Why are rice prices still high? | Hacker News Reader

Why are rice prices still high?

japantimes.co.jp

16 pointsPaulHoule16 comments

> “On top of that, with inbound tourism and eating out resurging as we came out of the pandemic, demand increased,”

Why does eating out increase demand for rice, rather than just shifting the same volume of consumption from being through homes/grocery stores to restaurants? Do people eating out pick rice more than people cooking at home? If this was true, and if people aren't in general eating more ... then have prices for some other foods that are more popular for home meals commensurately decreased?

There's a lot of possibilities, but one that springs to mind is that restaurants are quite wasteful compared to home cooks.

Well run restaurants waste as little food as possible, since that's all profit being thrown away.

Having run a restaurant, this was not my experience.

Is this a theoretical restaurant or a real one? From what I understand real restaurants waste food by necessity because (for one example) mistakes are inevitable, customers are picky/mercurial, and any prepared dish that is deemed less than suitable for one customer for any reason can’t be sold to any customer.

Also equipment fails, vendors mess up, etc.

You'd need perfect forecasting to not waste food. Order exactly enough food, and serve each customer exactly what they'd eat.

It's not about forecasting, but about being able to give food away instead of dumping it because "lost profits" and idiotic lawsuits on free food.

You skipped over the other part of what I wrote. The uneaten food that people leave on their plates is often more significant.

If saving 10c costs time worth more than that then it's not worth it. Ends there, really.

A friend used to work at a known cupcake chain in London and she literally threw out 30+ cupcakes a day. Whenever I was around, I'd try to convince her not to throw them but giving the box to some homeless or random passerby. Although that wasn't a common event given the boss.

So no, many places are stupidly wasteful, sometimes because of silly legislation.

Similarly, tourism should only account for an increase in demand of a few percent at most (?), seems like a lazy and potentially harmful attribution

I don't know about Japan but in the states it is common for a restaurant to serve you a large portion, otherwise some patrons would claim they're not getting a good value. It's quite normal to not be able to finish it, and unless you ask for a to-go container, it'll go to waste.

Japan in a variety of ways is approaching crisis mode for it's currency and economy.

https://www.reuters.com/business/japans-super-long-bond-yiel...

Japanese monetary policy has been limping along for quite some time now. Decades. Maybe now it is reaching a inflection point were the state is no long able to manipulate things enough to hide the cost of sovereign debt.

Food is one of those things were people just can't defer buying because they are worried about current state of the economy. So maybe food prices are where the symptoms of a flagging economy and falling money value are most apparent.

For context, 5 kg for 4220 yen retail is $2.67/lb. The current spot price for US rice wholesale is roughly $.40/lb, (CWT, F.O.B./wholesale) for May 2025.

https://www.ams.usda.gov/mnreports/ams_1655.pdf

"The reason that consumers have yet to see prices come down following the emergency stockpile release is due to the fact that most of the auctioned rice has yet to make its way to wholesalers."

Japan sets a low limit on rice imports before it starts a tariff regime that makes it much more expensive than market price. They could simply eliminate this to help consumers as a short term measure but refuse to do so on principle. Their rice market is a mess because of artificial measures meant to boost prices for Japanese farmers.

from a surface level personal research the money is not eaten by farmers, that in reality make a pittance but from a "rice consurtium", a middlemen that should represent farmer interest but in reality is basically a monopolistic corporation.

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