#capitalism #food #street-economics #cohost-repost
2023-01-04
I don't want to pollute a pre-existing share-thread so I'm forking this. This just covers The US.
This isn't well cited because I don't actually care that much. You're reading some rando, treat it accordingly. I am not a pizza expert, just someone who is involved in the hyperlocal gustatory import/export business (which is to say, I eat things sometimes, as a treat).
https://cohost.org/maxknightley/post/783860-it-should-be-conside
in Portland Maine as of 2017 you could go to the italian grocery store, in the back where it's not well advertized, and find an entire food service area that did nothing but prepare The Sicillian Slab, a pizza that is basically lighter-than-foccacia-but-just-as-springy, eggy and slightly sweet 'crust' that had a huge amount of sauce and cheese on top. We're talking 6-inch by 6-inch squares, two inches thick, cut from industrial-kitchen sheetpans full of pizza.
It is, still, the best pizza I've ever had. I didn't think I'd like the bread style pizza. But it was good.
The owner and the cook had a dispute, the cook went and made his own successful restauraunt. It's 8$ per slice there, now. The quality of the grocery never improved. I think he deserves way more money for what he produces, but it's artisan now. It's fancy. It's slightly charred from the brick oven instead of uniformly broiled from the industrial broiler.
But you gotta pay the bills, and art that attracts foodies does it better than the back room of an italian grocery, like it or not. The times are changing, everything's worse, suck it up. That's how it should be. Do better and you too might be at the top, some day. Some day, some day, when you should have retired a decade ago. Maybe. It's a gamble. More cruise ship stopover folks ate there than locals, last I was there. Mainstreet was empty, everyone was leaving, priced out. So was I. No idea how it's going over there these days.
pizza is one of those critical price indicators because once the price of a lone slice goes above 5$ you're just fucked. You can't stay in business unless you're delievering whole pies for 20
I remember when tacos were 1
in 2005-2009, I don't know when, there was a huge glut of posts in places like The Atlantic talking about how ordering pasta was "A rip-off" (they used a slur instead, generally) because it cost the restauraunt 3$ of components and they charged you 23$ for the privilege. This phenomenon is what I'm going to call The Jamie Oliver Fallacy (Timestamp link, 12:17 if it doesn't work). Labor is always the biggest cost. It's why everything hovers around 17$ at the example restauraunt. Restauraunts have economies of scale, especially for pizza, allowing them to be cheaper than most, but there's a cap. Wages have not risen as fast as cost of living has.
A lot of american stuff is like this -- it's a Theory of Mind problem, but the lack of accurate modeling of other people isn't an individual problem -- most schools in the US, even good ones, were very careful to alienate you from that. Especially when you consider how overworked teachers are and how badly students treat pretty much every adult in the school. (Which, also, is not an individual problem and instead one of how schools are designed and run). Most of my same-aged peers outside of "intellectual"/academic/STEM/Internet-Self-Learner spaces do not get that their inconvenience is partially because they underpaid, do not get that doctors are reluctant to deal with patients who send long emails because that's unpaid time, etc.
I have no idea how I got here from pizza but here we are. You can map 'street food goes from cheap affordable blue collar and exhausted commuter food' and it's creep towards no longer being that, to how many shuttered businesses are in the same town. Nothing is an island, the rising tide is drowning everyone who doesn't own a boat.