Tell HN: Food is too expensive now

Servers can only serve x tables, chefs and cooks can only make x meals per hour. Valets, barmen, bussboys all scale pretty linearly.

Plus rent doesn't scale well either. More meals translates to more staff, more staff translates to more space. And that's also linear.

Food-scale happens in factories, think frozen meals in your supermarket not restaurants.

Someone has to chop all the vegetables, slice all the fruit, bake all the desserts, fold all the napkins, mop the floors, clean the restrooms, etc, etc. The staff often begin work hours before opening, and leave hours after closing. Those costs don’t go down if you have more customers, they go up.

Batch cooking only works in some cases: you can bake a whole cake and then sell it by the slice, so there is an economy of scale there. Do the same thing with spaghetti noddles, on the other hand, and half your customers will get overcooked noodles. I suppose buffet–style restaurants benefit more from economies of scale, since they can cook a whole tray of something and take it out to the buffet all at once. Or cook a whole roast or ham and then carve some off for each customer. But then I suppose you have to pay someone to stand there and carve, so perhaps not.

Thanks, now I’m hungry, and there’s not a Luby’s within a thousand miles of here.

There were times in my life when these meals would have required twice as much time to execute, but repetition and experience (and necessity, given the busy evening schedule during my kids' soccer season) have led to these timings.

Lots of subjective variables, of course. Do you enjoy cooking? Are you productive at home while waiting for your delivery order? Is time spent in a restaurant relaxing? Do you count driving to/from the restaurant as part of the "work" of the meal? Don't you still have to clean up after a delivery order?

Western home stoves are underpowered compared to the typical asian home stove. So western recipes are designed for slow western stoves.

Once you use a wok for the first time you realize you've been using the stove equivalent of a car that can only go 30mph all your life.

FWIW: I cook multiple meals (often borderline gourmet / better than any local restaurant) for my family of 5 and it doesn't take this many hours. The more experience you gain, the faster your prep. Combining ready ingredients (I'll use that boxed pho broth rather than making from scratch / I'll start with a canned marinara rather than scratch) and being able to reconstitute leftovers can go a long way toward only having to do a major cooking event every-other or every-three days.

Yeah, that's what you do when it's expensive to eat. Stretch a pot of beans, rice and hamhocks over a week. Buy canned vegetables and Hamburger Helper. Shake and Bake chicken and au gratin potatoes out of a box. Stock up on bollilos, ramen and vermicelli. Stop expecting every meal to be an experience, you're not living to eat anymore, you're eating to live.

Let's be generous and assume lower wages is not the solution. I doubt the goal here is cheaper food at the cost of misery to others.

So there's rent as the obvious contender. In some parts of the country rent is high because supply is low. In NY there's not much one can do about supply, but in say SF property supply is very much under govt control. So loosening up zoning there, and allowing for more development would be a step. Of course there are a lot of people invested in that not happening - specifically landlords - which means the govt has to pick winners and losers (or more accurately choose different winners, since they are already choosing winners and losers.)

Now granted the original poster was clearly talking in the context of restaurant food prices, not actual "food prices" - but its worth noting that zoning changes wouldn't affect general food prices, and the impact on restaurant rents would be long term, not short term.

The other big input cost, direct and indirect, is energy. Fuel for cooking, and perhaps more significantly for transport.

I'm not sure the govt can do a whole lot there - yes there are taxes in there, but they are low compared to global standards, and reducing them just means making them up elsewhere. (which might not be a bad thing, but tax policy moves very slowly.)

The price of oil is not really in govt hands, pricing there is international and very fluid. Unlike most oil-producing countries, the US does not determine local supply.

So we're back to labour? But even there labour isn't over controlled by govt. Min wage is already pretty low, and given the high employment rate labourers can afford to hold out for higher pay. Its not like people working is restaurants are rich, even most owners barely break even, so again this doesn't look like an area where govt could do much - except encourage poor immigrants maybe? (in the UK low-end posts are getting hard to fill since brexit)

And I'm not sure lower restaurant prices at the cost of human misery is really the goal here.

So, in summary, what other govt options are in play? Zoning would have an effect in some locations. Is there anything else that would have an impact? Especially in a short time scale?

> Yes, the world is going through serious inflation right now but nothing comes close to the US.

Turkey is actually at 60% inflation right now.