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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 thought this post was going to be about how Chipotle burritos ordered for pickup are delivery are obviously and notable smaller and less filled than the ones they make while you watch.
When you tell someone as they're making it, "Add this, add that" they don't know when you'll stop and they don't want a tiny burrito with just a line of chicken and rice and no other stuffing. So they put in more as they go but then get overstuffed.
When someone sees up front, "Oh, they want guac" it doesn't matter that the guac is $2 add on, they are mentally subtracting the beans and beef that would have taken up that volume and create a more "normal" burrito.
Yeah I feel like for at least a decade the universal advice has been to slow walk fillings like this. I remember someone joking about this with Subway in high school.
It's like ice creams. If you get two scoops, they'll be smaller than 2x a single scoop.
What you do is get a single, wait till they're done, say actually you'd like a double (b/c the new scoop will have to be the same size) and then...
...get ice cream all over your shoes because 2x a single scoop doesn't fit in a cone, and swear off lifehacks from the internet.
Which, long term, saves you money!
Great lifehack!
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