The Economic Side of a Sandwich

In 2006, a court proclaimed that a burrito was not a sandwich. At the time, Panera’s contract said that no other establishment could sell sandwiches at the mall where it was located. When the food court subcontracted to a burrito chain, citing its deal and the potential for competition, Panera protested. They lost the case because of the definition of a sandwich.

Still, deciding what is a sandwich can be tough. Many of us wonder whether a hot dog on a bun is a sandwich.

The “Cube Rule” from Twitter user @Phosphatide has one answer:

Using the “Cube Rule,” a hot dog is a taco.

Sandwich Preferences

You can see that deli meat and mayo are at the top:

But it also depends on your generation. As a baby boomer (black), I tend to be much less adventuresome than Gen Z (yellow). Meanwhile, Gen X is green and Millennials, red:

And, we can ask which meal.

While 95 percent of all workers say they eat a sandwich a week, it could be lunch or breakfast. With the Egg McMuffin first in 1975, now other fast food chains and grocery and convenience stores let us grab a breakfast sandwich made of an English muffin or croissant, biscuit or bread surrounding some combination of eggs, cheese and meat. As the fastest growing menu item, the breakfast sandwich brought in more than $2.4 billion through September– a hefty gain from $1.5 billion in 2019.

Our Bottom Line: Sandwich Economics

As economists, we should cite the cost of a decision. Defined as sacrifice, cost reminds us that choosing is refusing. Not necessarily the money we spend, the cost of a sandwich decision is what we chose not to eat. With breakfast sandwiches the cost appears to be the annual 3.9 percent decline in cereal sales. Then, focusing on lunch, it was the deli meat we ate instead of a burger, grilled cheese, or PB&J.

And finally, returning to money, we can conclude with the GDP. As our yardstick of the value of the goods and services we produce, the GDP is composed of consumer expenditures, business investment, government spending, and net exports, Within the GDP, consumer speding occupies close to a 70 percent slice. And asking what we spend on food, we would see that it is a small proportion of total consumer spending:

More precisely though, the Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that households with an average annual income of $72,967, in 2022, spent $3639 on food away from home.

My sources and more: The Cube Rule was surreal, like Eugene Ionesco’s children’s book, Number 2. The book is wonderful. I do recommend it. However, returning to today’s post, I learned about the Cube Rule from my Hustle newsletter and first presented it here. From there, I used sandwich data from the ezcater survey and The Washington Post for the breakfast sandwich. Please note that the breakfast sandwich in our featured image is from The Hustle daily email and several of today’s sentences were from a previous econlife post.