No real thoughts about the content of the article, but shouldn't the Atlantic be able to produce a better looking plot than a stock, calibri-fonted MS Excel line-graph?
I remember articles like this about Gen-X (my generation) 15 years ago. I think it's just the case that people in their early 20's usually don't cook. I know I didn't. But as I and many of my friends moved into our 30's, we discovered the joy and satisfaction of cooking at home. Now my wife and I cook at home quite a bit. I'm sure we still go out to eat way more than our parents' generation, but we also use ingredients from local farmers' markets in our cooking quite often, which our parents didn't do really.
My point is, millennials are young; young people don't cook. This isn't a big surprise.
The article actually makes the point (not in the clickbait title) that gen Xers and even their parents are also spending more at restaurants and bars and less on groceries.
"So what’s the real story here? Yes, Millennials are shifting their spending toward restaurants and bars and away from grocers. But it’s not an unprecedented shift. They’re simply returning to their mid-aughts levels of restaurant spending."
This was in the comment for a bit but is gone again, but the rest of the summary would be that this isn't just Millennials. Gen Xers and their parents are also spending more at restaurants/bars
Sorry, I put it in for a second but some of it was repetitive (minus the part you mention, of course). Here's what was also in my comment:
"The big story here is not that young people are uniquely turning away from groceries. Rather, the story is a structural shift toward eating out at restaurants, among Millennials and their parents (and perhaps even their grandparents)."
As a millennial myself, my beef isn't with groceries, it's with the once-a-week, huge shopping trip. I much prefer to make a few small trips a week if it's on my commute. I used to live near a small, independent grocery and would usually stop in on my walk home from the train and grab stuff to cook that night.
I've found this to be my experience as well. Going to Target or King Soopers takes like an hour because it's an absolute Zoo, so I just stop at 7/11 or Wawa pretty much once a day.
I love both! I like stopping by small independent grocery stores, but I also buy what I can at Costco. My wife and I love to go to Costco and walk around. We set limits on what we will buy and have general rules such as no buying more of any category until we eat what we have. We spent about 600 per month at Costco, 150-200 at other grocery stores, and 150-200 eating out.
Whoa, where do you live that you're spending $1000 a month on food for two?
I love Costco too, but our apartment is too small for storing lots of bulk food items. My wife and I dream of having a bigger kitchen, pantry, and chest freezer someday.
I live in the California Bay Area. I can't break down the Costco since in the past I have not saved receipts. I estimate that out of that $600 I spent about $50 on beer and wine, and maybe $150-200 on household supplies.
I'm working on getting better numbers, since it seems like a lot too, especially when I think about what I'm eating: toast for breakfast, leftovers for lunch, simple dinners. I'd really like to know!
When I was single I was averaging about 250 -> 350 a month. But I offset this by buying chicken in bulk at 40LB increments and that usually lasted me several months.
For two right now I'm average about 700 to 800 a month. I have a number of food allergies so ingredients or restrictive. The other half is as close to organic as possible.
I'd say the biggest contribution to the price is moving off farm sourcing. I don't have the time right now to process 40lb of chicken, or several cases of produce.
Yeah, a roommate pays for about 4-5 dinners per week. I've also used the numbers from my budget categories since I'm happy on the rare months that we hit the limit on each and don't want to be labeled as low-balling my food to make eating out seem expensive. Cooking at home is cheap even if you give numbers this high.
I won't say I love both but we do both. My wife and I still go to Costco for bulk or other goods that don't necessarily need to be fresh. We also get gas there too.
It's interesting because I do this myself and attribute it to my time living in a developing nation for a few years. In one example, I was at a family home and there was almost nothing for breakfast on several mornings. When I asked what was up, they just told me they'd sent one of their children to the bakery up the street. Same thing with meat purchases for later meals.
Huh, I've been living like this for so long that I'd forgotten most people do the once-a-week blowout shopping spree. Having lived in Europe, one of the perks was that you invariably had local groceries, bakeries, and butchers seemingly on every street corner. Berkeley is kind of like that for me now: fresh bread, sausage, and local veggies only a 20 minute walk from home. Can't imagine living any other way!
Personally, I think it's the better way to live. For many people in the U.S., at least, it's probably hard to live that way. Some places are way to spread out for that.
For sure. I've grew up around Berkeley and now I'm in Europe. Both places (at least where I am now) are walkable which surely helps when making small runs to the market/bakery/etc.
It freaks me a little bit how on-demand most people seem to do their grocery shopping, but I have to attribute that to my atypical rural upbringing. When it is a 30-40 mile round trip to the grocery store, you become accustomed to doing all the shopping for the week at once, and whipping something up with what is on hand during the week.
Also that it seems like nobody has more than about three days of food in their pantry. My mother still puts up hundreds of quarts of canned vegetables every summer out of the garden, freezes enough other stuff to fill an entire full-size freezer, then they buy half a beef-creature from the farmer down the hill to fill the other freezer. And usually a couple hundred pounds of potatoes. There's probably enough food to keep them alive for two years.
A lot replies here seem to be from people living in large cities, but there is a whole lot more out there than just that. I don't live in the country, but the way my city (one of the top 100 largest US cities, that nobody has heard of) is sprawled out walking to the store is completely unreasonable.
Driving to pick up dinner each day would be just tedious.
Well, I'm a millenial. Without even reading the article, I'm wondering who in the hell chooses to drive, park, walk half a mile inside a flourescently-lit building, stand in line, pay, load a car, drive back to a house, and unbag groceries when all of that can be avoided by using a computer.
A better question is why we still have food warehouses that would be better operated by robots than people.
As a high-earning hyper-urban techy millenial (Brooklynite / software engineer) who doesn't particularly enjoy cooking, I'm wondering where the value proposition for groceries is when I can order from a huge variety of nearby restaurants, who will deliver hot, cooked food to my door every night for about $20/meal.
Considering there tends to be zero food waste with this option, I'm not sure I'm saving money by shopping for food, especially when I assign a value to my free time, which I like to estimate at half my hourly rate in calculations like this.
>I'm wondering who in the hell chooses to drive, park, walk half a mile inside a flourescently-lit building, stand in line, pay, load a car, drive back to a house, and unbag groceries when all of that can be avoided by using a computer.
I've tried grocery deliveries. Invariably not everything you want gets delivered. Produce and other fresh items may not be as good as you expect. Maybe if I had Instacart with Whole Foods but then I'd spend more and it's not available where I live anyway. Lots of people aren't quite as adverse to getting up from their computer.
> A better question is why we still have food warehouses that would be better operated by robots than people.
One reason is because not all fresh goods (e.g. produce and meat) are created equal. Hand selection of those items is part of getting the most value our of your food dollars. You can likely overcome many of the other issues; price comparison, new product discovery, etc.; but you're still left with the inconsistency of items that come from dirt.
Sounds like a computer vision problem. The heuristics of judging the quality of most foods doesn't seem that prohibitive - coloration and geometric consistency puts you about 99% of the way there.
Not everything is a computer problem. It's more of an economic issue. You can deliver hand-picked only premium goods but it will cost.
High quality food delivery is certainly possible. From what I've seen of Instacart delivering from Whole Foods, it works pretty well. But it's a premium service and isn't available where I live.
Additionally, the problem gets a lot more complex if you're doing something like buying produce slightly less than ripe for use in two or three days. That introduces a considerably larger spectrum of criteria across all available produce.
I'm not going to say it's necessarily more complicated of a problem -- I chose the word "complex" purposely -- as it mostly just simplifies down to being more training data for the AI produce picker (or what have you), but it sure seems like the failure rate would scale up rather quickly in real world scenarios. That would just lead to waste we wouldn't otherwise have.
Or maybe I just prefer to pick out my own produce. It could go either way, CV isn't my field.
Either way, handling pantry goods in this way doesn't sound particularly unreasonable.
Ideally, yes, and while in my small city of Dayton, Ohio I have limited options for produce close to home my local meat producers aren't at all close to me. It's certainly not a stop on my way home. They're setup more for people with chest freezers buying half a cow at a discount to have meat for months at a time.
We're just not the agrarian society that would be conducive to providing "hyperlocal produce / butchers".
You do realize that many places have these things called seasons? I do have a farm stand just down the road from me which has excellent (albeit a limited range of) produce in August. January? Not so much.
You mean "opting out" without ever leaving the system.
Everyone can always opt out if they're willing to drop enough things. A trivial way to opt out is to commit suicide. But are other ways too, such as moving into the wilderness and trying to make it there on your own. And that's comparatively much "cheaper" in poorer societies, since there is less to give up.
For instance, whereas in Medieval times serfs might have ran away from their lords and into the wilderness in order to avoid law and taxes, the majority of present-day criminals are found and captured in their own towns, while disgruntled citizens consider themselves to have little option but whine when it comes to taxes.
"Late stage capitalism" does indeed produce enough goods and services that people have the option of opting out. There's some pretty neat survivalist gear for sale nowadays. But they never really do.
> For instance, whereas in Medieval times serfs might have ran away from their lords and into the wilderness in order to avoid law and taxes
That and to your last point is what I was thinking about. It's harder to "opt out" of a subsistence farming existence than it is to opt out of a society where you have access to time- & resource-saving technology that enables you to multiply your abilities, as well as basic necessities at a price that allows you to have disposable income.
That's one of the gripes I have about some of the faux-sustainability crowd: it's not sustainable if it's predicated on a USD$100,000+ income.
His comment comes off as elitist and reeks of 'I value the potential value of my time more than the desire or effort needed to be self-sufficent with regards to food. I also hate big box stores, suburbia, and probably most office buildings.'
It also adds up really quickly. $20/dinner is like $50/day if you eat out all 3 meals, which is more than $15K/year. There are people who live on $15K/year; there are also startups that have been founded on $15K.
If the price of not making that grocery run for 3 years is "I get to do a startup without permission of investors", would you still do it?
You can write off those last 30 minutes of work a day as the part that feeds you but ultimately you're spending over the odds for food you could have made yourself.
Possibly. Modern delivery allows you to choose low-packaging options, and in cities is mostly delivered by electric bicycle. Also one big kitchen serving 100 meals is certainly more efficient than a hundred or so small ones.
Maybe in downtown, but I don't think the millennials who oppose grocery shopping are all clustered around areas where electric bike delivery is available. The would seem to be a very small representative subset.
Well, there are a number of reasons. Cooking your own food tends to be physically healthier - not to mention that there's a certain zen to it. It's also a good skill to have, and it's fun. Finally, it'll make your mother happy :)
You definitely save money eating at home once you get good at it. If you live with someone else it is also a great social opportunity. These days I cook and eat with my wife, but before I met her I cooked with my roommates.
One roommate now will only eat with us if we add up the cost of ingredients and charge him fairly. Many of our dinners cost only a couple dollars.
Pasta with marinara sauce and dinner rolls: 1.33 / pound pasta, 1.80 jar of sauce, rolls 0.13 each. Serves 3-4 people for $5. 15 minutes (limited by water heating).
Tacos with guacamole: $3 pre-made guacamole, tortillas 0.5 / 12 pieces, beans 1.20 / can, salsa $2 / half bottle, tofu 1.5 / block, cilantro 1 / bundle. rice ~$1. Serves 3-4 people for $10. 20 minutes (lots of tasks, have to cook tortillas).
I won't break it down, but I can do a nice sushi dinner: various rolls, cold tofu, inari, miso soup, for 3-4 people for about $15. 45 minutes (lots of tasks).
In any case I can feed three adults for about ten dollars and 2/3 of an hour of my time. Usually there are enough left-overs to make a nice lunch for myself.
I enjoy eating out, and do so about once a week. Before I got married I ate out a lot. I would spend about $900 per month just for myself. Now I make an effort to cook dinner 6 days a week and spend a total of about 800 per month on food for both of us.
When I see posts like this the prices often feel like they're chosen to be the best possible that could be achieved.
For instance, pre-made guacamole, if it's actually made entirely from real avocados, is more like $6 where I'm at if you want enough to feed 4 people multiple tacos each -- so twice the price you're quoting here.
Oh, you are right, I did the math wrong. I pay $11 for a three pack of 1 pound guacamole boxes. That's closer to $4 each. I'm in California which has a lot of Avocados. In the summer I can reliably purchase large Avocados for 4 for $5 at local markets. When I can get those I use three to make guacamole.
My general food purchasing scheme is to attempt to only purchase the foods I can get at the best prices. If I am shopping and see a 10 pound bag of organic carrots for less than $5 I will buy it and have lots of carrots that week. For example: carrot salad, egg-rolls (carrot filling freezes well), soup, or stir-fry.
I can always buy tortillas for about 3-4 dollars for at least 6 dozen. I freeze them into one dozen stacks and defrost in the microwave until they can be teased apart and finished on a pan.
Some of the best deals I get are at Whole Foods. They often have very good sales on frozen foods. Otherwise I get foods at Costco, a local family market, and Trader Joe's. In the summer I occasionally go to a flea market to get specialty items and seasonal produce.
I'm in San Jose, California. I can go to a local tofu shop and get fresh tofu for $2 per block. Otherwise I can spend about 6 dollars at Costco to get a 4 pack of a good brand tofu.
I think the difference is in the scaling: cooking doesn't scale vs income in the same way that eating out does. So in the absence of enjoying the act of cooking (which I happen to) there is absolutely an hourly rate threshold past which it makes no financial sense to cook.
If I save approximately the same amount cooking vs eating out, but it takes me the same additional amount of time to cook (again, assuming you don't enjoy that), then as my income grows the smaller the savings become as a percentage and the larger the monetary value of a given amount of my time becomes worth.
> when I assign a value to my free time, which I like to estimate at half my hourly rate in calculations like this.
That only works when you are choose to use that free time earning at that rate. Otherwise you are simply using mental gymnastics to validate your choice (which, since it is your money and your food, certainly does not require validation from others).
It just feels like 20th century americans didn't really value their time. They were the weird ones, apparently content (I don't really think that) to do all the pointless stuff they did.
> hot, cooked food to my door every night for about $20/meal
I'm disappointed when it costs more than $10 total to feed my family of 5 a hot cooked meal. 1.5 lbs of beef, 2 vegetables, and a few cups of milk is ~$10. This will increase as my kids get older, but God I can't imagine spending $20 per meal per person on food. Plus, the kids get to help see how the food is prepared, our oldest (7) can help cut veggies, everyone can help set the table, and best of all we know every last ingredient that does (and doesn't) end up in our food.
I assign a value to my free time too, and preparing fresh meals with my family is pretty damn valuable.
Yeah, but what if you're 25, you live alone, you make more money than you know what to do with (on account of spending 90% of your daily time at your high-tech job), and every time you cook for yourself half of your food goes bad or you have to eat the same thing 3-4 days in a row?
Cooking at home after with all that just reminds me that I'm not cooking with a family or whatever. I'd rather go sit next to strangers and have some human interactions with people who aren't Millennials working in tech.
What kind of food are you making that you won't want to eat for 3 days in a row? You may want to consider an investment in some cooking classes or some youtube videos. Outside of brewing beer, I can scarce think of a better ROI on your man-hours than learning to cook. Try these links to learn how to start:
> I'm wondering who in the hell chooses to drive, park, walk half a mile inside a flourescently-lit building, stand in line, pay, load a car, drive back to a house, and unbag groceries
I do. I have a list, so I'm pretty much on auto pilot in the store. This is 45 min that I can let my mind just shut down. Completely analog, no screens, no job, no worries. Nothing. Just walk the isles, load a cart and scratch a list.
> who doesn't particularly enjoy cooking, I'm wondering where the value proposition for groceries is when I can order from a huge variety of nearby restaurants,
If you don't enjoy cooking, then there really is no value proposition. Unless you think you may get to the point later in life where you wish you'd saved a bit more money. But you're young so you're still bullet proof.
> Considering there tends to be zero food waste with this option, I'm not sure I'm saving money by shopping for food...
With proper meal planning and preparing, there shouldn't be waste. But again, you don't enjoy cooking, so that's the hurdle.
I'm wondering who in the hell sits down all day in front of a blindingly bright screen, alone, clicking away to make games and tools that get other people to sit down all day in front of their computers... So they can afford to pay for a hyper-dense closet to live in, and be fed at their door like a caged chicken, so they have more time to avoid life by using a computer.
Reasonable to who? Of course, it's possible to cook very economically and well. But it's hardly unreasonable for people to choose to eat steaks and expensive seafood for at least some meals.
I understand that if you don't particularly like to cook, then someone bringing hot food over is a lot more appealing than doing something you don't enjoy.
I'll caution against drawing an equivalency between a lifestyle of eating take-out/delivery food vs. cooking (cooking, not heating up boxes of stuff) food you prepare at home.
In the former approach, you take what shows up. You can only control what you order and where you order from. In the latter approach, you can control what's going in to about as great (or little) a degree as you care to.
A grocery chain here (Kansas, so I assume most of the US) offers their full store online with free delivery ($100 minimum). Our weekly trips have been replaced by a few minutes on the laptop. The best part for me is that the orders are tracked and I can just re-order what I bought last week or make slight modifications.
No robots yet but I hope that's not far off.
Honestly I feel almost guilty when they roll up to the deliver the groceries.
Exact same price. You are quoted a price when you checkout online, but a human shops for you and goes through a normal checkout process in the store which weighs the fruits/vegetables etc. You are provided the same store receipt when they deliver the groceries as you would get in store. That amount is charged to your credit card.
My gf and I live in SF and use Sprig which is healthy and around $12-15/person including delivery. Its cheaper than when we bought groceries and cooked (which we didn't enjoy) because we had to rent a Zipcar to go to the grocery store, pay SF food prices and ended up wasting a lot that we didn't eat. We didnt waste out of poor planning but unpredictable schedules. She has sudden client meetings come up in the evening or I have to unexpectedly travel down to a different office in the south bay.
Considering my company provides breakfast and lunch, the high price for dinner isn't that bad. Also on weekends we're usually not home to cook, which increased the probability of wasting groceries we didn't eat during the week.
As millennials without children and good jobs who don't enjoy cooking, there isn't any reason to spend the time planning meals, renting a car and going to the grocery store on the weekend when I'd rather be doing anything else. If I lived in a smaller city, where I had a house and a car without an app that delivered healthy food, then it would have to change, but thats a boring life.
Hot, cooked food that is mostly unhealthy for you. If you want to eat fresh meat and vegetables that taste good... it's hard to get find that from different restaurants 3 times a day.
I don't know about you guys, but I love grocery shopping. Going to Ralphs and Costco is almost always an enjoyable experience for me (usually only hampered by dealing with parking). I believe you can use Google's delivery service to order from the latter, but I haven't tried it yet.
If I had a Ralph's it would be. Mostly shop at Walmart for canned goods or slower to perish items. Publix is run down, and old fashioned in that it lacks sunlight aside from the front window. Same for Winndixie.
Maybe they could actually build grocery stores close to where millennials want to (and can afford) to live? My nearest "grocery store" is a Target over a mile away.
>But today’s shoppers are springing for options in a market that supermarkets once monopolized. Modern shoppers divide their shopping among superstores like Walmart, supermarkets like Giant, specialty shops for bread and coffee, and online shopping for all of the above.
I suppose that technically-speaking a Walmart (or Target) is not a "supermarket." But that seems like a distinction without a difference in terms of making statements about how a given demographic is moving away from grocery shopping.
That was my point. (And Walmart Superstores are increasingly in a wide range of suburban locations as well.)
ADDED: I don't like doing grocery shopping at Walmart in general because of generally sub-par meat, bakery, and produce. But I still use one to pick up packaged groceries simply because it's a bit closer than my nearest regular supermarket.
Yeah, they are pretty sub-par, and they tend to be a zoo because everybody and their mother is there buying something - with about three of the sixteen cash registers manned.
It's bizarre to treat shopping on the grocery side of a super Walmart as different than shopping in a medium or larger sized grocery store. It's the same selection and the same experience (unless you need something that the Walmart stocks in addition to the groceries, in which case it is moderately more convenient).
Oh, it's the daily "Why won't millenials engage in the usual consumerist patternsß Don't they know they are ruining the economy?"-headline. I feel sorry for the article writers that get burdened with this stuff.
Not really. The headline is clickbaity, but then the author goes against the headline in the third paragraph
But this story reflects two universal truths about culture.
First, many cultural changes for which Millennials are
initially blamed really reflect broader trends affecting
even the oldest consumers. Second, many cultural changes
are really reversions to old norms.
I agree the author made it very clear that this was not a millennial behaviour alone
>The big story here is not that young people are uniquely turning away from groceries. Rather, the story is a structural shift toward eating out at restaurants
>So what seems to be a strictly Millennial trend is in fact part of a much broader cultural shift.
Except the article goes on to say that people are spending more money at bars and restaurants than at grocery stores. There is no indication that millennials are spending less money on food overall (in fact, wouldn't eating out every day mean they are spending more money than would buying groceries?).
They are not counting Walmart as a grocery store. I buy food at Walmart because it has everything else, is the cheapest and closest.
If I was less broke I would go out more and maybe splurge at Target sometimes, and buy more stuff on Amazon so I don't have to carry it. But the 'neighborhood' Walmart has produce so-- I think actually they should count Walmart and Target as grocery stores.
I think they are purposely segmenting the population here to show how typical supermarkets (read: Food only) are fading precisely because other retailers (walmart, etc) have gotten into the food game. Walmart isn't a supermarket because it's got a lot more than food. Its goods are a superset of your typical Giant, Kroger, Ralph's, etc. This is also likely a reason you see Kroger start to expand into "Super stores" that have one-stop shopping for a lot of similar things.
Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that this article may completely misinterpret its own statistics. It keeps talking about shoppers, but the unit in all of the charts is dollars.
It claims that more people are eating out. But it may be that as income disparity increases, restaurant prices go up for the people who can afford to eat out. That would lead to an increased amount of money going into restaurants, even though the same number or even fewer people are eating out.
Looking at the data presented in the article - it seems to correlate pretty well with economic recessions. I think that when people are flush with cash, they tend to eat out, while when they lose their jobs and are sitting at home, they economize at the cost of personal inconvenience. This is neither structural nor generational - there were dips for all age groups during the '91, '00, and '07-11 recessions, the dips were just larger for younger workers (who tend to be more exposed to economic fluctuations, since they enter the job market with no work history or network, and the onus is on them to convince someone they're worth paying for).
Certainly there were moments when I worked at Google that I was like "Why do I bother going to the supermarket, when I get 10 meals/week at work and can easily Instacart the rest?", and it was really just force of habit that kept me shopping. But now that I'm doing a startup, I appreciate having habits that keep my burn rate low - my in-laws recently looked at their food budget and realized that "Oh, the reason we're not saving any money is because we eat out every day."
For me I don't mind grocery shopping. When I was in the city proper, it was on the way too or from work. I would do delivery some time. But I love too cook and get hands on ingredients. After I moved thought, my diet has tanked due to difficulty in getting food.
Exceptions are dried spices, household goods, and oils which I buy in bulk. I did hate the time in line, effort etc. But also allowed me to check out for a bit.
Now I dread it, and do most of my orders through FreshDirect. I'm sort of in a food desert. There are two grocery stores two miles away from me. There are buses that run every 1.5 hours, and take 40 minutes to get there.
I hate it because I generally have to walk. It burns about 2 hours for me. I have to carry everything back in a backpack. Uber/Lyft is 30$ per trip. It's a bigger problem for impromptu meals. Or oh I need this but forgot about it.
The other night I wanted a salmon filet over a salad. I went to the store all the ingredients together was 22$. The pub next store has a salmon entree for 15$. Sometimes the value propositions are skewed.
Firstly when I was in the city, I didn't track my expenditure but would say I was spending more. This was in part because of a smaller kitchen and fridge. Because of the smaller kitchen there was less space to get items in bulk. The fridge didn't allow much meal prep. I'm the type to usually devote one day to cooking out of the week. But at the same time, I cooked more often due to convenience.
Secondly I feel like food prices are going up. My diet was very simple meat, produce, yogurt, protein powder. Those prices have stayed relatively flat. But when I started shopping for my girlfriend. It seemed like bread, soda, chips, etc. had gone up. I almost had sticker shock, when I went to get soda.
I'm also curious about the ramifications of living space. The millenial is often slated to be living in more urban areas. Where the kitchens often are not the best. I'm not asking for a Viking or Subzero range, but less than 10 minutes to boil water would be nice.
My apartment in the city had a Kenmore induction range. A piece of chicken on that took about 6 minutes to cook. My kenmore gas range at my house took 2 minutes to cook chicken. The cooking process was much quicker.
A number of my friends also don't know how to really cook. I'm not trying to be mean, but we're also seeing a proliferation of meal in a box busineses. That ship recipes to you. Is it ease of delivery, or ease of preparation? It was pretty much jumping into the deep end when I learned about my food allergies. Learning how to really cook, then figuring out how to substitute items.
Taking this back a step. I grew up with tv dinners, around the weeknight sitcom. I know alot of people who grew up this way. A shift from family dinner, where at X time dinner was on the table and the family gathered around. Is there also an underlying shift to eat and be entertained?
This touches on a question I've been pondering lately: why isn't it cheaper to eat out than to go grocery shopping?
Obviously, this doesn't apply to fancy restaurants, but it seems to me that due to economies of scale there should be some class of budget "eating out" offering that is actually cheaper than if you were to make it yourself.
The parts of the food chain that enjoy economies of scale are in raising, harvesting/slaughtering, preparing, distributing, and cooking the food. Plating the food and bringing it to your table has no economies of scale, good service has diseconomies of scale, and dishwashing has only mild economies of scale.
There is a category of food - store-bought prepared, grab'n'go, and fast food - that actually does move the cooking to the institution, and these foods aren't much more expensive than prepping them yourself (certainly cheaper when you count the cost of labor). You have freshness & selection limitations on them, though: since non-refrigerated food goes bad within an hour or two after being cooked, they're limited to those items that can move in sufficient volume that at the scale they're being cooked, they'll sell within an hour.
Yeah, I guess I didn't make clear by "eating out" but I don't mean sit-down service at a restaurant. Just any sort of institution that provides cooked food to me.
I suppose you're right that "fast food" might be cheaper, but it's so unhealthy. I would think some business offering rice, beans, lentils, teeeeny bits of meat, cheap but fresh vegetables could still come in cheaper than preparing food yourself, provided they don't have to wait your table or anything. Maybe they only offer one or two meal options and it's somewhat pre-cooked.
That'd probably work on a unit-economics basis but fail on a volume basis. In order for cooking-at-scale to work, you need to drive sufficient sales within your local area that you can ensure that food is bought within a few minutes after cooking it. The vast majority of people buy by taste rather than by healthiness. (Otherwise, we wouldn't have such an obesity epidemic in the US.)
Incidentally, in markets where there are a fair number of health-conscious yuppies, you do get healthy fast-food restaurants, eg. Loving Hut in SF/BayArea. I hear Portland has a big food truck that scene that's somewhat similar.
What if there was a mobile(not cellphone) grocer that frequented locations where people might consider buying from the grocer?
A grocer truck (like a food truck) could frequent train station parking lots as designated times allowing commuters to shop a couple of days' groceries.
A grocer truck could frequent central locations in a neighborhood at designated times to allow residents to walk up to the truck to purchase groceries.
Upsides:
grocery when you need it without trips to the supermarkets
purchase less but more often than a once a week trip.
convenient location and timing to do grocery shopping
no parking hassles if the model is a walk up to purchase groceries.
downsides:
limited choice (can be mitigated if grocer has a mobile app)
limited supply (again if there is an app and you can preorder the items are kept aside for you for a limited time before being sold) Perishable items cannot be set aside indefinitely.
limited pick up options (grocer can field location requests and can add a location if there is enough demand for it)
All this might have already been tried but I don't know of it. What other downsides do you see apart from the fact that some people would rather order from a restaurant than cook? This would not be for those people who don't want to cook.
Everything you describe is how this works in much of the world, except remove the wheels.
The station near my work has three "supermarkets" within 50m of the entrance, catering to three different price brackets. There's nowhere to park, they sell very little other than food[1], and they only provide baskets -- they don't expect people to buy more than they can fit on a bicycle. They're open every day, from 7-22.
[1] They sell detergents and so on, but you can't buy a TV or a pair of jeans, or a huge box of anything.
That's good to know. In my birth country growing up I remember my mom used to buy a couple of days' vegetables from a roaming vegetable vendor. The vegetables were fresh and available at the doorstep in the morning before lunch preparation began. Since we were vegetarians we didn't see or know if there were meat vendors that did this too but my guess is there weren't since these "mobile" vendors didn't have refrigeration on their push carts.
Doesn't sound like it would work, because there are at least two problems with that.
The first problem would be a kind of rendez-vous game [0]. Given the available information, seller and buyers have to choose their location such that they maximize the likelihood of finding their couterpart. Whereas people might think "Oh! Don't mind if I do!" if they see an ice cream truck, that's much less likely with groceries. Generally, people walk into a supermarket with a general idea of what they're going to buy, if not with an outright list. If the seller has higher costs of moving around than his customers, he'll just pick a place as a fixed permanent position at or near his warehouse (a.k.a a "store") and make it known so that customers might come to him. An ice cream truck, on the other hand, will just move to where the crowds are.
The second problem is that grocers seem to compete on variety and price. While you could sell a large variety of products from a truck, you'd be able to get a higher return on your dollar if you increased scale (suppliers might give you discounts, for instance). So a fixed shop could offer as much variety as truck, but at a lower price.
Why, as a millennial, does it feel like everybody is judging me for the decisions me and my peers make? If people want to be observational that's fine, but you don't have to look very far in the comments here to see the thinly veiled disdain for the habits of my generation.
It's the nature of the Internet (and really, opinions in general). If you're happy with the choices you make, what does it matter what the Internet thinks of them?
Generally speaking, everyone hates the new guy. I'm a Gen-Xer and we went through the same thing, as I'm sure every generation before us did. My advice? Ignore it. It is meaningless, lazy journalism.
I am not a Millennial, but the article did mention Gen-X and their parents, so..
I love cook. I love preparing a delicious meal for my family. We're foster parents and currently have two under three, and I know they're too young to really appreciate it, but I love preparing colorful, delicious meals for them.
One thing that really helps me at the store is a list. I have a wiki set up on our home server where I track menus for the weak and recipes for those meals. I also keep a copy of the grocery list. I print that out, scratch out anything we already have on hand, and take that to the store. Makes it all really simple and easy.
Once you have a dozen or two meals that the kids will eat and the parents enjoy, you can mix and match those and also rotate in some new ones to try. But you'll always have that base, so when that hectic week happens, at least meals won't be an issue.
I also have two under 3, so I can commiserate with making routine tasks as easy and efficient as possible. Ironic that you're running your kitchen like a restaurant tho, eh?
I've been trying lists with Trello, Alexa, or the ShopRite app because I either forget to print the list, or the printer is out of toner, or I can't read my handwriting because my only free time was 2am and I couldn't see straight anyways. There's no elegant and complete solution out there that works for me yet.
I believe this is not just a shift in spending behavior by age, but a product of people waiting longer to have children. Cooking a meal as a single person or couple is harder to justify vs a restaurant. When cooking it becomes more cost and time effective the more quantity of food you cook. For me it is far more time and cost effective to eat an inexpensive meal from a take out place, although I like cooking.
It's not the fact that I hate Grocery Shopping. I hate going into the store during peak hours. I know I can always go before or after peak hours, but working second shift makes that difficult when most stores near me close at 11pm. Coupled with the other issue: People. Hacking and coughing, not covering mouths, kids running around with no parental supervision. Or those same kids walking the cart into things or other people. (I know that not all kids are like this, but "one bad apple spoils the bunch")
I understand that going to a restaurant is no better, but at lease I can call ahead, pick up the food and leave.
Grocery stores are the absolute best venues for people-watching. When traveling especially, the best way to get a sense of the people in a new place is to spend time at their grocery store.
141 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 191 ms ] threadMy point is, millennials are young; young people don't cook. This isn't a big surprise.
The line right under the title says: Because they prefer chips from CVS and going out to restaurants. And, increasingly, so do their parents.
"So what’s the real story here? Yes, Millennials are shifting their spending toward restaurants and bars and away from grocers. But it’s not an unprecedented shift. They’re simply returning to their mid-aughts levels of restaurant spending."
"The big story here is not that young people are uniquely turning away from groceries. Rather, the story is a structural shift toward eating out at restaurants, among Millennials and their parents (and perhaps even their grandparents)."
I love Costco too, but our apartment is too small for storing lots of bulk food items. My wife and I dream of having a bigger kitchen, pantry, and chest freezer someday.
I'm working on getting better numbers, since it seems like a lot too, especially when I think about what I'm eating: toast for breakfast, leftovers for lunch, simple dinners. I'd really like to know!
When I was single I was averaging about 250 -> 350 a month. But I offset this by buying chicken in bulk at 40LB increments and that usually lasted me several months.
For two right now I'm average about 700 to 800 a month. I have a number of food allergies so ingredients or restrictive. The other half is as close to organic as possible.
I'd say the biggest contribution to the price is moving off farm sourcing. I don't have the time right now to process 40lb of chicken, or several cases of produce.
Also that it seems like nobody has more than about three days of food in their pantry. My mother still puts up hundreds of quarts of canned vegetables every summer out of the garden, freezes enough other stuff to fill an entire full-size freezer, then they buy half a beef-creature from the farmer down the hill to fill the other freezer. And usually a couple hundred pounds of potatoes. There's probably enough food to keep them alive for two years.
Driving to pick up dinner each day would be just tedious.
https://twitter.com/thinkpiecebot
A better question is why we still have food warehouses that would be better operated by robots than people.
As a high-earning hyper-urban techy millenial (Brooklynite / software engineer) who doesn't particularly enjoy cooking, I'm wondering where the value proposition for groceries is when I can order from a huge variety of nearby restaurants, who will deliver hot, cooked food to my door every night for about $20/meal.
Considering there tends to be zero food waste with this option, I'm not sure I'm saving money by shopping for food, especially when I assign a value to my free time, which I like to estimate at half my hourly rate in calculations like this.
I've tried grocery deliveries. Invariably not everything you want gets delivered. Produce and other fresh items may not be as good as you expect. Maybe if I had Instacart with Whole Foods but then I'd spend more and it's not available where I live anyway. Lots of people aren't quite as adverse to getting up from their computer.
One reason is because not all fresh goods (e.g. produce and meat) are created equal. Hand selection of those items is part of getting the most value our of your food dollars. You can likely overcome many of the other issues; price comparison, new product discovery, etc.; but you're still left with the inconsistency of items that come from dirt.
High quality food delivery is certainly possible. From what I've seen of Instacart delivering from Whole Foods, it works pretty well. But it's a premium service and isn't available where I live.
I'm not going to say it's necessarily more complicated of a problem -- I chose the word "complex" purposely -- as it mostly just simplifies down to being more training data for the AI produce picker (or what have you), but it sure seems like the failure rate would scale up rather quickly in real world scenarios. That would just lead to waste we wouldn't otherwise have.
Or maybe I just prefer to pick out my own produce. It could go either way, CV isn't my field.
Either way, handling pantry goods in this way doesn't sound particularly unreasonable.
We're just not the agrarian society that would be conducive to providing "hyperlocal produce / butchers".
You do realize that many places have these things called seasons? I do have a farm stand just down the road from me which has excellent (albeit a limited range of) produce in August. January? Not so much.
Everyone can always opt out if they're willing to drop enough things. A trivial way to opt out is to commit suicide. But are other ways too, such as moving into the wilderness and trying to make it there on your own. And that's comparatively much "cheaper" in poorer societies, since there is less to give up.
For instance, whereas in Medieval times serfs might have ran away from their lords and into the wilderness in order to avoid law and taxes, the majority of present-day criminals are found and captured in their own towns, while disgruntled citizens consider themselves to have little option but whine when it comes to taxes.
"Late stage capitalism" does indeed produce enough goods and services that people have the option of opting out. There's some pretty neat survivalist gear for sale nowadays. But they never really do.
That and to your last point is what I was thinking about. It's harder to "opt out" of a subsistence farming existence than it is to opt out of a society where you have access to time- & resource-saving technology that enables you to multiply your abilities, as well as basic necessities at a price that allows you to have disposable income.
That's one of the gripes I have about some of the faux-sustainability crowd: it's not sustainable if it's predicated on a USD$100,000+ income.
From a societal evolution standpoint it's been selected for extinction and we're keeping it alive because... why again?
Many, many millenials aren't as fortunate to have a high-paying software engineering position like yourself.
For them, $20 per dinner every night is simply impossible.
If the price of not making that grocery run for 3 years is "I get to do a startup without permission of investors", would you still do it?
You can write off those last 30 minutes of work a day as the part that feeds you but ultimately you're spending over the odds for food you could have made yourself.
hmm, sure is a lot of energy waste though for every meal delivered.
Maybe in downtown, but I don't think the millennials who oppose grocery shopping are all clustered around areas where electric bike delivery is available. The would seem to be a very small representative subset.
One roommate now will only eat with us if we add up the cost of ingredients and charge him fairly. Many of our dinners cost only a couple dollars.
Pasta with marinara sauce and dinner rolls: 1.33 / pound pasta, 1.80 jar of sauce, rolls 0.13 each. Serves 3-4 people for $5. 15 minutes (limited by water heating).
Tacos with guacamole: $3 pre-made guacamole, tortillas 0.5 / 12 pieces, beans 1.20 / can, salsa $2 / half bottle, tofu 1.5 / block, cilantro 1 / bundle. rice ~$1. Serves 3-4 people for $10. 20 minutes (lots of tasks, have to cook tortillas).
I won't break it down, but I can do a nice sushi dinner: various rolls, cold tofu, inari, miso soup, for 3-4 people for about $15. 45 minutes (lots of tasks).
In any case I can feed three adults for about ten dollars and 2/3 of an hour of my time. Usually there are enough left-overs to make a nice lunch for myself.
I enjoy eating out, and do so about once a week. Before I got married I ate out a lot. I would spend about $900 per month just for myself. Now I make an effort to cook dinner 6 days a week and spend a total of about 800 per month on food for both of us.
For instance, pre-made guacamole, if it's actually made entirely from real avocados, is more like $6 where I'm at if you want enough to feed 4 people multiple tacos each -- so twice the price you're quoting here.
My general food purchasing scheme is to attempt to only purchase the foods I can get at the best prices. If I am shopping and see a 10 pound bag of organic carrots for less than $5 I will buy it and have lots of carrots that week. For example: carrot salad, egg-rolls (carrot filling freezes well), soup, or stir-fry.
I can always buy tortillas for about 3-4 dollars for at least 6 dozen. I freeze them into one dozen stacks and defrost in the microwave until they can be teased apart and finished on a pan.
Some of the best deals I get are at Whole Foods. They often have very good sales on frozen foods. Otherwise I get foods at Costco, a local family market, and Trader Joe's. In the summer I occasionally go to a flea market to get specialty items and seasonal produce.
A jar of $1.80 pasta sauce around here is probably going to be more closely related to ketchup than real pasta sauce.
> tofu 1.5 / block
Hm. You clearly have much better food prices than I do in general, I guess.
If I save approximately the same amount cooking vs eating out, but it takes me the same additional amount of time to cook (again, assuming you don't enjoy that), then as my income grows the smaller the savings become as a percentage and the larger the monetary value of a given amount of my time becomes worth.
That only works when you are choose to use that free time earning at that rate. Otherwise you are simply using mental gymnastics to validate your choice (which, since it is your money and your food, certainly does not require validation from others).
I'm disappointed when it costs more than $10 total to feed my family of 5 a hot cooked meal. 1.5 lbs of beef, 2 vegetables, and a few cups of milk is ~$10. This will increase as my kids get older, but God I can't imagine spending $20 per meal per person on food. Plus, the kids get to help see how the food is prepared, our oldest (7) can help cut veggies, everyone can help set the table, and best of all we know every last ingredient that does (and doesn't) end up in our food.
I assign a value to my free time too, and preparing fresh meals with my family is pretty damn valuable.
Cooking at home after with all that just reminds me that I'm not cooking with a family or whatever. I'd rather go sit next to strangers and have some human interactions with people who aren't Millennials working in tech.
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=http://www.forbe...
http://www.guidingtech.com/13245/youtube-channels-learn-basi...
It will take some time to learn, and some epic failures, but within a few weeks you'll be making great food you can't wait to eat!
I do. I have a list, so I'm pretty much on auto pilot in the store. This is 45 min that I can let my mind just shut down. Completely analog, no screens, no job, no worries. Nothing. Just walk the isles, load a cart and scratch a list.
> who doesn't particularly enjoy cooking, I'm wondering where the value proposition for groceries is when I can order from a huge variety of nearby restaurants,
If you don't enjoy cooking, then there really is no value proposition. Unless you think you may get to the point later in life where you wish you'd saved a bit more money. But you're young so you're still bullet proof.
> Considering there tends to be zero food waste with this option, I'm not sure I'm saving money by shopping for food...
With proper meal planning and preparing, there shouldn't be waste. But again, you don't enjoy cooking, so that's the hurdle.
I guess so, relative to ordering cooked meals and groceries on line. But it's not quite binary. Any hunters and gatherers on Hacker News?
LOL.
I'll caution against drawing an equivalency between a lifestyle of eating take-out/delivery food vs. cooking (cooking, not heating up boxes of stuff) food you prepare at home.
In the former approach, you take what shows up. You can only control what you order and where you order from. In the latter approach, you can control what's going in to about as great (or little) a degree as you care to.
YMMV of course.
No robots yet but I hope that's not far off.
Honestly I feel almost guilty when they roll up to the deliver the groceries.
My local store uses Rosie for online shopping and states that only advertised specials are guaranteed to have the store price.
Considering my company provides breakfast and lunch, the high price for dinner isn't that bad. Also on weekends we're usually not home to cook, which increased the probability of wasting groceries we didn't eat during the week.
As millennials without children and good jobs who don't enjoy cooking, there isn't any reason to spend the time planning meals, renting a car and going to the grocery store on the weekend when I'd rather be doing anything else. If I lived in a smaller city, where I had a house and a car without an app that delivered healthy food, then it would have to change, but thats a boring life.
Honestly, I start thinking about the grocery store model and wondering if it needs to evolve.
I suppose that technically-speaking a Walmart (or Target) is not a "supermarket." But that seems like a distinction without a difference in terms of making statements about how a given demographic is moving away from grocery shopping.
ADDED: I don't like doing grocery shopping at Walmart in general because of generally sub-par meat, bakery, and produce. But I still use one to pick up packaged groceries simply because it's a bit closer than my nearest regular supermarket.
Sigh. At least you didn't write "for all intensive purposes".
>The big story here is not that young people are uniquely turning away from groceries. Rather, the story is a structural shift toward eating out at restaurants
>So what seems to be a strictly Millennial trend is in fact part of a much broader cultural shift.
If I was less broke I would go out more and maybe splurge at Target sometimes, and buy more stuff on Amazon so I don't have to carry it. But the 'neighborhood' Walmart has produce so-- I think actually they should count Walmart and Target as grocery stores.
It claims that more people are eating out. But it may be that as income disparity increases, restaurant prices go up for the people who can afford to eat out. That would lead to an increased amount of money going into restaurants, even though the same number or even fewer people are eating out.
Certainly there were moments when I worked at Google that I was like "Why do I bother going to the supermarket, when I get 10 meals/week at work and can easily Instacart the rest?", and it was really just force of habit that kept me shopping. But now that I'm doing a startup, I appreciate having habits that keep my burn rate low - my in-laws recently looked at their food budget and realized that "Oh, the reason we're not saving any money is because we eat out every day."
Exceptions are dried spices, household goods, and oils which I buy in bulk. I did hate the time in line, effort etc. But also allowed me to check out for a bit.
Now I dread it, and do most of my orders through FreshDirect. I'm sort of in a food desert. There are two grocery stores two miles away from me. There are buses that run every 1.5 hours, and take 40 minutes to get there.
I hate it because I generally have to walk. It burns about 2 hours for me. I have to carry everything back in a backpack. Uber/Lyft is 30$ per trip. It's a bigger problem for impromptu meals. Or oh I need this but forgot about it.
The other night I wanted a salmon filet over a salad. I went to the store all the ingredients together was 22$. The pub next store has a salmon entree for 15$. Sometimes the value propositions are skewed.
Firstly when I was in the city, I didn't track my expenditure but would say I was spending more. This was in part because of a smaller kitchen and fridge. Because of the smaller kitchen there was less space to get items in bulk. The fridge didn't allow much meal prep. I'm the type to usually devote one day to cooking out of the week. But at the same time, I cooked more often due to convenience.
Secondly I feel like food prices are going up. My diet was very simple meat, produce, yogurt, protein powder. Those prices have stayed relatively flat. But when I started shopping for my girlfriend. It seemed like bread, soda, chips, etc. had gone up. I almost had sticker shock, when I went to get soda.
I'm also curious about the ramifications of living space. The millenial is often slated to be living in more urban areas. Where the kitchens often are not the best. I'm not asking for a Viking or Subzero range, but less than 10 minutes to boil water would be nice.
My apartment in the city had a Kenmore induction range. A piece of chicken on that took about 6 minutes to cook. My kenmore gas range at my house took 2 minutes to cook chicken. The cooking process was much quicker.
A number of my friends also don't know how to really cook. I'm not trying to be mean, but we're also seeing a proliferation of meal in a box busineses. That ship recipes to you. Is it ease of delivery, or ease of preparation? It was pretty much jumping into the deep end when I learned about my food allergies. Learning how to really cook, then figuring out how to substitute items.
Taking this back a step. I grew up with tv dinners, around the weeknight sitcom. I know alot of people who grew up this way. A shift from family dinner, where at X time dinner was on the table and the family gathered around. Is there also an underlying shift to eat and be entertained?
Obviously, this doesn't apply to fancy restaurants, but it seems to me that due to economies of scale there should be some class of budget "eating out" offering that is actually cheaper than if you were to make it yourself.
The parts of the food chain that enjoy economies of scale are in raising, harvesting/slaughtering, preparing, distributing, and cooking the food. Plating the food and bringing it to your table has no economies of scale, good service has diseconomies of scale, and dishwashing has only mild economies of scale.
There is a category of food - store-bought prepared, grab'n'go, and fast food - that actually does move the cooking to the institution, and these foods aren't much more expensive than prepping them yourself (certainly cheaper when you count the cost of labor). You have freshness & selection limitations on them, though: since non-refrigerated food goes bad within an hour or two after being cooked, they're limited to those items that can move in sufficient volume that at the scale they're being cooked, they'll sell within an hour.
I suppose you're right that "fast food" might be cheaper, but it's so unhealthy. I would think some business offering rice, beans, lentils, teeeeny bits of meat, cheap but fresh vegetables could still come in cheaper than preparing food yourself, provided they don't have to wait your table or anything. Maybe they only offer one or two meal options and it's somewhat pre-cooked.
Incidentally, in markets where there are a fair number of health-conscious yuppies, you do get healthy fast-food restaurants, eg. Loving Hut in SF/BayArea. I hear Portland has a big food truck that scene that's somewhat similar.
Not to mention cost of the land, building, and repairs which are "free" in your own house because you're already paying for it.
What if there was a mobile(not cellphone) grocer that frequented locations where people might consider buying from the grocer?
A grocer truck (like a food truck) could frequent train station parking lots as designated times allowing commuters to shop a couple of days' groceries. A grocer truck could frequent central locations in a neighborhood at designated times to allow residents to walk up to the truck to purchase groceries.
Upsides:
grocery when you need it without trips to the supermarkets
purchase less but more often than a once a week trip.
convenient location and timing to do grocery shopping
no parking hassles if the model is a walk up to purchase groceries.
downsides: limited choice (can be mitigated if grocer has a mobile app)
limited supply (again if there is an app and you can preorder the items are kept aside for you for a limited time before being sold) Perishable items cannot be set aside indefinitely.
limited pick up options (grocer can field location requests and can add a location if there is enough demand for it)
All this might have already been tried but I don't know of it. What other downsides do you see apart from the fact that some people would rather order from a restaurant than cook? This would not be for those people who don't want to cook.
The station near my work has three "supermarkets" within 50m of the entrance, catering to three different price brackets. There's nowhere to park, they sell very little other than food[1], and they only provide baskets -- they don't expect people to buy more than they can fit on a bicycle. They're open every day, from 7-22.
[1] They sell detergents and so on, but you can't buy a TV or a pair of jeans, or a huge box of anything.
The first problem would be a kind of rendez-vous game [0]. Given the available information, seller and buyers have to choose their location such that they maximize the likelihood of finding their couterpart. Whereas people might think "Oh! Don't mind if I do!" if they see an ice cream truck, that's much less likely with groceries. Generally, people walk into a supermarket with a general idea of what they're going to buy, if not with an outright list. If the seller has higher costs of moving around than his customers, he'll just pick a place as a fixed permanent position at or near his warehouse (a.k.a a "store") and make it known so that customers might come to him. An ice cream truck, on the other hand, will just move to where the crowds are.
The second problem is that grocers seem to compete on variety and price. While you could sell a large variety of products from a truck, you'd be able to get a higher return on your dollar if you increased scale (suppliers might give you discounts, for instance). So a fixed shop could offer as much variety as truck, but at a lower price.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_problem
I love cook. I love preparing a delicious meal for my family. We're foster parents and currently have two under three, and I know they're too young to really appreciate it, but I love preparing colorful, delicious meals for them.
One thing that really helps me at the store is a list. I have a wiki set up on our home server where I track menus for the weak and recipes for those meals. I also keep a copy of the grocery list. I print that out, scratch out anything we already have on hand, and take that to the store. Makes it all really simple and easy.
Once you have a dozen or two meals that the kids will eat and the parents enjoy, you can mix and match those and also rotate in some new ones to try. But you'll always have that base, so when that hectic week happens, at least meals won't be an issue.
I've been trying lists with Trello, Alexa, or the ShopRite app because I either forget to print the list, or the printer is out of toner, or I can't read my handwriting because my only free time was 2am and I couldn't see straight anyways. There's no elegant and complete solution out there that works for me yet.
My menus look something like:
October 21, 2016
[[ShoppingList20161021:lists|Shopping List]]-----
October 14, 2016
...
Now, I can just click to pull up the recipe and or shopping list.
Recipes can be cut and paste from websites or a picture taken with phone from one of my cookbooks, etc.
I can cut and paste recipe to make new menus very simply or I can just copy entire menus with shopping lists; just need to edit the date.
Oh and I have a vpn running, so if I do happen to leave my list, I can still get to it.
I understand that going to a restaurant is no better, but at lease I can call ahead, pick up the food and leave.