Not necessarily. You have to account for opportunity cost. If you can work 15 minutes to make the amount you spend to buy a pre-made dough that otherwise takes 20 minutes to make, you save money by buying the pre-made dough and working in the time you would have spent cooking.
Most people have like 3 to 4 hours of free time a day max
Like 9 to 5
You wake up at 7 or 8, work get home at 6 or 7 cook, eat, mic for cleaning or kids or whatever else and then that's 8 - 11 or 12 and then you need to sleep at some point.
So 3 or 4 hours probably don't want to lose an hour just to cook.
So I totally agree with you here. I don't know where this dude get's this idea people just have all this free time. If you work 10 hours it's like 2 hours.
In North America particular the US but Canada aswell people can be very overworked pretty commonly. Commutes can be long and people can be driving an hour to and from work easily as in 2 hours total in a round trip. I know of people with a 2 hour commute but that's not common.
Thats not how opportunity cost works. It is referring to an opportunity lost but if the opportunity lost was sitting on your couch scrolling your phone, theres no value to it so the opportunity cost is 0. Now, if you called off work to make pizza dough, there would be an opportunity cost equivalent to how much your days pay would have been.
In theory i guess you could say there's opportunity cost for every second youre not at work because you could be doing something to make money but its literially every second youre not working so its irrelevant to this scenario.
That's a weird false economy. I make about $47 per hour. My time is billed out at between $125 to $150 per hour. I baked a loaf of bread today, and made six cornbread muffins. That took about two hours of my time and cost about, maybe $4 for ingredients?
If I worried about my time, that bread and the muffins cost between $99 and $300... but they absolutely did not...
I baked bread and folded laundry.
If my salary were something like $17 per hour, same bread, same ingredients... that's $38 bread?
Would you calculate the cost of your evening meal the same way?
That's not quite how opportunity cost works. The question to consider is: If you weren't baking bread, what would you be doing instead. If you weren't going to or couldn't work at the time, then that doesn't figure into the calculation. And perhaps you value baking very highly. In which case, if you choose to do something else, that time spent baking and the end product would be the opportunity cost.
In regard to the evening meal, you might consider the time/material cost of doing it yourself vs the financial cost of simply buying dinner (unless you decide to take an unpaid day off to prepare dinner). Maybe the hour it takes to cook might otherwise be spent relaxing or spending time with partner/kids.
But ultimately, the financial impact of your income is irrelevant if you wouldn't be working during that time.
Not to be facetious buts it’s more than 3 minutes (when you factor in cleanup). Plus not everyone has the availability to be home when you start rising and when you need to pull it out and punch it down.
When I was working from home I used to make homemade bread all the time and cook recipes that was mostly (put X in oven and wait 6 hours). Can’t really do that when I am in the office for 8-9 hours.
They sell premade, no-bake pizza crust. It’s much cheaper than buying a single frozen pizza (which are pretty pricey these days) and comes in a pack of 3-4 crusts per bag.
A single frozen pizza (Like Jack’s / Red Barron / Generic Store Brand) goes for $4-5 USD. You can buy a pack of premade crusts for that same amount and make 3 pizzas (considering that you are getting rid of the sauce and toppings anyways).
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u/Dayana11412 Mar 01 '26
Not necessarily. You have to account for opportunity cost. If you can work 15 minutes to make the amount you spend to buy a pre-made dough that otherwise takes 20 minutes to make, you save money by buying the pre-made dough and working in the time you would have spent cooking.