“What?” I hear you say “a 45 Euro chicken, it must be a mistake. They must have forgotten the decimal point or does this chicken lay golden eggs. Maybe this is an organic hand reared chicken that will taste like heaven or you are in a 5 star restaurant with a Michelin star chef doing the cooking.” Do you know what, all these thoughts went through my head too?
They are all wrong, let me explain- on a recent family day out we stopped off on the way home at a well known fried chicken fast food outlet – its name escapes me now something like fried chicken from as American state – oh yes that’s it KFC. We ordered the food and were told how much it was, I thought it sounded expensive so I ask for a receipt and a copy of the menu. On further inspection I discovered the chicken pieces cost 4 Euros 50 Cents and there were only THREE pieces in it. Now you are probably thinking that it must be a meal deal and that it included chips (French Fries) and a drink. Wrong!! only THREE pieces of chicken.
So where does the 45 Euro chicken come from? Well when you take the "secret mix of 11 herbs and spices" covering off the chicken and are just looking at the chicken you will see that you could easily get about 30 pieces out of a medium sized chicken. That means that each chicken will give you 10 portions which is 45 Euros you get out of a chicken.
Now the thing that really gets my goat up is that you can buy a medium sized chicken here for about 5 Euros, so that means they are getting 40 Euros out of each chicken, and through bulk buying they are probably making more on each chicken.
OK so I know that everybody has to make a living, but really!! Is this not just a rip off? I know that the building was designed and built during the Celtic Tiger but it wasn’t finished until after the Tiger had whimpered off into the jungle. Somebody forgot to tell these people we are in the middle of a recession, they will have to recoup the development costs over a longer period or run the risk of going out of business. We just stopped there because we wanted to get some food for the kids and it was the first fast food outlet in the town that we can to, now I know that the main rivals to them are an indigenous company SuperMacwho specialize in fried chicken too and another multi-national company with two golden arches over their buildings and both of these offer kids meals for less than the 3 pieces of chicken we got and you get a free toy with it.
To make things even worse when we got home and were watching TV there was an ad on for an adult meal deal they are offering in the North for 4 pounds 85 pence. With the current exchange rate this 5 Euros 81 cents which is 1 euro 31 cents extra for a hell of a lot more.
I know that everybody has to cover costs when working out their prices but is it because the recipe for the chicken is so important that we have to pay the wage of a group of bodyguards employed to protect the chef at each outlet who has to mix the herbs and spices or are we paying for the state of the art alarm system back at HQ that stops anybody stealing the piece of paper with the colonel’s secret mix of 11 herbs and spices wrote down on it.
Now don’t get me wrong I do like the chicken in question, especially the extra crispy type, and I know they do have some offers on but if we were to take advantage of the offers they have on we would be throwing half of it in the bin. We only wanted to feed the kids not feed a dinner to a family of four. So you see I couldn’t justify buying a bucket of chicken, I only like it some much.
Also in these times when people are being laid off or being made redundant, which in a lot of cases means they are having to struggle to make ends meet, how you spend the ever decreasing money has to be studied and re-evaluated, this being said I think I will keep driving the next time we are out and see what else is on offer.
