I was tempted a couple of times in restaurants with slow service to order a pizza for delivery right to my table.
Customers pointing this out always annoyed me. The “I could make this cheaper at home” is true but they aren’t taking into account payroll, utilities and all the overhead. Plus, the most important item, profit. It’s not a dirty word. Businesses aren’t run to break even.
Yes, it’s my choice to eat at a restaurant. If I wanted a cheaper meal I would have fixed it myself.
I wonder if those people go to an airport and during check-in, gripe about how it would be cheaper to drive.
Yep. If you’re gonna bitch about eating out and the price, what’s the point?
You don’t have to patronize these places.
I certainly don’t want to go where the food is crap.
And I imagine they’ll lose business if it consistently so.
If I get bad food I’ll think twice about the place the next time. There’s 400 other places to go. If you just want take out.
Which is fine.
But …I’m gonna get the best deal I can. Coupons, discounts, Apps.
Nothing tastes better than a free emergency pizza. 
Oh that is so true.
Personally, I’m a sucker for Subway’s meatball sandwiches. Toasted on herb & cheese bread with pepperjack, parmesan, onion, bell pepper, jalapeno, pepperoncini, oregano, and, if I’m in the mood for it, just a wee bit of the new aioli sauce they have. (The ghost pepper bread they have right now also goes really good with the meatball sub).
They’ve pretty much got a lock on that. Jimmy John’s doesn’t even have a meatball sub, Jersey Mike’s got rid of theirs during the pandemic and haven’t brought it back, and I haven’t tried Firehouse’s meatball, but the one time I did eat there did not impress me.
I admit the same; I ate at a Firehouse once when I was in Eugene, Oregon and was underwhelmed.
But… I think I just picked a boring sandwich and I’m up to trying it again someday.
You two are missing the point, but that’s my fault for not being explicit. .
Of course you pay a premium for food already made for you. But the discrepancy is still really large here.
If you’re going to pay that much of a difference, it makes more sense to pick a sit down place or at least a better, larger sub.
Subway is more expensive than it is worth. That was the context in which I figured all this out.
Oh, no argument from me. You can get better for less from other sandwich places, assuming there’s another one available.
But it wasn’t that long ago when you could get a really cheap meal at a fast food joint. Back when they had literal dollar menus and you could get a burger or a chicken sandwich—maybe not a really good or elaborate one, but something to satisfy your hunger—for a buck or so. And when Subway had their “five dollar footlong” offers—if I were just making one sandwich, I don’t think I could’ve bought one sandwich’s worth of bread, meat, cheese, and toppings for that little.
You should see the food waste from our school lunch periods. BARRELS of it
maybe we need to start a thread about food waste?
That’s still doable in many of the major fast food chains today, though they lock some of those bargains behind their apps. But my wife regularly gets cheap meals from places like McDonald’s and Jack in the Box through their app, and it can be comparable to what you’d have seen on a value menu about 5 years ago or so.
They pretty much still have that (in a very limited fashion, admittedly).
The “$5 Footlong” promotion at Subway ended in 2014. Using an inflation calculator, $5 in 2014 translates to $6.67 in 2024. And Subway earlier this year had a deal where (for a limited time) you could get any footlong sandwich for $6.99, which is only 32 cents more expensive than their old deal (again, taking inflation into account).
And they brought it back again this month on “National Sandwich Day”.
I also see another time this year when there was a deal where you could buy one footlong and get another one free through the app. But these are through the app, which is a tactic that a lot of chains are using now. It’s definitely not as easy as a permanent value menu, or the rotating “cheap sandwich of the day” that I remember both Subway and Quiznos having in the past.
Nice one! 
I am never using an ap to buy fast food. I will go to a local grocery store deli or convenience store before I have to navigate that nonsense.
Or pay more. I don’t care. They don’t get to have my information for a hamburger.
Or not eat at all.
Ten years. Wow. I can still hear those commercials’ jingles in my head!
I feel that way, too. It’s just icky to have everything I do become part of a database. (I miss DVDs for the same reason. But millions seem to love having a big corporation know every single time they decide to watch Young Frankenstein.)
Me too dammit. 
Or they don’t care and love the objectively better technology.
Well, “objectively better” only if you don’t want to watch something that Netflix has discontinued making available.
I still don’t get the “don’t care,” though. I know millions feel that way, but I can’t share the attitude.
As I type this, I’m being presented with two internet ads for dog food and one for baseball caps; I don’t have a dog and I never wear baseball caps.
So it’s not that I don’t care; it’s that I get a genuine chance to marvel — almost in awe — at what folks seem to be doing, or not doing, with the info they’re collecting.
I suspect that Netflix has slightly more options than your DVD shelf, though not having your shelf I can’t be completely certain. 
Because those millions have never seen evidence of harm coming to them as a result of a company knowong how often they watch a particular Brooks film. It seems like an extremely reasonable position to take.
I mean, if you’re that concerned you could live completely off the grid in a secret cave and forage for everything under the cover of night, but that’s probably taking privacy concerns to an extreme end. It’s a spectrum and you just fall on a different part of that spectrum than the average person.