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The online discourse, I've been watching this week is the $20 Burrito. As a super TLDR; this is an intra-right argument that got started by one conservative saying young conservatives are upset about food affordability, and gave an offhand example about '$20 burritos'. The response was a combination of:
Burritos aren't actually that unaffordable, the rate of increase in unaffordability has come down, also you can make them at home for cheaper, also you aren't entitled to eating out.
The response to the response is that this is a losing message to one's own side, avoids accountability for losing focus on why 2024 went Trump, and suspiciously aligned to Iran war support.
Before I address that specifically, a little about my personal burrito.
I am as close to a controlled middleclass experiment as possible.
I live in the same zipcode I grew up in; my kids go to the same Catholic school I went to. I work in the same industry as my father. I aspire to give my family the same life I grew up with. I can't live the life my parents lived.
In the 90s my parents moved us into a new construction. Today, I live in smaller a house, on a smaller lot built in the mid-70s. In realtive terms, I live in a house that is not only smaller, but nearly 50 years older than the one my father did.
My parents had >8 kids. I have 5.
Here's the kicker: My father was an individual contributor, software developer. I am a Director-level at a mid-market software company; This isn't title inflation, I manage an org of about 25, including multiple layers of leadership.
While being considerably more successful than my father in my career, I financially struggle to same life he lived.
I don't disagree with any of the above points, or probably other reasonable ones, but they all miss the point: I want to live the life I grew up in, I am willing to work hard for it, I held up my part of the implied social contract, I think that the failure of the implied social contract is a BAD thing, something to be seen as regrettable, and I want my politicians to focus on fixing it.
Burritos aren't actually that unaffordable, the rate of increase in unaffordability has come down, also you can make them at home for cheaper, also you aren't entitled to eating out.
This is all arguably true. But yet, is a losing message. Especially when your side won on addressing the real and percieved reasons we can't get affordable burritos, and super especially when the other side's solution is 'free burritos for our friends, mass immigration for our enemies'
The US middle class opportunity has changed in negatives ways for reasons that don't benefit me, and I didn't ask for, and instead of my political side agreeing to help address these issues, they are telling me to support a foreign war
I've been to expensive and gucci places and I think it completely loco to pay $20 for a burrito. If a restaurant tries to charge that much, literally walk out and go somewhere else. It's true though that restaurants in general have gotten more expensive though, but I think it's probably a structural shift in the labor market as well as the attitudes of young people getting food and ordering delivery. If there are suckers out there who will pay $30 for delivery of a shitty meal, then someone out there will charge that much.
In my personal IME groceries are up slightly but not enough that I really notice.
holy shit. my post was about how it's not about the burrito, and the complete obtuseness of the responses that focus on it, and all i get is obtuse responses that focus on it.
EDIT: Matt Walsh, making the same point:
Try to make a point using an incredibly stupid and obviously wrong hyperbole, and obviously you're going to get millions of people pointing that out.
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The problem is that the affordability crisis has been complained about, acknowledged, and attempted to be fixed for at least 2 decades now. I remember that the insane cost of housing and schooling were major political issues in the mid-2000s, and even after the 2008 crash, housing continuing to inflate to such an extent that they stayed flat instead of going down like most other things was basically common knowledge. The problem is multi-faceted, we have many people who have many theories and have tried many things. They could probably do better, but a generic "address the affordability crisis" gives little to work with, and it's like going to a medical research center and telling them to "address the death crisis." They're just as eager as you to fix it, and they've been trying very hard to fix it for a long time. It's just background noise at this point.
So that just leaves the other, more specific parts, which are comprised greatly (not your post, but certainly the posts you are alluding to) by complaints like the burrito thing. So that's what's being addressed. And I think it's especially valuable, because bad arguments in favor of good positions have a way of discrediting the good positions themselves if those bad arguments are left standing too long without being cut down by the people who have those good positions. And complaining about the cost of prepared food is a very bad argument when the affordability crisis is the topic.
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I think a major issue is that some specific things that people really enjoy have surged massively in price, sometimes in ways that aren't reflected in inflation.
For example ground beef where I live is effectively up more than 100% since 2020 both due to price increases and the almost complete lack of meaningful sales. If you're price conscious and your usual diet consists a lot of ground beef this will feel outrageous.
Agree that beef prices massively surged, especially ground beef, but somehow pork and chicken are down. I think this points at a major habbeing in the beef industry in particular, rather than generalized massive inflation.
My cope is buying whole briskets and grinding them, because somehow ground beef is now regularly more expensive than brisket.
Beef issues seem to be industry specific. Similar issue with coffee during the Biden years. It wasn't inflation that jacked the price so high, it was a few years of extreme weather events that disrupted harvests (though apparently one of the issues in 2023 was that so many people were trekking to the US that there weren't enough laborers to handle the harvesting.
For beef, herd levels are at a low point for apparently weather-related reasons. The gap was being closed with imports, but there have been issues with that, including the expansion of screwworm and standards/safety issues. The topic is a Big Fucking Deal among certain parts of the MAHA faction that I only really catch in passing.
I also remember $5 eggs last year, glad that's over
Yeah, egg prices got insane, but that was another industry specific thing. Some birds tested positive for an avian illness and one of the last acts of the Biden admin was an order to purge something like 100 million chickens, which was either a reasonable safety precaution or a malevolent overreaction, I have no grounding to discern between the two.
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I suspect some sort of Biden era regulation or enforcement specifically aimed at this goal. Though in my area ground beef isn't particularly worse than other beef; it's sitting at $7.00/lb ($6.00/lb for the large pack) for 80/20. A whole brisket is $9.00/lb. Steaks are terrible, bone-in ribeye is at $20.00/lb -- they actually have a fancy boneless grass-fed ribeye for $13.99/lb, but I tried it and it's not very good (this is Australian beef, whereas the others are all US)
Wow that's way high. I can get brisket for 4.50 for no roll and 5.50 for choice right now at walmart, and can get better if it's on sale at another store. (TX)
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I've replaced almost all of our (unground) beef intake with chuck roast. Slice it thin (and maybe pound it a little) and I think it's better than flank steak for fajitas. Else I just cube it and braise it. Couple hours of that and it's so delicious and tender. Plus you're getting a lot of nutrition and flavor out of the connective tissue that's converted to collagen. Hoping nobody else figures this out. Also, typically about half the roast is suitable for cutting into steaks and cooking normally, whereas only the other half is something you wouldn't want to cook that way.
Real steaks, like ribeye, have become exorbitantly expensive, but I've found that in almost all cases I like lamb shoulder chops better anyway and they're less than half the price per pound. My go-to is to marinate them in a little bit of very high-end soy sauce and rice vinegar.
Cannot for the life of me figure out why filet """mignon""" (it almost never is) is so expensive. Worst cut of meat on the cow IMO unless you're doing something very specific with it, but people go nuts and I sincerely think it's because "mignon" sounds fancy.
Filet is great though. It kind of lacks the meaty steaky flavor though, and the tender texture might be offputting to some people. Goes good with some sauces or deep fried.
Worst cut is definitely something like top round.
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I feel like people realised that here long ago. When I can get flank steak for almost the same price then why bother?
Here the chuck roast I'm buying is $10.99/pound whereas the flank steak is usually more like $27.
But most people probably aren't feeding a wife who insists that every piece of meat be organic, pasture-raised, and from an animal with an endowment set up such that buddhist monks will be praying for them in perpetuity; etc.
You might want to consider asking your friends out of state to buy you some beef and fedex overnight it to you. You'd still save money.
Even so chuck roast is generally sognificantly cheaper
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Are whole cows available in the bay area? You might be better off buying a whole/half a cow directly from a rancher and getting it processed to eat over time.
Yes, that's definitely been something we plan to look into, and I'm not sure why we haven't gotten around to it yet. The economics make perfect sense and I'm more than happy to use all the weird cuts that would come along with it. Probably I should put Claude on the case.
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Highest price = highest quality! O_O
It's a known phenomenon from marketing psychology. Sometimes if you increase the price of something to an absurd amount, you'll get more units sold.
One of my favorite books is 'How to Blacksmith'. It starts from absolute zero principles - that you have nothing and educates you on how to get into said topic.
The very foreword starts off with 'If you're thinking to get into this to make money as a side project, don't. You will not. Do not do this. You will end up disappointed and frustrated.'
It's not until the very last chapter that he basically says 'If you're determined to try and make money off of this, these are my experiences.' And one illustrative example he gives is 'If you're not able to sell a product, the first thing you should so is increase the price.'
And yet, despite all of this, I find alot of sales people I've interacted with seem incapable of grasping this.
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