Help me understand the economics of breakfast

Been a while since the last entry. The lack of meat has really had an adverse effect on my thinking. Going well so far, just difficult when lunch time at the office comes. You walk into the staff eating area and you find your colleagues feasting on grilled chicken, burgers, stews, etc. Not a nice feeling. As a result I have my lunch thirty minutes before they do.

The meal I look forward to the most is thus Saturday breakfast as this is when I put a temporary halt to being vegetarian. As you can imagine, I go quite heavy on the grease either cooking it at home or going to the nearest coffee shop. I am not really a fan of those buffet breakfasts. I am quite fussy when it comes to breakfast and my tune is this: from pan to plate in less than a minute. I just don’t like those metal dishes with those warmers underneath that have sausages kept warm in their steam for thirty minutes. Worse with the bacon, as it tends to go hard when not eaten immediately. The scrambled eggs sometimes have this moat of water around them. Not too pleasing to the eye.

Last week I tried to calculate what would be cheaper, going out for breakfast or making my own. A no brainer I hear you say. Well, it’s not as simple as that. Let’s do a comparison using a group of three people: me, the madam and a hung over mate of mine.

A traditional breakfast consisting of two fried eggs, two rashers of bacon, two pork bangers, grilled tomato & a slice of toast goes for R29.00. Let’s make it R37.00 as one would include a glass of juice, cool drink. The bill for three people is thus R120.00

Cooking at home would come up to this:

Half dozen eggs – R10.00
Pack of bacon – R20.000
Litre of juice – R10.00
Sausages – R20.00
Tomatoes – R5.00

That comes up to about R65. I haven’t added the bread, butter, etc. assuming you already have these in your fridge. Still, its cheaper to make your own. That makes sense. It would obviously not make sense to make b

My confusion is with the buffet breakfasts. If it costs you about R22.00 to get a good, filling breakfast then why do people go and spend R80.00 on a buffet breakfast? That doesn’t make sense to me. A quick search has revealed the most expensive breakfast, which includes a 100g steak would set you back about R50.00. Still, that’s a saving of R30.00. So why do people do buffet breakfasts?

Not only is it not a romantic thing (in my humble opinion, mass produced food is a turn off) but surely its also not healthy to eat that much at the start of the day.

Buffet dinners I can understand because some of the stuff they make there might be a bit difficult and time consuming, but not the breakfasts.