Analysis on the Cost of Eating Out
After last week’s how much does a meal cost post, Dennis suggested I look at eating out by category. This got me thinking, how often do we really eat sushi? So I had to check it out. Time for some more graphs!
To start with, I realized that last week’s 10.85 $/meal is a little too general because it is an average of all “eating out” expenses. This also includes snacks, coffees, and teas. So if we went to Tim Hortons for lunch fir 20$ but then decided on a 5$ ice cap afterwards, the average would be 12.5 $/meal for 2 meals instead of just 25$ for 1 meal. I suppose this is the danger of averaging. So in conclusion, the previous statement should be rephrased as average cost per eating out transaction.
The next step was to split eating out expenses into three distinct categories to get a better picture of where the money’s going:
Percentage of expenses | Average cost per person ($/expense)
Dinners 58% $14.15
Lunch/Breakfast 20% $13.63
Snacks 23% $3.68
This indicates that the average cost for dinner is actually higher at 14.15 $/dinner. Lunch is similarly expensive. This is closer in-line with my previous expectation that dinners should be 15–20$/meal but still comfortably less than my expectation. While dinners account for nearly 2/3rds of our eating out transactions, the low cost but moderately high frequency of snacks brings down the overall average to the previously mentioned 10.85 $/meal (transaction).
So what do we eat for dinner when we eat out?
Not surprising, for dinner meals, we eat sushi 50% of the time. Again, this makes sense because almost every Friday night is at sushi. Other food types are significantly less. Note that the “dinner” food category is because I didn’t record what type of food we were eating.
Looking at dinner meals, this is a graph that shows the cost per meal based on food type.
It’s really interesting because it’s ranked by order of occurrence with sushi happening the most at 37 times and Thai just 7 times. Taiwanese is 6 times, pho 5 times, Greek 4 times, Malaysian 3 times, Korean and Italian twice, and burgers once.
Sushi at 13$ makes sense because when we go to Asakusa Sushi we pay about 10$ each + tax and tip. Why is Thai, Malaysian, Korean and Italian so high? Probably because those times we ate out with friends or family and didn’t use coupons. In those instances, we’re often paying for 3–6 people instead of the regular 2. Or, we used a social shopper but the restaurant was still very expensive. Note that this data doesn’t show the potential savings for meals when friends or family treat us in return. Alex is quite good at that and always seems to get the better of us.
On the other hand, we have taken advantage of social shopper coupons for Greek, hotpot and burgers getting nearly a 50% discount on dinner. A nearby Taiwanese noodle house and an abundance of pho restaurants makes for comparable prices to sushi. Unfortunately we’ve been set off pho for a while after finding hair in our food… twice.
Lunch results are similar to what we found for dinner, although I’ve also included breakfast too. This one’s less accurate because each type, excluding the generic “lunch” only occurred 1–3 times. I withhold drawing conclusions about breakfast and dim sum because I know breakfast was at Ihop where I treated Dad and I can’t remember going for dim sum.
Generally, the remaining lunches are times when we go out on the weekend and get hungry but hadn’t packed any food.
A similar calculation for snacks (tim hortons, McDonald’s fries, drinks and gelato) shows that drinks (bubble tea, discount starbucks) accounts for nearly half of our snacks. I think this is good. It implies that we don’t impulse buy a lot of snacks when we’re hungry and away from the house.
What conclusions can we draw from this? I think we could pack lunches on the weekends more before leaving the house so we don’t end up buying stuff while out and about. This would reduce our lunch costs and potentially, snacks too.
On the other hand, eating out is a big part of wellness and happiness so a good balance needs to be found. I’m not sure what would be a good balance but I think we need to be very careful with the social shopper coupons we buy. We should only buy them if the restaurant is relatively cheap to begin with. Too many times have we bought discounts only to find that the restaurant is so expensive and the portions so small that we’re still paying through the roof. Damn that Italian restaurant…
Got any ideas? Let us know in the comments below.
