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The $14 Burrito: Why San Francisco Inflation Feels Higher Than 2.5%

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Re: The $14 Burrito: Why San Francisco Inflation Feels Higher Than 2.5%

#51

Post by OkayPhysicist »

testfrequency wrote: post #7
manfromchina1 wrote: post #2

Moving from LA to SF will definitely give you a sticker shock. I used to buy nice large burritos in DTLA for $10 flat as recently as 2024. That's with tax. Later that year in SF a nice sandwich in random bodegas would cost well over $20(with tax). SF is probably the most eye wateringly expensive city in all of US. It definitely beats NYC.

Food is so much cheaper (and better) in LA than SF. SF has such mediocre food for what you pay compared to any other city I’ve lived in*. You either have to fork over a few hundred to experience some of the stellar fine dining options in the city, or end up at some brunch place that’s probably pretty decent but you’re not leaving without at least $100 between two people. The good food in the Bay Area I’ve always foun…

LA's food scene is unbelievably good. There are individual categories of food that other places have it beat on (for example, if I want a deep dish pizza, I'm probably better off going to Zachary's, or being in Chicago), but on a scale of "I can walk into a random restaurant with no research and expect a good to extremely good meal, with plenty of variety in such restaurants to choose from" to "Evansville, IN", I haven't been anywhere in the world that has LA beat.

Re: The $14 Burrito: Why San Francisco Inflation Feels Higher Than 2.5%

#52

Post by Espressosaurus »

RickS wrote: post #35

This tracks with.... basically everything except the official numbers. I routinely see people who record their grocery prices finding increases that start in the 40% range. Certainly true for soda and snacks in my experience. There's a new second-order concern where I'm now alarmed by low prices. For example: I have no idea what johnsonville did to keep their brats at $4.99 over the past 5 years while the more local…

Yeah, my basket of goods hasn't changed and is closer to doubling in price comparing 2018 to today. Some items I've been tracking have quadrupled since 2010 or thereabouts. Your basic cup-of-noodles used to be $.20 to $.25 and is now at over $1. Beef prices are much like egg prices, quadrupling at best. Chicken is high but sales prices keep it at a modest doubling relative to previous sales for the most part. More like triple for whole chickens.

Expect the computer prices to rise since OpenAI bought out the next year's supply from two of the biggest RAM/NAND manufacturers in the world.

Re: The $14 Burrito: Why San Francisco Inflation Feels Higher Than 2.5%

#53

Post by Lucasoato »

Last year I attended the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco. This is a global event, in which people coming from different countries gather together to showcase their projects, chasing the dream. Many are independent developers, looking for the opportunity or investment that could change their life.

To me, the fact that crêpes were sold at 20$ and cans of coke at 10$ at the event was a shame. The organizers turned what was once a great event to bring everyone together into a way to scalp even more indie game developers. The price to partecipate as a company was so high that even big names boycott it.

Re: The $14 Burrito: Why San Francisco Inflation Feels Higher Than 2.5%

#54

Post by superkuh »

jonny_eh wrote: post #37
superkuh wrote: post #14

People in SF have more money (on average) and so those selling things there price higher. Compare the average salary for $jobdescription in SF vs Minneapolis. The entire (very small) region has been a bubble of higher income and prices for a long time and is getting worse. It feeds on itself like a ratchet.

Did you read the article?

I did. Did you notice that in the article they're talking about how the price (89%) spanned a decade at least? This seems to align with what I've said in my above coment.

>That's an 89% increase over a decade, and a 32% jump in just two years. San Francisco has the highest indexed concert ticket prices in the nation, roughly 29% above the norm, according to analysis from Tickethold.

Of course prices are increasing everywhere across the USA. I am just pointing out that San Francisco has always been significantly more expensive than everywhere else even before the last handful of years. And the reason for this is very clear: SF people have been paid more on average. Probably because the demand for the small area (so nice climate wise, job availability wise, etc) exceeds availability for those things and drives up other prices. And then the ratcheting like I said.

Re: The $14 Burrito: Why San Francisco Inflation Feels Higher Than 2.5%

#55

Post by [deleted] »

kwhat4 wrote: post #19
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #15

It's funny watching people in this thread talk about food in LA being so much cheaper than in SF, because in my humble experience LA is also quite expensive compared to pretty much everywhere else in the country.

My local family owned tacoria now sells a $14 burrito in LA. The rest of the prices outlined in this article are also on par with LA pricing. It's hard to find a more expensive place to live the California.

[deleted]

Re: The $14 Burrito: Why San Francisco Inflation Feels Higher Than 2.5%

#56

Post by skippyboxedhero »

JohnFen wrote: post #3

> According to official metrics It's incredibly hard to have any actual faith in governmental assessments anymore.

If you think about what they are actually trying to measure, it should also be clear that the primary goal of these statistics is to employ economists.

There is the raw price data, which is mostly bunk because it uses unrepresentative products. And there is obviously huge political pressure not to make basket adjustments that result in prices going up.

And then there are quality adjustments that are completely nonsensical. Worst example is obviously with something like medicine where it just isn't possible to compare the price of drugs that save lives that didn't exist fifty years ago.

Unfortunately, economists will forever be in the camp of not understanding the difference between what is measured and what can be useful (and this has serious consequences for policy, for example the understanding within modern economics of long-term economic growth is close to zero which has led to policies focusing heavily on resource usage/intensity, essentially no different to North Korean economic policy in the 50s, due to significantly understated long-term estimates of growth). Hong Kong's government didn't produce economic statistics during its period of rapid growth for this reason.

Re: The $14 Burrito: Why San Francisco Inflation Feels Higher Than 2.5%

#57

Post by ZeroConcerns »

9x39 wrote: post #50
ZeroConcerns wrote: post #41

So, ehhm, yeah, I sort-of question the data in this article. A US$5.50 burrito in Downtown SF in 2014? Nah... even Taco Bell takeout was already more expensive than that at the time. Also: sure, some places overdo it on the pricing: I distinctly remember walking out of a Rotterdam (somewhere in The Netherlands) establishment due to them charging 25 Euros for a lunch sandwich, like 2 decades ago, despite this not bein…

They said they used Yelp photos, which seem like you can verify this. Here's one from 2014, $5.50 https://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/taqueria-canc%C3%BAn-san-fra... Here's one from 2015, $6.99 https://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/taqueria-canc%C3%BAn-san-fra...

Yeah, I did in fact read the original article, and the glossy (unreadable) and undated photographs did not convince me. Therefore, the Taco Bell comparison, and the rest of my comment.

Re: The $14 Burrito: Why San Francisco Inflation Feels Higher Than 2.5%

#58

Post by hackingonempty »

The article claims "a burrito that cost $5.50 in 2014 is now $13.95" but I just checked one of the better SF Mission taquerias that has a web site with prices (Papalote) and used the Way-Back Machine and a carne asada burrito was $9.10 in Jan 2014 and is now $13.75. That's only 1.5X not 2.5X increase.

According to the BLS CPI calculator, that $9.10 in 2014 has $12.61 of buying power as of a couple months ago, or $13.75 in late 2025 dollars is $9.92 in 2014. The price has only exceeded inflation by 9%.

** edit in 2014 it was only $1 to make it "super" (cheese, guac, and crema) now it is $3.50. So more like $10 vs $17+ now

Re: The $14 Burrito: Why San Francisco Inflation Feels Higher Than 2.5%

#59

Post by alephnerd »

Lucasoato wrote: post #53

Last year I attended the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco. This is a global event, in which people coming from different countries gather together to showcase their projects, chasing the dream. Many are independent developers, looking for the opportunity or investment that could change their life. To me, the fact that crêpes were sold at 20$ and cans of coke at 10$ at the event was a shame. The organizers t…

> To me, the fact that crêpes were sold at 20$ and cans of coke at 10$ at the event was a shame...

They can price as such because such purchases tend to be expensable during business travel. Corporate conferences like GDC, RSA, etc aren't targeted at ICs - they're meant to essentially be a "safe space" for vendors to meet with prospective clients.

Re: The $14 Burrito: Why San Francisco Inflation Feels Higher Than 2.5%

#60

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

dangus wrote: post #39
mproud wrote: post #4

Yes, but I think some of this is also the increase in food worker minimum wage in California.

It’s this already debunked by the famous Danish McDonald’s example? This is also debunked simple napkin math, even if the napkin math is generous to skeptics. Let’s say you buy a product for $100 with these example costs: $30 of the price goes to labor $30 of the price goes to rent/utilities/“keeping the lights on” $30 of the price goes to inputs (materials) $10 of the price goes to profit. Let’s say wages go up by 2…

This is really disingenuous and doesn't debunk anything. Who claimed that wages going up 20% would raise the overall price of the product 20%? I'm sure you can find someone on Twitter who said that because you can find any dumb thing on Twitter, but it's not a main argument.

It's obvious to everyone that labor is just one cost to the seller. People only care that the price went up $6, not how that $6 happens to break down for the seller.

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