Chicken Stew (and Vegetarianism)

[kimberly_a]

Bought ingredients today for a chicken stew I'm making and was horrified at the cost of meat. Do people really buy this stuff every day without howling in pain? My eyes bugged out when I saw the price tag. No wonder I always used to cook vegetarian! That's difficult now, with all of Shannon's food constraints (no beans and no dairy, in particular,

Comments

[xiphias]

Well, at least that the value your actions are adding are greater than the amount of money you'd be likely to make in a similar amount of time doing paid work.

It doesn't need to be that your time is WORTHLESS -- just that this action would be a worthwhile use of your time.

My paid time is worth about $12 an hour. For me, I suspect this will be worth it, if I get a little skill under my belt -- especially since pay for meat-cutters at the local supermarket starts at around $16/hour. Which means that 1) if I do this, I'll teach myself an employable skill, and 2) if the supermarket pays $16/hour for this action, then they MUST be passing that cost on to me, and obviously at a premium (if the employee is getting $16/hour, the employer must be paying out something like nearly $30/hour what with payroll taxes and benefits, and they need to have at LEAST 10%/10% overhead and profit above that, as a MINUMUM).

Now, if I'm in a job that pays significantly above that amount, then, yes, it's not cost-effective to do it myself -- but it does become worthwhile to look at what it would cost to hire someone else to do it for you on a piecework basis -- could you pay someone $16/hour to do it for you on a job basis, and not have to deal with the cost of payroll taxes and benefits?

We're used to a situation where economies of scale make it much cheaper to get a mass-produced product. I'm not convinced that meat production is that way any longer. And certainly if you place a financial premium on "organic", "sustainable" and so forth, I think the numbers shift, and I'm starting to think that, for these products, buying locally starts to be cheaper than buying mass-produced.

[cartman94501]

You're absolutely right. Your time wouldn't have to be worthless, just worth less than the amount you save by doing this work yourself. If you've already worked 40 hours that week for wages, now you're sucking up your leisure time, so the calculation becomes, "Is an hour of meat cutting to save $x worth more to me than an hour of leisure time?" unless you consider meat cutting to be a leisure activity (I certainly don't).

I don't think someone who earns $16/hour in wages costs her/his employer anywhere near $30/hour in wages, benefits and payroll taxes. I think $20 would be more realistic. Social Security and Medicare taxes (7.65%) on $16/hour come to about $1.22/hour. On the other hand, your 10% markup seems very low, so perhaps $30/hour is realistic.