It's incredibly hard to have any actual faith in governmental assessments anymore.
There is the raw price data, which is mostly bunk because it uses unrepresentative products. And there is obviously huge political pressure not to make basket adjustments that result in prices going up.
And then there are quality adjustments that are completely nonsensical. Worst example is obviously with something like medicine where it just isn't possible to compare the price of drugs that save lives that didn't exist fifty years ago.
Unfortunately, economists will forever be in the camp of not understanding the difference between what is measured and what can be useful (and this has serious consequences for policy, for example the understanding within modern economics of long-term economic growth is close to zero which has led to policies focusing heavily on resource usage/intensity, essentially no different to North Korean economic policy in the 50s, due to significantly understated long-term estimates of growth). Hong Kong's government didn't produce economic statistics during its period of rapid growth for this reason.
The Law of Salutary Contradiction states that when an event or policy is initially dismissed as impossible or a conspiracy theory, it is later acknowledged as occurring—but framed as beneficial and morally justified.P.S. There are way too many variables for you to draw that kind of causation from the correlation, and you’re very naive to think you could.
Most serious studies of minumum wage effects conclude that while it does create upward price pressure, the results are small changes. It is essentially a redistributive, rather than inflationary, mechanism.
Only if you are considering the wages of the employees at the fast food restaurant. But when it extends to employees involved in the logistics, processing, and farming its no longer minimal.
Tangentially, calling the rise in wages a "living wage" in SF/DC/NYC/etc. is folly to begin with and reveals minimum wage laws are based on sloganeering and not an economic analysis.
Anyway ...
The basic idea is pretty simple: if you work 40 hours a week on minimum wage, you should be able to rent a reasonable condition 1 bedroom, 1 bathroom apartment relatively close to where you work.
That's not a "slogan", it's an idea that's been nominally central to The American Dream for more than a half century (but also largely untrue for the last few decades in many metropolitan areas).
Do you oppose this idea?
This is also debunked simple napkin math, even if the napkin math is generous to skeptics.
Let’s say you buy a product for $100 with these example costs:
$30 of the price goes to labor
$30 of the price goes to rent/utilities/“keeping the lights on”
$30 of the price goes to inputs (materials)
$10 of the price goes to profit.
Let’s say wages go up by 20%.
Labor goes up to $36, now your price is $106.
Wages went up by 20% but your price went up by 6%.
Maybe we have to add the labor of the input materials, but a lot of input materials have low labor costs than finished products in the restaurant industry. E.g., a tortilla from a tortilla factory doesn’t have 30% of its price represented by labor cost, since it’s made on an automated assembly line. Still, for ease, let’s just say our input materials went up by ~6% to $32
At the end of the day your total cost of your product went up 8% but all the employees got a massive 20% raise with net positive income.
It's obvious to everyone that labor is just one cost to the seller. People only care that the price went up $6, not how that $6 happens to break down for the seller.
Many people think that if a McDonald’s worker’s salary goes from $10 to $20 that their Big Mac will go from $4 to $8.
My napkin math is extremely generous to minimum wage haters. It assumes that everyone is getting a raise and therefore all costs of all goods are going up. It also assumes basically a worst case scenario restaurant industry wage breakdown.
For example, the S&P 500’s average labor cost as a percentage of revenue is only 12%.
I haven’t even brought up the fact that people making wages that are too low to survive on already use government benefit programs, like how Walmart is the largest employer consumer of food stamps in the country. Minimum wage could be one mechanism among others to reduce corporate welfare. Walmart doesn’t deserve to have its labor costs be subsidized by the taxpayer.
And it's a distraction from the main point. Without needing to look at any specific math, higher labor costs will be generally passed onto the customer because profit is not allowed to go down. That's not a defense of low wages, it's just an illustration of where the power lies.
If I live in India the PlayStation 5 isn’t magically price reduced to $100 just because my income is lower. Similarly, it doesn’t magically become $5,000 if I live in Monaco.
> Onions that cost $9 a sack before COVID now run $80. Beef is up more than $2 a pound, adding $6,000 to his monthly costs. Labor adds another $3,000.
>That's an 89% increase over a decade, and a 32% jump in just two years. San Francisco has the highest indexed concert ticket prices in the nation, roughly 29% above the norm, according to analysis from Tickethold.
Of course prices are increasing everywhere across the USA. I am just pointing out that San Francisco has always been significantly more expensive than everywhere else even before the last handful of years. And the reason for this is very clear: SF people have been paid more on average. Probably because the demand for the small area (so nice climate wise, job availability wise, etc) exceeds availability for those things and drives up other prices. And then the ratcheting like I said.
Applebees is gonna be the same in both places but in LA you're gonna be much more able to find some categorically lower and lower priced end non-franchised place.
They haven't been that cheap since the 90s. 10 years ago, they were around $10.
You do realise that the article has actual photos of the menus from different years, right?
What's your hypothesis here? They photoshopped the images?
But yeah, it's likely an outlier in 2014 to be that cheap. More like $7-8.
Locally (not in SV), one can still find "cheap" burritos at Mexican joints. By cheap I mean $11-12.
In one local restaurant, they bumped up burritos from about $11 to $18 within a year. I stopped going there.
More concretely, if you converted 1btc to euro or dollar at the beginning of the year and back to btc at the end, how much fewer btc you'd end up with if you went through dollar as oppossed to euro.
Furthermore, a lot of these places continue to give an ethnic discount - especially when paying in cash - because someone of the same ethnic group will most likely remain a repeat customer and can induce negative WoM in tightly knit ethnic communities.
This is _not_ a thing at all. Maybe you observed it once, but this is HIGHLY unusual.
Or a longtime establishment of the area offers 15$ ones - https://www.gorditosmexicanfood.com/menu#menu=burritos Granted these are massive compared to basically anywhere else.
Even the old reliable mom and pop owned places (Tiryaki, Thai, Pho, Sichuanese) have all been hallowed out by what's been happening in the ID and have been transitioning to that "great vibe" model too as a last-ditch effort to survive. There was a bit of a resurgence of food trucks those last couple of years, but laws limit what can be made in a food truck.
There's a new second-order concern where I'm now alarmed by low prices. For example: I have no idea what johnsonville did to keep their brats at $4.99 over the past 5 years while the more local ones shot to $9-11, but it makes me grossed out and skeptical.
As the article notes, opposite effect in tech. I was perusing ipad mini and mac mini yesterday and couldn't believe what I paid $500 for in 2021. The amount of apple you get for $350 on the refurb market is absolutely batty. You can get a shitty intel mini for well under 100 bucks. Tempted to start slinging them around like chonky raspberry pis.
Expect the computer prices to rise since OpenAI bought out the next year's supply from two of the biggest RAM/NAND manufacturers in the world.
And then the tarrifs hit, which certainly does hurt. I was making desserts w nice belgian chocolate that went from $65 per 5lb to $90. So I'm not discounting the pain there, but the bulk of this effect seems to predate the tariffs, unless there are some from 46 admin or before that I'm not aware of.
Of course, if given the ability now, finally, to charge whatever retail wants, you could say it's opportunism. But they didn't have the ability to do that until the trade shocks.
The thing people are in denial about is that it's everything. You are saying Belgian chocolate. Some people say iPhones. Blah blah blah. I'm saying, literally everything. Everything physical had prices that had to compare to lower priced, high quality imports from China and southeast Asia. They think that a sticker that says Mexico on their fruit means Mexico. They think stickers don't lie! Do you see?
The US doesn't import fresh tomatoes from China and never has. Nor does Mexico.
Frankly, the amount of food imported from China has always been relatively small. For instance, it made up just 1% of US food supplies in 2009.
This is a key metric that the article doesn't properly account for when it comes to food prices. The asshole restaurateurs got an exception to the anti "drip-pricing" law that required all fees to be rolled into the listed cost: https://oag.ca.gov/hiddenfees
Only in the restaurant world are customers on the hook for ensuring a living wage. It's a stupid system but is culturally entrenched.
Meal prepping, cooking at home, and fine dining only.
Also: sure, some places overdo it on the pricing: I distinctly remember walking out of a Rotterdam (somewhere in The Netherlands) establishment due to them charging 25 Euros for a lunch sandwich, like 2 decades ago, despite this not being a fancy place at all. No inflation in sight, just greed and/or an inability to read the target audience...
Here's one from 2014, $5.50 https://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/taqueria-canc%C3%BAn-san-fra...
Here's one from 2015, $6.99 https://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/taqueria-canc%C3%BAn-san-fra...
$5.50 - dated March 14, 2014: https://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/taqueria-cancun-san-francisc...
$5.50 - dated February 28, 2014: https://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/taqueria-cancun-san-francisc...
Mind, that's a regular burrito and it was one of the cheaper ones in SF. El Farolito was around $6 at the time. La Taqueria started at $8 for people who liked to splurge. El Papolote's yuppie burritos were like $10.
The price at Taqueria Cancun jumped again in 2014 iirc after La Taqueria won best burrito in the US normalized the higher price and got them some press (Taqueria Cancun was in one of the final brackets).
I still carry cash because services like massage and housecleaning and some restaurants are happy to give good price breaks for cash payment, but I also love Apple Pay as a consumer.
To me, the fact that crêpes were sold at 20$ and cans of coke at 10$ at the event was a shame. The organizers turned what was once a great event to bring everyone together into a way to scalp even more indie game developers. The price to partecipate as a company was so high that even big names boycott it.
They can price as such because such purchases tend to be expensable during business travel. Corporate conferences like GDC, RSA, etc aren't targeted at ICs - they're meant to essentially be a "safe space" for vendors to meet with prospective clients.
Damn! It's been a couple of decades since I attended the Game Developer conference (thank goodness), but when I used to go, cans of soda were free.
According to the BLS CPI calculator, that $9.10 in 2014 has $12.61 of buying power as of a couple months ago, or $13.75 in late 2025 dollars is $9.92 in 2014. The price has only exceeded inflation by 9%.
** edit in 2014 it was only $1 to make it "super" (cheese, guac, and crema) now it is $3.50. So more like $10 vs $17+ now
I make six figures but I have resorted to making eating out a rare treat in order for me to maintain my financial goals. This harkens back to my childhood in a low-income family, though I do remember my parents taking advantage of fast food deals in the 1990s and 2000s. I pack lunches and dinners to work, and I regularly cook, sometimes resorting to frozen meals for convenience’s sake. Eating out is reserved for social gatherings and for travel.
What’s interesting is the situation isn’t that much better in Sacramento, my hometown and where I visit family members. While Sacramento has lower housing prices, eating out isn’t substantially cheaper.
On the flipside, I’m in Tokyo now on a trip, where eating out feels cheap. $10 in the Bay Area or even Sacramento doesn’t get a satisfying meal these days (it’s not even enough for a fast food combo meal in many cases), but ¥1,500 (roughly $10) in Tokyo can buy a satisfying meal. Even ¥750 can buy a satisfying meal if one looks harder.
The situation in the Bay Area is demoralizing. I’m still in the Bay because of my career and because of social ties. It’s one thing to be priced out of buying a house, but it’s another thing to feel priced out of eating out. I don’t know if the situation is better in other parts of the United States, though; I’ve heard of people in other states complain about the high price of eating out these days.
I don't know how people are affording the various delivery services and their fees on top of it.
It’s the same with the RAM situation. Prices will continue to skyrocket as long as there are enough buyers paying whatever prices the sellers set.
Start declining those tips. We have to stop putting up with that BS.
Should I blame SF inflation or what?
Monetary policy is months to years ahead of what you see at the counter. See also the great money printing of 2020.
manfromchina1•1d ago
the_sleaze_•1d ago
ep103•1d ago
testfrequency•1d ago
SF has such mediocre food for what you pay compared to any other city I’ve lived in*. You either have to fork over a few hundred to experience some of the stellar fine dining options in the city, or end up at some brunch place that’s probably pretty decent but you’re not leaving without at least $100 between two people.
The good food in the Bay Area I’ve always found to be in a shopping center or random places sprinkled all round the south bay and peninsula. Which, may sound similar to how LA is too, but I’d argue LA has overall a healthier food scene and variety of amazing food all within central LA - and most importantly, more affordable.
* besides Seattle
buildbot•1d ago
There are still reasonable & very good places though you just have to know.
testfrequency•1d ago
Locals would (passive aggressively) remind me though how amazing Seattle is, and I should be grateful for no income tax
jandrewrogers•1d ago
Seattle had much better food 15 years ago. The average food quality has noticeably deteriorated at the same time as prices skyrocketed. It is a shame really.
lelanthran•1d ago
I'm curious about the self-inflicted part. How was it self-inflicted?
fragmede•1d ago
RickS•1d ago
radley•1d ago
OkayPhysicist•1d ago
manfromchina1•1d ago
I feel the same way about NYC and NOLA. Both have world class cuisine and the sheer diversity of NYC food scene can't be found anywhere in the US. And for whatever reason NYC style pizza is not as ubiquitous outside the NYC-NJ area.You can definitely find such pizza in Boston, but it cannot be found in every little corner in LA for example.
OkayPhysicist•23h ago