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Comment by Ericson2314 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe we need buffet-style restaurants that serve nutritious perishable food without all the extra plating, waters, and other frivolities so people can bask in being served and pretend they are aristocracy.

Everyone cooking is a massive inefficiency, and yet paying for conventional restaurants is also uneconomical. Eating shelf-stable food is cheaper than cooking for most people, but only until the bad health effects catch up. Just like global warming, the market can only optimize over small time horizons without politically pricing in externalities.

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Yes and no. There's really not a whole lot of margin in the food. You get margin from buying a soda, beer, or wine in wholesale and selling it with barely any labour at a 5x markup.

My parents tried a buffet thing once, didn't work. You need a certain amount of scale that wasn't present in their area. I have seen some proper huge buffet places though, seems pretty good though rent is an issue.

I'm not arguing the economics work out given today's prices and all sorts of disequilibria. I'm just saying everyone cooking is ipso facto inefficient, so they has to be some context in which communal eating is economic.

If that is buffet-style and a hefty land value tax to stop landlords from milking the restaurant, so be it.

Those aren't the only options. You can have small street-food vendors. The costs are much lower because there's no waiter etc. But it's more of a functional thing ("get food, go home fed"), not a pleasure thing where you sit around with friends or your partner and talk while someone serves you food.

Yeah that is good. Bums me out that we force them to use gas generators and not have running water mainly to avoid extractive rents, but that can be fixed. Mandating you bring your own container as I swear take-out contributes a huge portion of urban trash would also be a doable improvement.

Making it less convenient (e.g. by requiring customers to have a container on hand) is a great way to have fewer customers.

Why not instead mandate compostable containers?

Because reuse is far better than composting.

I think the issue is less intractable that it might sound. Food delivery could pick up last meal's dishes. Or offices could have dishwashers.

That trash is so cheap, and sources of trash so unregulated (because just raising the cost of trash leads to litter --- need to impose cost on the producer not consumer) got us in this rut. The inconvenience you speak of is more effect than cause.

> Maybe we need buffet-style restaurants that serve nutritious perishable food without all the extra plating, waters, and other frivolities so people can bask in being served and pretend they are aristocracy.

Aside from buffet-style, casual, fast-casual, fast-food, and street food outlets fit in the “prepared food without, or without as much of, the frivolity that simulates aristocracy”. It’s not exactly an underserved space.

It's definitely a welcome development, but it still costs more than cooking your own meals and cleaning up by a whole lot, so something is amiss. (As I wrote before, I don't mean to say it is all the restaurant's fault, it could be rents are simply too high.)

When you say it costs more to eat out, are you factoring in the cost of your time?

If I spend an hour and a half prepping and cooking dinner, but I managed to buy that ingredients for $10 less than what I would spend at a restaurant, it's still cheaper to eat at the restaurant if I factor in the time I spent.

>When you say it costs more to eat out, are you factoring in the cost of your time?

Just an addendum: if that time would have been spent, say, watching TV (and you are a healthy adult that doesn't have any psychological or physiological benefit from watching TV) then the time cost is possibly negligible.

Full time salaried workers can't easily convert additional time into money.

I mean there are many ways to overwork oneself, and I suppose the fact that I often am just too mentally drained after work to do all the cooking anyways speaks to a similar malady.

I think we do see PP's point with poorer people with horrendous commutes, part time inconsistent jobs, etc. Lot's of anguish about "food deserts" of course, but I think there is a larger reckoning that we simply need to reduce work and commutes before dual income people at all levels can afford to cook real food.

You should get multiple meals from cooking and cleaning for 1.5 hours, either as leftovers or for other people.

You should, but I eat a lot and the prep work adds up.

I tried to look into that. I think problem is two fold: 1. options 2. audience

1. options: I need to be able to serve two or three meal options tops depending on what is available / inexpensive. People really like having options but that drives costs up which will drive me up a wall.

2. audience: I need a captive audience such as prisoners in a prison or resident college students who pay for the whole semester at a cafeteria.

Well,

1) I personally hate choosing things from menus as as I truly like all the food "that isn't bad" (for all dishes there exists a pareto equal or better dish which I like. Something like that?) That fact that a single dish du jour can get more attention an planning re seasonal ingredients and other inputs due diligence is a huge plus too.

2) I am also fine committing to eating at the same restaurant once, twice, maybe even 3 times a week, and do that anyways.

Count me in!

Restaurants run the gamut from the dinky places not much larger than kiosks that simply microwave your food on demand to really fancy and expensive businesses. And the dinky places do have higher profit margins, assuming they don’t overstock the place. Of course, people applying for jobs in the dinky places don’t expect to get paid more than people working at fancy restaurants (with slimmer profit margins and higher labor costs).

And that’s not considering people willing to lose money so they can own a coffee shop!

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