Fast Food and Your Money?

"McDonald’s opened their first restaurant in 1945, and by 1990 the fast food industry had taken over America with 11,800 McDonald’s, 6,298 Burger Kings and 3,721 Wendy’s”. Just with that statistic alone, it goes to show how rapidly fast food restaurants grow.  As if that statistic did not show how much fast food has taken over, "each day more than 160,000 fast food restaurants service more than 50 million Americans, producing sales of more than $110 billion dollars annually”.  $110 billion dollars is a lot of money coming out of our pockets for fast food restaurants, and is something to consider when eating at these companies. Although running through McDonalds, or Chick-Fil-A can seem like a cheap and easy way to eat, it doesn't add up to be as cheap as we may think.  Most Americans think that on the spot it seems to be cheap to eat out, and it may be for some people, but if you have that mindset more than two or three times a week, cheap turns into more and more expensive with each trip made. We may not all think that we spend a lot of our money out at fast food restaurants, but it goes to show with the profit made by these companies. "The annual revenues of America’s fast food industry have risen by about 20 percent since 2001”. Most Americans’ money for food is going to fast food restaurants instead of regular home cooked meals like it used to be. More and more Americans are picking the easy way out and eating out each day rather than going to the grocery store and buying the food to cook at home. "A generation ago, we could say that more than three quarters of money spent on food were for ingredients to cook a home made meal, while today we say more than half of the money spent on food is spent on food outside of the home”.  A closer look at our own money needs to go into effect, that is the only way we can help our health and money for the better overall.  A major start would be not eating out as much and being aware of our own personal budget. 

 Direct quotes by:
Onegreenplanet.org
Dailybeast.com