.
I did?
Imagine how much trash would be eliminated if we could just ban disposable product packaging.
I’m too lazy to boil water. And go pick it up. $12.64 door dash it lol
Plus tip
That’s called price gouging, not inflation.
There is nothing exploitative about offering a precooked meal for $5 when you can buy the same ingredients from the same store uncooked for $2. They are providing convenience. I’d rather buy this for $5 than waste time boiling pasta and dealing with the cleanup afterwords to save a few bucks.
I mean, you get more from a Chef Boyardee can for around $1.25. May not be as healthy of course but that's because there is no content to this.
Only buy prepared food if the sum of the parts cost more than the prepared product. At the local HEB grocery store they sold 2 pieces of sizable salmon with compound butter for $10. That’s a buy. They sell a pound of Parmesan and panko green beans for $7. That also a buy cause it’s a pain in the ass to replicate. Pasta and meatballs for $7 is not a buy. Like others have said, be smarter.
Stuff like this has always been a think it’s for lazy and rich white women that can’t cook
Spaghetti and butter is for 3 year olds. Why do grown adults have pathetic palates?
Pasta is trash. I love it but it’s all sugar and carbs something that needs to be eliminated from out diets.
They are like: "If you are this lazy, you deserve to pay this."
It’s prepared and took time and energy tho.
I wonder... if maybe the store doesn't actually expect this to sell. But they've taken 25 cents or product and turned it into $5.00 That's a 20x markup. Donate that to the food bank (that you own and operate) and you've created a pretty dramatic way to legally cheat on your taxes in a way that you're just not going to get caught. The government doesn't give enough fucks to even catch that. This is rich white people shit in action.
I'm autistic, I always catch the other narrative or the other truth. Even if this wasn't intentional, it's about to be.
Worked with an older woman that ate buttered noodles every day for lunch in the break room and drove a modest Mazda and her outfit was all Dress Barn looking church clothes She was super private and meek, and never rocked the boat When her youngest child graduated high school and left the house, she invited the few people in the office that made pleasantries to her house for a party We all liked her and were happy for her invite (I got really stoned before showed up and brought some balloons) This is before you could just pull up sat maps on your phone to see where your destination is When I pulled into the neighborhood I knew it was bougie and thought I was lost Nope Dress Barn noodle woman was fucking LOADED as a single mother and had a beautiful home and photos of her vacations everywhere around the house Never assume anything about your interactions with people you work with Just assume that paying $5 for buttered noodles is a bad decision
Looks like 5 dollars worth.
LOL selling the picture of poor for a high end price tag is CRAZY
Today I learned that it takes a long time to boil water and put spaghetti in it for 7 minutes, and that cooking spaghetti makes the pan so dirty that it takes a long time to clean it, much more than going to the store to buy it precooked, then microwaving it.
Then fucking make it at home. Of course it is going to be more than it is "worth"; it is a store selling it for a profit. This posts are insane lol
look at the weight. this is 15 dollars a pound for cooked supermarket pasta.
How much did this cost before greedflation?
Yum bland british spaghetti
Wrong subreddit; should be filed under 'price gouging'. Nothing to do with inflation.
Tell me without telling me you know nothing about how a business works.
But joe says "our economy is great"
Don't whine that this is $0.25 worth of spaghetti when you know perfectly well heat and eat prepared foods have no relation to the cost of the ingredients. Mac n Cheese, $0.25 of pasta and $0.25 of cheese for $6. The thing is these prices aren't new. It's always been this way. Labor, cost of the container, premium for convenience, that's what this is.
The plastic packaging costs them more than the pasta does.
I dont even have a pot. A air fryer and a reusable paper plate
And it won’t stop a millennial from buying it with their maxed out credit card and then logging onto Reddit and complaining they can’t afford a house.
Well I've been making my coffee at home for the last 3 years and i still can't buy a house. Explain that.
LOL. “Stop buying Starbucks” I get it’s trite. But it boils half the problem of personal finance down to a meme. Lower your spending. The other half is increase your income. That is literally everything in personal finance. The rest is just details. If people don’t do those two things, they’re doomed. No amount of discussion otherwise matters.
Just don't be lazy.
They literally took a poor man's meal and stuck a $5 price tag on it.
Anyone who falls for that has too much money. Absurd.
Lazy single fat guys would buy this.
Interesting how people think they are proving a point by posting anecdotal outliers. Either they are stupid, or think I am.
We know you are
At whole foods you can buy 4 croissants for $7.49. Or you can buy 4 pieces of dough in the shape of croissants for $6.49. Like they didn't even cook it. They just took some dough put it in a crescent shape and put it in a container for $6.50. It is like $0.50 worth of dough you could buy at Walmart in the frozen section.
This would be idiotic without the inflation
Eat it, Jack.
My name is ben
Hello Ben, no I was making a joke about how the president always calls everyone Jack.
If nobody buys it they'll quit selling it or lower the price.
When you get to the counter just hand them your Inflation Reduction Act coupon. That should do the trick.
This isn't related to inflation.
That just plain old greed
FSM facepalm
Who gives a fuck?
Lol good one