Priceonomics:
Is it any wonder that Americans will buy one billion rotisserie chickens this year, most of those from supermarkets or discount stores with grocery operations?
The price point of rotisserie chickens has captured consumers’ interest almost as much as the chickens themselves. At a typical supermarket, it might cost $7 or $8, the same as a fresh whole chicken in the refrigerator case. Less, in some stores. And the store pays for the herbs and the heat.
Why is rotisserie chicken so cheap?
This article was a lot more interesting than it had any right to be. I’ve never roasted a whole chicken, preferring to just cook the individual pieces I need (usually breasts or thighs, depending on the recipe) but, when I need a lot of chicken, I always grab a rotisserie bird from the supermarket if only for convenience and speed’s sake.
Funnily enough it was only a month or so ago we switched from getting a rotisserie chook once a week to buying an uncooked one and roasting it ourselves on a Saturday afternoon.
Get a lot more meat for your buck – and it tastes better too.
But I reckon we had rotisserie chickens in Australia before 1985 as mentioned in the story.
If one wants to make a better comparison, one should use volume of meat, rather than simple weight. If you buy fresh/frozen, you’re paying for all the stuff that ends up in the bottom of the pan. You should also attribute some value to your cooking time. After all, milk from a cow that you own and milk yourself is wayyy cheaper than buying from the store, if you don’t fully incorporate all the various tangible and intangible costs.
Always interesting.
(One more note is that while a home-roasted chicken is cheaper, it has costs as well.
Namely “effort and time” and “eating all that chicken”.
For a hungry family, the latter is no big deal – for a single person, well, it’s harder to actually eat three pounds of cooked chicken vs 1.5 – and wasted meat raises your effective cost per pound.
Me, I’ll buy a rotisserie if I’m feeling lazy and just feeding myself, maybe. Otherwise, and almost always if the girlfriend is eating, it’s whole-bird, or roast-some-hindquarters time.)
The article does compare net weight post-cooking to get the effective per-pound, if you look closely.
Volume is both harder to measure (you’d need a displacement tank or some weird controls on manually packing shreds into a container, I guess) and not how anyone actually sells, buys, or portions their chicken, is the thing.
(Plus, we generally prefer moister chicken over drier – and weight reflects that better than volume.)
Time can’t reasonably be priced in an article (vs. a personal analysis) because time/effort is valued so radically differently between various people.
(People who hate cooking vs. people who both love it and feel really good about feeding loved ones, for example…)
That’s fair. For the time aspect, even just attributing minimum wage to it, as opportunity cost if nothing else, would work.
Personally, we buy frozen chicken tenderloins by the multi-pound package and fry the whole bag. Taking bones out of the equation saves tons of time.
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Two thoughts. We get them at Costco for under $5 and they are big. Secondly, one guy who worked at a grocery chain said they would take expired chickens at their store and make them the rotisserie chickens for that week.
Costco hands down.