The Chicken Tender Rule
For years, I have measured the real-world cost of things by a variety of rules of thumb. One of my favorites has been the “Waffle House Formula,” wherein the cost of taking my family to Waffle House was a pretty good analogy to the rest of my famliy budget.
When my wife and I first got married, it was around $15, tax and tip included, for the two of us to go eat at Waffle House. Then we had a kid, eventually bumping the cost up to around $18 to $20. Then another kid came along, adding a few more dollars, followed by a few more as our two boys got bigger and required more food. It got to be around $30, effectively doubling our Waffle House bill, which fairly accurately reflected the doubling of the size of our family and the size of our regular household expenses with things like food and clothing and water use and everything else that you need more of when you’re working with more people.
Fast-forward a few years and we added a third kid, which of course eventually meant spending more for a trip to Waffle House. Couple the additional mouth to feed with the inevitable rise in the cost of, well, everything, and now the bill for a family of five would come out at around $40 or so. Then, eventually, $50, which suddenly doesn’t make a lot of economic sense, when waffles, eggs and bacon costs about two bucks a person to make at home.
Well, that’s the “Waffle House Formula” in a nutshell.
Once it gets too expensive to do something, you either
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have to stop doing it, figure out how to do it cheaper, or learn how to live with the high cost of doing it.
You can apply that to pretty much anything, like playing golf or collecting comic books or going on vacation in the RV. Can you afford it? If not, is there a cheaper way? If not, what else can you give up to keep doing it? For many of us these days, one of the key things we have to consider is the high cost of a gallon of gas. When gas was around $2 a gallon, it was pretty easy to just say, hey, let’s drive up to the Ozarks for the weekend and camp out. At $4 a gallon, which is where we’ve been hovering for most of the summer, a $70 gas bill is suddenly a $140 gas bill and you have to decide if that extra $70 could be better spent elsewhere, like on eggs or ground beef, which have also dramatically jumped in price over the past several months.
Well, my son, who is a social studies teacher, was recently discussing some economic ideas with my daughter during dinner (we are a wild bunch, I tell you what), and he said mentioned what he called the “Chicken Tender Rule,” which was one I was not familiar with.
He said that just about every restaurant, from a seafood place to a burger joint to a Mexican cantina offfers a chicken tender dinner. He said, at least according to this rule, you can always tell how the economy is doing by the cost of a chicken tender dinner, the most generic and universal menu item.
If the cost of a chicken tender dinner is around $7.99, then the economy is doing pretty well, but if it’s $9.99 then the restaurant is struggling to sell its higher priced entrees and the economy is doing bad.
It made sense to me.
And it made even more sense when I looked at a menu Sunday aftert church when we went out to eat and I happened to see the place we went had a chicken tender dinner for $12.49.
And, of course, our local Waffle House went out of business, so these are definitely troubling times…
