See, when I was a kid you guys, I used to go to daycare, and I’m pretty sure a lot of you guys went to daycare too. I’m quite sure if you guys try to remember it, the memory is probably going to be blurry, but I remember one day, I still remember it till this day, there was one day, where the daycare I used to go to, brought us a Happy meal.
You guys know a Happy Meal? From McDonald’s. It comes in that little box, you get a burger or nuggets, some fries, a drink, and usually there’s a little toy inside.
And I remember that was probably the best day of my life as a kid because it’s literally McDonald’s, like normally you wouldn’t eat that. They would just give you random food. Some rice, maybe a cookie if they were feeling generous. But one day they brought us McDonald’s, and I remember I was genuinely happy. Everyone was happy, obviously because as a kid, you’d get excited about nuggets, fries, maybe a milkshake, whatever. And back then I thought, wow, they really love us.
But now that I grew up, I’ve seen the good and the bad. I’ve been through enough shit to know that things are rarely as simple as they looked when you were a kid and you start to notice all these little things happening underneath the surface that you never noticed before. And eventually you start looking at the same world with completely different eyes. And the other day I was just on a walk, completely random, and I passed by a McDonald’s. It was one of those hot summer nights. The lights were on, there were little kids inside with their families, people eating, talking, running around, and for a second I just stood there looking at it. And something about that image pulled me backwards.
At that exact moment, I wasn’t looking at those kids anymore. I was remembering myself, and then I stopped, then I thought: when I was a kid and they brought us McDonald’s... was that actually love? Or was there a whole transaction happening that I just couldn’t see because I was a kid? Did the daycare pay somebody? Did McDonald’s give them some kind of special price because they were feeding a room full of kids? Was another food vendor involved?
And the answer wasn’t surprising. Apparently, yeah, there was a whole business happening behind that food.
Because, see, a daycare has kids inside it every single day, and those kids have to eat. Breakfast, lunch, snacks, whatever the daycare gives them. And a lot of these daycares don’t really cook. They maybe have like a little warming kitchen, maybe a fridge, but there usually isn’t somebody standing in the back whose entire job is to make lunch for sixty kids. So instead, they buy the food. Breakfast, lunch, snack, five days a week, there’s somebody who makes that food, brings it, & gets paid for it. And in America, the government even pays daycares for the meals they serve through a program they can join. It’s called the Child and Adult Care Food Program, or CACFP. More than four billion dollars a year, around 1.7 billion meals.
And when you actually stop and think about that, it gets interesting, because a daycare might have thirty kids, sixty kids, a hundred kids, sometimes even more, and every single one of those kids is gonna be hungry again tomorrow. Then the day after that. Then next Monday. Then the Monday after that. For as long as that daycare stays open.
It’s basically companies whose job is to prepare or supply food to places like daycares. There’s like a truck that pulls up to the daycare every day at seven in the morning with trays of food inside. Breakfast, lunch, snacks, whatever that daycare ordered, and the daycare pays that company to keep doing it over and over again.
So, essentially, when you guys look at it as a transaction you got: the daycare has kids that need food. The food vendor has food that needs daycares. And it looks like this:
─────────────────── ────────────────────
👶🏻 DAYCARE 🚚 FOOD VENDOR
│ │ │ │
│ kids need food │ │ needs daycares │
│ meals every day │ │ prepares food │
│ always need it │ │ delivers it daily │
└────────────────────┘ └────────────────────┘
The daycare is thinking: “I need somebody to feed these kids every day.” And the food vendor is thinking: “I need a day care to deliver food to”. Both of them need each other, the daycare does not need to be convinced that kids need food. The food vendor does not need to be convinced that getting another daycare would be good for business. The only problem is:
Throughout my research, I found out that for a food vendor to find a daycare, they have to go to these big conferences where thousands of daycare owners show up in one building. And if a food vendor wants to be there, they have to pay for a small little place, about the size of a parking spot. They put up a table and a sign, and they stand there for three days hoping daycare owners come in and stop. And that little place costs anywhere from $2,750 to $5,000 just for the space. So when you calculate the entire cost of the whole thing, stuff like flying out your crew, paying for the hotel, the small place itself, food, etc., they’re at $15,000–$25,000 for three days.
And that’s just one thing. A lot of them pay for billboards, spend a shit ton of money on ads, all to get one daycare.
And the daycare too, also has problem, even a shittier problem, the obvious one is “yeah kids need to eat” duh… If the food isn’t there, well, now you’ve got hungry kids. Like imagine a four-year-old coming home and saying, “I didn’t eat lunch.” That’s pretty bad.
Or imagine even worse, the kid comes home and says, “The food was gross.” Well, now the daycare is doomed. That’s the whole review. Because obviously, food is one of the ways parents judge the daycare. They’re paying hard-earned money, and the average price of daycare is over $13,000 a year per child.