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Comment by contingencies | Hacker News Reader

IMHO the popularity of packaged sandwiches in the UK is largely driven by three factors:

(1) English people have famously bad taste when it comes to food, and most of them are truly willing to eat crap.

(2) Many English people are cash or time poor, and this stuff is everywhere for $cheap.

(3) Grab-and-go style sandwiches in boxes are made using industrial processes in which high initial investment results in small margins per sale which are often maximized at the expense of taste, eg. waterjet cutting, commercial standardized ingredients (eg. heavily processed industrial cheeses and meat slices), etc. As purely commercial operations, they don't care about quality until it limits sales.

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No offence, but (1) hasn't been true for literally decades now, showing you to be a out of touch about the UK, which begs the question are you even vaguely right about 2 or 3?

Check out Paul Robinson's comment for a general refutation. Given the popularity of 'artisanal'-type portable food preparations in both the UK and the US I think it unlikely the market could get away with such standards even at the low-end.

I find your comment valuable though for the insight that bread products may be cut by waterjets:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrhThBHOGrU

This is astonishing: surely sogginess ensues?

Bonus bready humour:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRq_SAuQDec

He discusses how the packaged sandwich industry has improved in his perception based upon a single store (M&S). I was discussing the IMHO base reasons for the popularity of packaged sandwiches. Chalk and cheese. Regardless, on cost as a driver we explicitly concur.

IMO the scandal here with these triangular containers is the 'three slice' sandwich, for example:

https://img.tesco.com/Groceries/pi/441/5051140265441/IDShot_...

The naive customer felt that he was getting two traditional sandwiches but course he only actually got 1.5

>He discusses how the packaged sandwich industry has improved in his perception based upon a single store (M&S)

Britain has a lot more food chains with national reach than the US does. M&S has a huge share of the 'food to go' market in the UK.

But in any case, the overall quality of prepackaged sandwiches definitely has improved over the past couple of decades, as I can attest from personal experience.

Americans eat plenty of equally cheap and gross foods for lunch.

I would personally much rather eat a prepackaged sandwich than something from this:

http://8-food.com/product.php

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