It's not just SF. The $10 lunch of 2015 is now $15. Default tipping of 20% on things that we never tipped on in 2015 (takeout, fast food) is also adding alot to the total cost. I don't know how people are affording the various delivery services and their fees on top of it.
> Default tipping of 20% on things that we never tipped on in 2015 (takeout, fast food) is also adding alot to the total cost. Start declining those tips. We have to stop putting up with that BS.
Seem quaint to remember Dunkin' donuts franchisees forbidding their employees from putting out plastic cups for tips.
> And for San Franciscans, the price on the menu is rarely the price you pay. Add in sales tax, a default 18-20% tip on the tablet screen, an SF Mandate or Cost of Living Fee, and 8.625% sales tax. Soon that seemingly cheap $15 lunch might be $20. This is a key metric that the article doesn't properly account for when it comes to food prices. The asshole restaurateurs got an exception to the anti "drip-pricing" law t…
"But the restaurant industry is special." Only in the restaurant world are customers on the hook for ensuring a living wage. It's a stupid system but is culturally entrenched.
A significant portion of the bottom and middle segments of the restaurant industry have been enshittified. Lower quality, less service, and higher prices.
Meal prepping, cooking at home, and fine dining only.
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 hav…
> I haven't been anywhere in the world that has LA beat. I feel the same way about NYC and NOLA. Both have world class cuisine and the sheer diversity of NYC food scene can't be found anywhere in the US. And for whatever reason NYC style pizza is not as ubiquitous outside the NYC-NJ area.You can definitely find such pizza in Boston, but it cannot be found in every little corner in LA for example.
I'm sure plenty of it boils down to matter of priorities (I feel the same way about breakfast burritos as you do about NYC style pizza), but I'd rank cities on my "diverse selection of quality restaurants, weighted for rarely walking into a bad restaurant" scale with LA, NYC, Istanbul, and Edmonton in order at the "I do not need to look up restaurants, I will walk into the next restaurant I see and be pleased" tier.
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…
I disagree with your last paragraph. This math is not obvious to most laypeople. Many people think that if a McDonald’s worker’s salary goes from $10 to $20 that their Big Mac will go from $4 to $8. My napkin math is extremely generous to minimum wage haters. It assumes that everyone is getting a raise and therefore all costs of all goods are going up. It also assumes basically a worst case scenario restaurant indust…
You can imagine a person who thinks McDonalds' only cost for making a hamburger is the labor and they get the beef and bread for free. But hopefully there aren't many of those people.
And it's a distraction from the main point. Without needing to look at any specific math, higher labor costs will be generally passed onto the customer because profit is not allowed to go down. That's not a defense of low wages, it's just an illustration of where the power lies.
> San Francisco's Consumer Price Index increased just 2.5% year-over-year, well below the post-pandemic peaks. The Federal Reserve has declared victory. But is the inflation crisis really over?
Monetary policy is months to years ahead of what you see at the counter. See also the great money printing of 2020.
If you shop at tech bro places you will get tech bro prices (I blame Mission Control). For example, Taqueria Cancun on 19th as mentioned versus other options a couple blocks east or south, or in the parts of SF that have remained Latiné. Furthermore, a lot of these places continue to give an ethnic discount - especially when paying in cash - because someone of the same ethnic group will most likely remain a repeat cu…
> a lot of these places continue to give an ethnic discount - especially when paying in cash
This is _not_ a thing at all. Maybe you observed it once, but this is HIGHLY unusual.
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…
It’s not complicated. We also imported a lot of really cheap, high quality food from China. And now we don’t. Even if you personally were not buying Chinese tomatoes rebadged as Mexican in Grocery Outlet, the fact that they were one tenth the cost lowered prices on the produce you’ve been buying from Costco and Whole Foods. Indeed, the giant corporations have been litigating the tariffs issue as the single greatest c…
Chinese tomatoes?
The US doesn't import fresh tomatoes from China and never has. Nor does Mexico.
Frankly, the amount of food imported from China has always been relatively small. For instance, it made up just 1% of US food supplies in 2009.
I disagree with your last paragraph. This math is not obvious to most laypeople. Many people think that if a McDonald’s worker’s salary goes from $10 to $20 that their Big Mac will go from $4 to $8. My napkin math is extremely generous to minimum wage haters. It assumes that everyone is getting a raise and therefore all costs of all goods are going up. It also assumes basically a worst case scenario restaurant indust…
You can imagine a person who thinks McDonalds' only cost for making a hamburger is the labor and they get the beef and bread for free. But hopefully there aren't many of those people. And it's a distraction from the main point. Without needing to look at any specific math, higher labor costs will be generally passed onto the customer because profit is not allowed to go down. That's not a defense of low wages, it's ju…
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…
I disagree with your last paragraph. This math is not obvious to most laypeople. Many people think that if a McDonald’s worker’s salary goes from $10 to $20 that their Big Mac will go from $4 to $8. My napkin math is extremely generous to minimum wage haters. It assumes that everyone is getting a raise and therefore all costs of all goods are going up. It also assumes basically a worst case scenario restaurant indust…
And what about price increases because people can now afford to pay more for the same product?