The value is more than the price cooked versus DIY. To me it's a bargain because I'll eat something way worse for me if I'm in a rush and there's nothing available. We don't want to stop at McDonalds because I'm running late from work, my wife and daughter had an activity until 6, and we already ate everything in the fridge. Boom, chicken.<p>EDIT: I don't want to entirely rag on McD's. I lost a bunch of weight when I was in consulting and ate every meal on the run. Of the fast food chains, they have some of the most reasonable items with easy math on the calories. Pro tip: Egg McMuffins and regular cheeseburgers are 300 calories each. I'm not saying it was healthy, but I did control my calories and lose weight. I am likely partially embalmed from the trans fat and sodium though. Hopefully we can agree a supermarket rotisserie chicken is a superior option :)
Something kind of similar goes on in the produce aisle with bags of apples vs individual apples.<p>Bags of apples have a very high percent mass loss when peeled and rotted parts cut off and served into apple pies or apple sauce or canned into brandied apples and are very small making a huge amount of labor to peel like ten mini apples per pound.<p>Individual apples are large and about can select externally flawless apples, and the surface area to volume scaling means for a given amount of finished product your compost pile will have maybe half the compost. Also the labor demand is immensely lower, it takes just as long to peel a baby apple from a bag that smaller than a baseball as it goes to peel a freakishly large individual apple thats bigger than a softball.<p>Solely on price per pound, bags of apples are mystifyingly cheaper than individual apples per pound, but in terms of final product and factoring in the labor annoyance of prep time, individual apples are often a much better deal.<p>I suppose much as there are people shocked that I find applesauce making and brandied apple canning fun and recreational and stress reducing, there probably exist people who are shocked that everyone doesn't find apple peeling and coring to be meditative and chill. For people who enjoy spending hours peeling tiny little apples, a 5 pound bag of little apples must be pure joy to them.
From the article:
<i>Customers can thank Boston Market—which opened its first store in 1985 in Newton, Mass., under the name Boston Chicken—for the modern rotisserie chicken industry.</i><p>This was a surprise to me. In Italy "Rotisserie chicken" have been a common urban offering since at least the '60s, probably even before. No idea about other parts of Europe or the rest of the world, but I distinctly remember small stores displaying roasted chickens since my childhood.<p>The only recent innovation is that you can now find these in larger supermarkets and that most of the stores are now managed as some franchise.
They're an even bigger bargain at the end of the night. When I worked 2nd shift I would stop at Kroger on the way home at 10:30pm, grab a baguette from the bakery for 50 cents and a rotisserie chicken for $2.99, both half-price because I assume they throw them out at closing time. Cheap dinner and lunch for the next day.
I greatly prefer rotisserie chickens from grocery stores to baking my own, just for the convenience. The fact that it's typically cheaper than buying and baking your own is a huge factor as well.<p>I really want to recommend trying baked cornish hens at home to anyone who hasn't eaten them. I buy a 6-pack at Costco for about $18. A single one by itself is an entire meal for me. If I'm really, really hungry, I'll eat it with a side like pita bread or rice. Fat, water, and seasoning pool under it to make really tasty drippings that you can use for either.<p>They're super easy to prepare and bake. I just spray it with cooking oil, salt and pepper it, and stick it in the oven at 400F for an hour. The great thing about it is that it's really difficult to overcook it due to the fat from the skin, and the small amount of meat compared to a whole chicken, so you can play around with higher temperatures and times without having to worry about ruining it.<p>They taste sooo good, especially the crisp skin. It's one of my favorite things to eat.
The chart shows you can save $1-$2 per chicken that feeds about 3 people? I think it'd be difficult to find 3 people unwilling to chip in 50 cents to turn a raw chicken into a cooked one. And pricing seasoning ingredients by just the percentage they used is disengenious. I've never gotten to the bottom of any of herb bottle before it went stale.<p>The rotisserie industry is a bargain for consumer and seller. It's easy and automated for stores to produce at scale and a real time saver for the customer. Not to mention I can take it prepackaged to a picnic.
I like to maximize the value of my rotisserie chicken dinner by cooking all the leftover scraps and bones in a pressure cooker. After an hour, you got yourself a stew!<p>Use ice cube trays to make broth cubes and store in the freezer for future meals.
I get 5-6 meals out of a $14 organic rotisserie chicken for my wife and I.<p>2 from the wings and breast. Then we slowcook the carcass into bone broth which becomes the basis of an awesome soup. I've got thai curry chicken soup on the stove right now.
Cooking a whole chicken is a major pain.
If not for rotisserie chickens, I would only buy chicken in the form of pre-butchered packages of breasts, thighs, or legs (and the occasional bag of frozen buffalo wings).<p>The pre-butchered meat is usually a way better deal.
Boneless chicken breasts, which are the most expensive option, are often as cheap as $3.50/lb - about the same as a roto chicken.
And it's pure meat, extremely healthy, and only takes 20-30 minutes to cook.<p>(But when you have a 2- and 4-year-old, sometimes those 20-30 minutes make all the difference. So I eat roto chicken about once a week.)
Costco rotisserie chicken is probably the best existing deal out there right now. $4.99 for 2-3 days worth of food.<p>I infrequently make my own rotisserie chicken and it costs me at least $12, including chicken, spices, etc.
BUT what about the psychological value of _feeling_ like you're getting a deal, even if you aren't actually getting one?<p>E.g. People from this research actually experience more pleasure when they believe a wine is expensive: <a href="http://time.com/money/3846874/expensive-price-tag-cheap-wine-brain-placebo-effect/" rel="nofollow">http://time.com/money/3846874/expensive-price-tag-cheap-wine...</a><p>> “Expectations truly influence neurobiological responses,” write the authors.
> Without including the cost of our time, it came to a total of 52 cents.<p>I think that's the major point for anyone: time.<p>For the sake of a few dollars my time is more valuable or at least better spent doing something else.<p>I think that is also a reason for many thing such as my region where people hire a guys with a snowblowers to clean out their driveways. Pay $200 for four months and you don't break your back it's worth it.
At the supermarket Wegmans where I live, an entire fresh rotisserie chicken is $5. It's a total steal if you're a starving college kid, as you can easily make a couple meals out of it. These used to be HUGE chickens, however they've noticeably got smaller, but still easily two meals.
Store-roasted chickens drive me crazy because every chicken in the case is 4 pounds or more and all the roasted chickens started out smaller. I'd like to buy a 3 to 3.5 pound bird small enough to roast in a pan but they use them all and don't sell them.
They're a bargain at Costco, assuming you need to buy other stuff there, otherwise the value of time to park and walk to the back of the store might dominate.