Ditch Starbucks and DoorDash, George Kamel Says. How Cheap Appliances Can Replace Your Takeout Budget

A daily Starbucks run and a couple of weekly DoorDash orders are two of the easiest line items to silently drain a household budget. Americans are still spending heavily on prepared food: food services spending hit $1.5 billion in March. That category, restaurants and delivery, has been climbing while grocery spending stays flat.

George Kamel says roughly $331 in cheap kitchen appliances can save consumers thousands of dollars each year. Most of them pay for themselves in weeks, not months. And you may already own some of these devices.

The Coffee Fix: A $69 Programmable Brewer

Kamel’s first appliance that he recommended recently on his podcast is the Ninja 12-cup programmable coffee maker, about $69. That amounts to about “10 drinks at Starbucks, which is probably 2 weeks of drinks for most of you,” Kamel said. After that, every cup is essentially free coffee for the life of the machine.

Kamel sets his machine to brew before your alarm goes off. “Make your coffee at home exactly how you like it,” he said. “Then just throw it in a to-go cup and you are out the door. Mornings are hard enough without your coffee.”

Kamel admitted that he personally uses a luxury Fellow Aiden coffee maker. But “that’s not the coffee maker most people should get,” he says. For flavor upgrades on a budget, he suggests adding a cheap bean grinder.

The Takeout Fix: Freezer, Rice Cooker, Chopper

The second habit, weekly food delivery, can be eliminated with three appliances.

1. Magic Chef deep freezer. The idea is to buy proteins and vegetables in bulk on sale. Prep freezer meals in advance. This can be purchased for about $200.
2. Aroma 16-cup rice cooker. About $37 at Target. It offers hands-off cooking and perfectly cooked rice like you’d find at Chipotle.
3. Vegetable chopper with mandolin slicer. Around $25. This can greatly reduce time spent on manual chopping.

“You just bag it up, get the ingredients all layered in there, put a label on it, and you can just throw it in the crockpot before you go to work,” Kamel said. And “most of your DoorDash Chipotle bowl for $19 was just rice anyways.” Rice cooker rice, chopped veggies, and a freezer-prepped protein produces the same bowl at home for a small fraction of the delivery price. The fees, the tip, and the markup vanish.

How Much Do You Actually Spend on Takeout?

Pull your last 60 days of debit and credit card statements and total two line items: coffee shops and food delivery. If those two numbers together exceed roughly $331 over two months, Kamel’s appliance stack pays for itself before the next statement cycle. The real value is displacing a big recurring expense with a one-time expense.

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