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True!

This article ignores an important aspect of time. I earn about $90 an hour. So between cooking and doing dishes, let's say i remove the wait times and stuff where i could do other things, I am still using up about 10 to 15 minutes extra preparing a fresh chicken.

I understand I don't work 24/7, but still, even my downtime matters so even if I cut down that price per hour in half, I'd still rather get a pre-made chicken especially during the week when time is of the essence.



You value all your time at $90 an hour and still find time to give us some?! You are extremely generous!

Obviously facetious but hopefully you get my point. Not all time in our lives is billable. You don't get paid for washing your own clothes, cleaning your kitchen, taking your kids to school. It's life. You do that for you. While these are all things you can pay somebody else to do, it's really not until that point you can start comparing time values. If you are, you're probably not in the demographic that buys cheap rotisserie chicken.

Or you're some sort of robot who never sleeps and only works. Again, thanks for putting your zeros and ones aside for a few minutes to talk to us.


Lol. Thanks for calling me out, albeit it subtle. I don't work 24hrs, like i already stated. Which means my price per hour obviously is not uniform throughout the day.

However, my value for my most productive 8 hours of the day is directly correlated to what i do in my "downtime". So if i went drinking for 4 hours one night, it would reduce my productivity during my best hours during the next day. So whatever i do during my down hours matters. Sleep matters, rest matters, food matters. So i have to optimize those as well. So my price per hour never goes to zero at any point in the day. Which is why i trimmed it to half in my final part. So that 15min is still worth a dollar value, no?


You've made an excellent argument for outsourcing your entire meal prep and having food delivered to your house (or paying someone to shop for you) and having someone cook it for you.

The "I make $___ an hour" claim only holds weight if your alternative to whatever activity would be to actually charge money for that time. Presumably you're going to make your own dinner most of the time so your hourly rate at work is largely irrelevant.


This is an oversimplification. If the time I'm spending not working is contributing to my ability to make $90/hr it's entirely valid. There are so many things that can fall into this category too, like the need for people to have recreational time, or professional development (e.g. reading journals), etc.


Then you are not making 90$ an hour, but whatever is the prorated fare accounting for your not-billing hours.


I enjoy cooking and baking but even I would say that the only argument needed for "outsourcing your entire meal prep and having food delivered to your house" is "I don't feel like doing it myself."

I'm not posting this just to be a jerk; rather, I think that too often we spend time trying to justify a behavior that is not at all damaging, but somehow seems "bad."

If you don't like doing X and you can afford to pay someone to do it, then go ahead, do so and get on with Life.


I charge my per hour price based on my productivity. So even though its only 8 hours of proudctivity in a day, my effectiveness in that period depends on what i do in my downtime. If i go drinking, my productivity is affected. Same here. Even though it won't be the same price per hour


Whether or not its the amount you get paid per hour, every hour devoted to an activity has an opportunity cost, and there is some value associated with that cost. No time is free.


I agree the article underemphasized the cost of time, but it didn't ignore it. It is addressed in the last section of the article.

When a cook’s time is included as labor costs in the above calculation, whole chickens become more expensive than rotisserie options.




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