Recently I read an article where the author said that buying out is cheaper than staying in. Of course my curiosity was sparked. After all, saving for a wedding has left little money for eating out so Ben and I often use different excuses to legitimize our spending. I thought that perhaps this would give me the opportunity to once and for all come up with a concrete excuse that I could always employ. However, as I read the article I quickly realized that it wasn’t the excuse that I was going to be looking for. The author argued that if you were to use their wage for the amount of time that they spent having to actually cook the meal that it would cost more to make it themselves than it would have to have gone out in the first place. However, this has caused me to wonder, what would happen if we applied this rationality to everything? Suddenly, it costs me more to clean my house than to pay someone else to do it, taking my dog for a walk would be cheaper if I paid a dog walker to do it for me, and my homework would defiantly be cheaper if I paid an online agency to do it for me. But something is missing. Oh yeah, the fact that I am not actually getting paid for any of that. You can’t spend money that you don’t have. (Well, I am sure some credit card agencies would argue differently.) If you are not getting paid for the meals that you cook at home you cannot justify using your “wages” to eat out. Work time and home time is completely separate. As a feminist I am often tempted to argue the women should get paid a “wage” for the work that they do at home. My reasoning for this is that may times a home job can be more time consuming than an actual full time position outside of a home, a mother’s job is never done. Yet, for this case I don’t think that applying a wage to cooking when you aren’t actually earning money for it is a bit silly and more expensive. If you consider only the price that the food itself costs it is MUCH cheaper to eat at home.
Now, that isn’t to say that we should just stay at home and cook it ourselves either. Part of what frustrated me about this article is that is seemed to suggest that you can have more time to do important things if you aren’t cooking the food yourself but when I look back on my childhood I have so many fond memories of dinner time. Both of my parents loved to cook and in fact many of my favorite recipes are ones that my dad found. My parents would make things together and I would help set the table and get everyone something to drink. We would all talk while dinner was being made and afterwards we would all clean up together. Now that my dad has passed away and I am an adult and getting ready to be out on my own those moments are priceless to me. We may have not been getting paid wages for our work but we got something much better instead.