Please define “massively” for us. It sounds like you were eating larks tongue in aspic and are now buying year-old potatoes at the Latvian coop. Remember, some in an international audience may have done just that at some point. Is that what happened?
Wonder if a functional kitchen should be thought of as an expense-management device. No matter what the financial situation, in the US without a kitchen you can always find something to eat to keep body and soul together, but with a functional kitchen you can always eat something both tasty and healthy (if you can cook). You can choose to cook if you have the cash; you may need to do that if you don’t. The fact that you always can is a very consoling fact in rough economic times.
Whoops, my bad!
Due to the step nature of purchasing food, the break even points change depending on exactly which meals we're talking about dining out for. The more you eat out, the higher the cost per home cooked meals due to loss of economy of scale and spoilage.
My wife, the keeper of the budgets, calculated that the break even point for work lunches was $11 a lunch. This is doable, but it basically means relegating yourself to low end fast food. In the area where I lived (Southern California) that put even Chipotle out of reach for my preferred configuration. There are certainly places that can reliably deliver 800 calories for less, but that'll cost you in the long run in different ways.
> Wonder if a functional kitchen should be thought of as an expense-management device. No matter what the financial situation, in the US without a kitchen you can always find something to eat to keep body and soul together, but with a functional kitchen you can always eat something both tasty and healthy (if you can cook).
I think that's a pretty good way to think about it. As GP has pointed out you do need to purchase an actual kitchen too, but I think that the cost is fairly marginal compared to buying a home in most markets.
> You can choose to cook if you have the cash; you may need to do that if you don’t. The fact that you always can is a very consoling fact in rough economic times.
If one wants true consolation in rough economic times, buy a chest freezer. Nothing provides emotional security like a hundred pounds of meat and vegetables frozen in the garage.
Is that because, based on other comments here, you're already invested in a kitchen and, as a result, are forgetting to factor in that substantial cost? But that would be like if you owned your own silicon fab. You would no doubt also wonder how anyone could afford to buy their processors from Intel for hundreds of dollars when you can make your own for pennies. But you're not actually making them for pennies when you need to lay the capital upfront.
> Subjectively, I don't think that cooking at home is a "luxury".
The luxury isn't cooking. The luxury is being able to have a large room full of machinery dedicated to preparing meals for, on average, 2.5 people. These days, average people can barely afford living spaces as-is. That room adds to the cost substantially and is not likely to be recouped against eating out, unless eating out means eating at places that are selling entertainment alongside food.
It is true that the typical home kitchen can be more cost effective than food entertainment, but that's only because your home kitchen does not have to provide the entertainment portion. I do not see these being reasonably comparable when talking about the cost of prepared food. Once you add the cost of equivalent entertainment at home, the food entertainment restaurant looks pretty cheap again.
> Generally speaking only the lowest economic strata of the working poor depend heavily on fast & packaged food
Generally speaking, the poor have to buy used houses that already have kitchens for a lot of historical reasons. They have little opportunity to not become invested in the means of production, even when it is not ideal from a purely economic point of view. There are exceptions of places without kitchens, as mentioned earlier in the thread, but they are typically only found where land values are high, where the cost of keeping an existing kitchen is higher than repurposing it.
The wealthy, who are most likely to build new houses, that will one day be sold to the poor, want the luxury of having a kitchen even when it is not economically sound, and so the cycle continues.
So, my kitchen has a range, sink, dishwasher, and full-size refrigerator. It is small but it is a full kitchen. It is the smallest "room" in my apartment; I probably pay a few hundred dollars a month for it. The cost difference between cooking at home and eating out makes up for that in a couple of weeks for me.
Kitchens aren't that expensive.
You're right that ignoring the cost of a kitchen discounts the cost of cooking at home, but I think you're drastically overestimating the cost of purchasing a kitchen. In another thread you mentioned $60,000 for a kitchen, a number which I think is way too high. I suspect that this is a case of the average being dragged up by the outliers. After all, high end kitchens can get very expensive, but we're not looking at high end income earners.
So, let's look at it from the perspective of someone buying a used home. Let's assume that they're buying basic, at median prices and reasonable sizes.
A basic kitchen remodel is somewhere in the neighborhood of $24,000[0][1], including all new cabinetry, countertops, flooring, plumbing, and appliances. Presumably installing a new kitchen in a new building is significantly cheaper since that is less labor intensive than remodeling. The median house costs in the neighborhood of $100/sq. ft[2], with a typical small kitchen being anywhere from 70-100 square feet. Even assuming that the cost/ft doesn't already include the kitchen itself, we have a bare minimum price of about $34,000 for a basic kitchen fully installed.
(This does not account for the fact that the $103/sq. ft. number includes the kitchen that comes with the house, and thus we are double counting some costs).
A 30 year mortgage on $34,000 is $441.76, which is $5.89 a person a day for a 2.5 person household, or $2.94 each for lunch and dinner. So in order for a basic kitchen to pay itself off, each meal must be at least $2.94 cheaper than what you would pay dining out. This is obviously quite hard to do if you're buying the cheapest calories available, but trivial if your typical meal is more expensive than say, Chipotle.
And of course, this is a pessimistic analysis. As you've mentioned, your typical American is purchasing a used house, which absent a growing market means that they're financing the depreciated value of that kitchen.
Now if the cost per square foot was closer to $850 per square foot, a not unreasonable estimate for San Francisco proper, one would quickly question whether the $59,500 was worth it for the space of a small kitchen alone.
> The luxury isn't cooking. The luxury is being able to have a large room full of machinery dedicated to preparing meals for, on average, 2.5 people. These days, average people can barely afford living spaces as-is.
I would argue that if having a kitchen is such an obvious luxury as you propose, we'd see more housing move to eliminate it. Instead our evidence is that you have to be extremely far up the COL curve before having a kitchen is no longer worth the space. Even in incredibly crowded markets like NYC it is more common to see apartments give up a separate bedroom before falling back to a half kitchen.
SF is certainly the outlier in terms of cost, so if any place in the US was going to have a local trend of abandoning full kitchens or even half kitchens, it would be there.
> Generally speaking, the poor have to buy used houses that already have kitchens for a lot of historical reasons. They have little opportunity to not become invested in the means of production, even when it is not ideal from a purely economic point of view.
Yes, the poor do have to buy kitchens. But they also buy cheap kitchens, which continues to tilt the equation towards cooking being cheaper. Instead it appears like time and energy are actually what drives people towards dining out, not cost.
0 - https://www.homedepot.com/c/cost_kitchen_remodel
1 - https://www.homeadvisor.com/cost/kitchens/remodel-a-kitchen/
2 - https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/research/average-house-price...
Subjectively, I don't think that cooking at home is a "luxury". Maybe being a foodie is an upper class thing given the extra cost and time investment associated with it, but historically huge chunks of the middle class have cooked at home for a large chunk of their meals. Generally speaking only the lowest economic strata of the working poor depend heavily on fast & packaged food, and that's largely a factor of both time and ingredient availability. If you're working two or three jobs or live in a food desert, you're not going to cook at home no matter what the unit economics are.
That being said, I do have a general theory about high COL businesses. After moving out of our high COL city (Santa Monica, for the record), we've started building out a home gym and programming our own workouts. What we realized is that while our old gym provided a lot of knowledge and social structure, the primary service they offered was land and equipment. They were able to charge a premium because we literally couldn't afford enough land to put the equipment. Now that we live in a lower COL city with a large garage, the financial balance points towards it being cheaper to just buy all the equipment rather than paying for a gym membership. At the extreme end of land cost, I can see this even applying to kitchens too, since a good kitchen takes up a fairly large portion of an apartment.