Food Industry Experts Reveal The Biggest Menu Ripoffs To Avoid
We've all had it. That nagging thought, popping up in the back of our brains, as we're looking down at the menu, at the side order of french fries that costs $8. We all think, "I could just bake my own at home! Why am I here?" Well, as it turns out, you're not the only one having those doubts about the food industry and what you should avoid on the menu. Reddit user, u/Sanscosmic, wanted to know what specifically when they asked:
People who work in the food industry, what food item is a complete rip-off yet people still buy?
Drink Up. It's Your Money.
The profit margins on drinks is usually ludicrously high no matter where you go.
PM--
Where The Real Movie Theater Money Is
If you're specifically referencing movie theaters, all of it is. 5.49 for a small soda, at least half of which is frozen water? But it's where they actually make their money, not much meat on the bone if any from box office sales.
I once heard a movie theater owner say he was not in the movie business, he was in the snack business. The movie was just to get and keep customers around for a couple of hours.
For Our Friends Overseas
Really irks me when a fish and chip shop charges $2 for tomato sauce put in a container.
Make an effort to avoid those places.
Just Do The Math
Soda.
In order to get your money's worth of a McDonald's medium soda, you would have to fill your cup up 16 times.
We All Know It, But We Still Do It
Bottles of water.
I deliver pizzas where water is 100% fine to drink out of taps, yet people still buy them.
They are ridiculously overpriced as well.
600% Markup
i used to work at a chicken restaurant. biggest rip off was the green beans.
theyre just the jumbo sized canned green beans with onion seasoning, microwaved. it was almost $3 for a pint. you can buy a can of green beans for like 50 cents.
But It's SO Good
Garlic Bread.
In most restaurants the Gbread is just yesterdays bread slathered in garlic butter and passed through a toaster. Costs maybe 50c a serve but we'll sell it for $5. If the restaurant doesn't sell or provide fresh bread, it's yesterdays bread from the bakery down the road.
It IS really good though, toasts better if you use day old bread.
Ice. It's Ice. You're Paying For Ice.
A medium flavored coolatta (slushee drink) is 5 dollars.
Five dollars for 3 squirts of flavoring then mixed with shaved ice.
Just Don't Add Sweet n' Low
Tea.
You can buy 100 teabags for the same price as a cup of tea. Also boiling water is free at most coffee shops if you ask.
A Good Set Of Guidelines To Follow
General rules at a sit-down restaurant:
Soda costs them 8c, including washing the glass, but costs you $2 to $3. Alcohol is always highly marked up. Sides and apps are marked up much more than entrees.
It's All The Same
Long time since I worked in the food industry so I don't know if this still holds true, but around 2005 every uk supermarket (except Morrisons) had their salmon encroute produced by the same company on the same line by the same people. One of my jobs was literally stopping the line and changing the sleeve to a different supermarkets one. Same fish, same sauce, same pastry, same lattice, even the same plastic tray just a different sleeve.
Naturally this never stops people insisting the Tesco one was sh-te and the M&S one was just better somehow because it was double the price.
This extended to 90% of non fresh fish products but brand loyalty still reigned supreme.
Flying Too Close To The Sun
...Chicken Wings are costly as a raw material, need refrigeration/freezing to store and preparing them properly requires trained manpower (which is costly as hell nowadays)
Compare that with a Coke or say Lemon soda: Hardly any preparation, no special skills needed by the person making it plus the Raw material is cheap af.
Restaurants don't fleece you on food...they fleece you on the drinks.
Source: I'm a restaurant owner :P
But, Again, It's All Soo Good
Most cereal has no nutritional value and its unclear whether 'fortifying' them with vitamins has any actual benefits. Yet hugely expensive and well liked although I think as a market it's slowly fading.
Name vs. Value
Used to work in a chip factory when we ran plain chips all the same chips went into the "name brand" on one line then right next to it would be the "value chips" with 2/$1 stickers on them
Listen To The Bread Experts
A lot of things are like this.
Generic sliced bread is basically the same as the name brand, made in the same place, with a different package. For example in Shop Rite stores in PA the shop rite brand white bread is actually Stroehmann bread. The generic is $1 and the name brand is $3.99.
Fruit Comes To Overthrow
In Austria; I find fresh fruits and veggies quite highly marked up. Just the other day I spent 6€ for one kilo of cherries. In the middle of the season! Strawberries - around 2,5€ per half of kilogram - also in the season now.
Not even "organic" ones. Plain market prices.
Don't let me even start on other, more exotic produce.
strawberries grow great in 1/4 day direct light, and medium dry soil of any kind(esp higher altitudes!). we planted 4 strawberry plants 2 years ago(5'x5' bed on the shaded east side of our house), and now we literally cant pick and eat them as fast as they grow.(colorado high plains, similar latitude and altitude as austria, but we're a bit drier.)
it looks like the movie 'The Ruins' out there now only strawberry plants..
THey'll also outcompete most pest plants, so you can plant strawberries to kill off bindweed, thistle and dandelion(they outcompete swiftly if you trim the weeds back) before long strawberries becomes the weeds in your lawn and paths.
the only real 'downside' is the birds, squirrels, and slugs they attract.
KNEW We Couldn't Trust
When I worked for popular pizza restaurant we would charge something like $5 dollars for a box of breadsticks. My boss told me one day how much of a rip off it was since the dough, cost of labor, and even the box they came in only totaled around $1.25.
The Hidden Secret
...When you buy food/drinks at a restaurant, you aren't simply paying for the food. You are paying for the experience. That restaurant pays for building rent, utilities, supplies, and employees to actually make the food/serve the food/clean the place.
Of course they aren't going to sell at value. Sure, some items are blatantly overpriced even considering, but selling you a coffee for $3 instead of 15 cents so you can hang out in the cafe on your laptop for four hours isn't exactly capitalistic greed.
"Homecooked" = Store Bought
Not me, but my dad. He goes to Starbucks and orders a pastry or something I don't remember the name of. He starts asking the lady behind the counter what it was and all that jazz and then she mentions that he could get an entire box of them for like, $20 across the street at Costco while he was here paying $5 for a single one.
Reminder that everything "gourmet" and "homecooked" is probably still mass produced in a factory.
H/T: Reddit
In fact, some mistakes are so astronomical that they're remembered for decades afterwards, leaving the one who made the mistake a legacy of being a dumba**. Here are a few of them!!!
U/ronjans24 asked: What was the biggest mistake in human history?
Some may argue that the existence of the Universe was a mistake. I disagree. It was clearly Zayn leaving One Direction. But these next few were pretty bad too.
If you do the math, this is also the reason why Hentai exists.
I'll say the wrong turn Franz Ferdinand's driver made that went right in front of Gavrilo Princip.
EDIT: yes I'm aware war may still have broken out even if Franz Ferdinand wasn't assassinated
Imagine you're Gavrilo Princip. The assassination plot you and your friends had been cooking up for about the last year or so has been a complete and total disaster, just a monumental f*ck-up of the highest degree. You're staked out at this deli thinking maybe, just maybe the car will pass by, and by some stroke of sheer luck, it does.
If you're Princip, this is nothing short of serendipity.
Petition to return to the ocean.
Ocean Surf GIFGiphy"Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans."
"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move." - Douglas Adams
This was, in fact, a monumental mistake.
Sears not beating Amazon to the punch.
Blockbuster not buying Netflix.
You thought THOSE were bad? Well gear up for their next few, because they are 100% accurate. Except the one about Cats, that movie slaps.
I don’t know sports, but sure.
Seahawks not running it.
I used to wear a Seahawks jersey whenever I took a test because I knew I would pass when I shouldn't.
CATS is great, y'all are just boring.
GiphyThe Emoji Movie.
That live action movie about Cats is also up there.
Very fair point.
Social Media.
Humans are not wired to have that many social interactions and maintain that many relationships. Plus the echochambers it allows people to create for themselves, no matter how conspiratorial or vile their beliefs, means that stupid/evil people are no longer shunned into changing their mind.
Not sure it was worth being able to see what a celebrity had for lunch or what new "dance" your younger cousin and her tween friends are doing.
But in all seriousness, some horrible things may now have happened if the right thing was halted at the right time.
Washington called it.
George Washington Disney GIF by Hamilton: An American MusicalGiphyVoting for people based on what side of the political spectrum they're on. George Washington himself advised against political parties because he thought they would cause too much division in this country. Unfortunately for everyone, he was right.
Big oops on that one.
Barack Obama mocking Donald Trump at the Correspondents Dinner might have led directly to his 2016 run....
"Now, I know that he's taken some flak lately, but no one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than The Donald," Obama said. "And that's because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter — like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?"
Then he turned serious: "But all kidding aside, obviously, we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience. For example — no, seriously, just recently, in an episode of 'Celebrity Apprentice' — at the steakhouse, the men's cooking team did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks. And there was a lot of blame to go around. But you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so ultimately, you didn't blame Lil Jon or Meatloaf. You fired Gary Busey. And these are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night. Well handled, sir. Well handled."
This is the best Star Wars and no one can change my mind.
I'll take 'Star Wars Christmas Special' for $100.
That atrocious pile of manure gave us Boba Fett, so without the Christmas Special there won't be The Mandalorian.
Wow, in this article, I openly admitted my love for Cats AND The Star Wars Holiday Special. So maybe my existence was the biggest mistake of all.
ANYWAY, I hope you enjoyed, and I hope you all feel a little bit better about yourself. Because when push comes to shove, at least you didn't accidentally start World War I