How do they do it? There is a local restaurant/grocery that a few months back started selling hot rotisserie chickens. They come off the roaster at 1PM and 5PM. You can order them by phone and they'll reserve them for you. They cost $7.95 per chicken. Now I know that at places like Costco and the local supermarket you can probably get a whole rotisserie chicken for $5.95 or $4.95 or (food is just stupidly cheap in the US) even $3.95. But that's a maximally processed, water and phosphate injected, factory farmed monstrosity and even fresh off the grill doesn't really taste all that great. (Although I hear the Costco ones aren't bad).

The chicken at this local place is a free-range, organic, healthy bird that has been hand rubbed with spices and is roasted with half a lemon and fresh rosemary and garlic cloves in the cavity. It is very close to as good as roasting one at home and even closer if you time things right for the 1PM and 5PM windows.

Now here is the thing. At the very cheapest, I can buy an organic free-range chicken for $1.99 a pound (that's timing it for a sale). These chickens are a good 3.5 pounds. So they are making 95 cents less cooking, spice, labor, lemons and rosemary and packaging. How do they do it?

I know they can get the chicken for less than I can and so forth but it is still a ridiculous price.

Sometime we'll get sick of it, but for now we have a pretty standard fallback if we don't feel like cooking. Or for when we want to take a picnic to the outdoor Shakespeare festival. Or whenever. Even better, the grocery also sells very reasonable produce, breads, deli items and so on.