Life is Harder and People are Angrier in the Taco Bell Regret Economy

Late last year, facing an all-but certain recession, companies scaled back. They laid people off, cut contracts, and started tightening their belt.

Only the recession never happened.

The economy continued to grow, according to the economists. Unemployment stayed historically low and wages went up.

At least that’s what we’re told.

But if all that’s true, then why is everyone still so angry?

Turns out, there is a good reason. ?

There Used to Be Way More Fruit Snacks Around Here

In late December 2023, The Atlantic published an article highlighting research they conducted with a polling firm that found that other than “inflation” itself, the cost of groceries was the next biggest economic concern facing Americans.

According to The Atlantic, nothing else even came close.

But in the year before The Atlantic published its research, a specific type of article reared its ugly head on an almost weekly basis.

It is the “Why Aren’t Americans Happier About the Economy?” article.

Personally, I stopped reading these articles a long time ago – or, more accurately, as soon I read the first one and got a full taste of the condescending way many of these articles are written. They never say it this directly, but the gist often boils down to this hypothetical question:

Question: Why are people too stupid to understand how great the economy is doing?

Answer: The people aren’t “stupid,” per se – they are just far too easily manipulated by propaganda and disinformation. This wouldn’t be the case if they were smarter.

Then The Atlantic went out and asked some actual people and found out it wasn’t stupidity that is making people so mad about the economy.

It is the cost of food.

Which is something anyone from the actual grocery-buying public could have told these writers a long time ago.

In my family, my wife and I have been parents since our late teens and early twenties. By the time I was 26, I had three kids. One of them was already 8 years old.

We have been buying groceries for a long, long time. Over the last few years, I have seen a troubling math problem manifest itself in the back of my wife’s Volkswagen every time we go pick up the groceries:

The more grocery money we spend, the less fruit snacks we can afford.

Before you scoff at my privilege, my family was often very poor when I was growing up. We never had anything like fruit snacks in our kitchen.

Because of this, in my house fruit snacks aren’t just bits of plastic-textured mono-flavored deliciousness.

For me, they are a sign of comfort and security. If there are fruit snacks in the pantry, we can live to fight another day.

But as the grocery budget has shot upward, there are fewer groceries altogether – and the fruit snacks have all but disappeared.

And, with my wife recently experiencing a layoff, the truth is they aren’t likely to return soon.

But missing fruit snacks isn’t the worst food-based crime this economy has inflicted on me.

It has also forced me to regret not eating at Taco Bell.

And when the economy goes that upside down, the world becomes a dangerous place.

The Taco Bell Regret Economy

I have worked remotely for almost ten years.

Over that time, I have grown exhausted of eating at the same five fast-food restaurants around my house.

I have also reached the age where, gastrointestinally speaking, the term “McDonald’s Bundle” has a whole other meaning.

Because of this, a couple of years ago I started giving my body a break. Instead of fast food, I sometimes go to the grocery store near my house and pick up supplies to make my son (who attends college remotely) and I lunch.

If I kept the cost of lunch at or near the same cost as fast food, then I felt like I was coming out ahead. I was eating better and often saving money.

Then the cost of food skyrocketed.

And yes, fast food has also become more expensive.

But so have groceries.

Now, when I run to pick up the stuff to make my son and I lunch, I often leave thinking that, with the cost of groceries, I would have been better off going to Taco Bell.

Sure, I wouldn’t have come out ahead if I bought the most expensive combo meals, but a couple of Cheesy Bean and Rice Burritos and Double Stacked tacos would have kept my total spend under $10.

(For the sake of the argument, we are going to think of what would happen to my bowels after that experience the same way petroleum economists think of polar bears: as an externality we can ignore, but still a genuine tragedy.)

I know there are passionate fans of Taco Bell who eat there and never regret it.

My daughter is one of those people. In fact, they should just use one of those pneumatic bank tubes to connect whatever microwave they use to make Doritos Locos tacos directly to her bedroom window.

But fans aside, the economy is really messed up when you regret not going to Taco Bell.

That doesn’t mean I don’t eat at Taco Bell.

I do.

And that doesn’t mean I don’t like some of their food.

I do.

But I also depend on the intrinsic regret baked into menu items like the Beefy 5-Layer Burrito to keep my relationship with them in check. That regret makes the Beefy 5-Layer Burrito a guilty pleasure – and not a staple of my family’s economic survival strategy.

The whole thing reminds me of an event that occurred during my wife’s last pregnancy.

She had a craving for KFC, so we went through the drive-thru late at night. The person at the window was obviously very stoned. When we pulled up, he congratulated us on being the “1,000th” customer that day and gave us literally buckets of free chicken.

The next morning, our kitchen counter looked a tornado had gone through an Oklahoma poultry farm.

There were bones where there shouldn’t be bones.

There were no bones where there should be bones.

There may have even been a feather or two somewhere.

And, you know what?

It was years before I ate at KFC again, and not because we got food poisoning – but because we didn’t get food poisoning.

Being able to emerge from that pile of chicken bones without having to spend all day in the bathroom was like playing Russian Roulette and hearing the echo of an empty chamber in your ear.

First you cry, then you laugh, then you tell God that in exchange for saving you, you’ll never do something like that again.

But if that happened in this economy?

I would have gone back every night, hoping that the combination of a potent strain of weed and what I assume was that kid’s perpetual desire to close early would make me the 1000th customer again.

Sure, I know that almost no one wins the lottery twice.

But I could hope.

And when that’s the reality – when the toothpaste tube gets cut open twice before we throw it away and the Taco Bell value menu becomes an economic survival hack – almost no one is going to be happy, no matter how many times you and tell us everything is okay.

This article was written by Jack McKissen, and not a machine.

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