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Comment by djtriptych | Hacker News Reader

Well, I'm a millenial. Without even reading the article, I'm wondering who in the hell chooses to drive, park, walk half a mile inside a flourescently-lit building, stand in line, pay, load a car, drive back to a house, and unbag groceries when all of that can be avoided by using a computer.

A better question is why we still have food warehouses that would be better operated by robots than people.

As a high-earning hyper-urban techy millenial (Brooklynite / software engineer) who doesn't particularly enjoy cooking, I'm wondering where the value proposition for groceries is when I can order from a huge variety of nearby restaurants, who will deliver hot, cooked food to my door every night for about $20/meal.

Considering there tends to be zero food waste with this option, I'm not sure I'm saving money by shopping for food, especially when I assign a value to my free time, which I like to estimate at half my hourly rate in calculations like this.

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You definitely save money eating at home once you get good at it. If you live with someone else it is also a great social opportunity. These days I cook and eat with my wife, but before I met her I cooked with my roommates.

One roommate now will only eat with us if we add up the cost of ingredients and charge him fairly. Many of our dinners cost only a couple dollars.

Pasta with marinara sauce and dinner rolls: 1.33 / pound pasta, 1.80 jar of sauce, rolls 0.13 each. Serves 3-4 people for $5. 15 minutes (limited by water heating).

Tacos with guacamole: $3 pre-made guacamole, tortillas 0.5 / 12 pieces, beans 1.20 / can, salsa $2 / half bottle, tofu 1.5 / block, cilantro 1 / bundle. rice ~$1. Serves 3-4 people for $10. 20 minutes (lots of tasks, have to cook tortillas).

I won't break it down, but I can do a nice sushi dinner: various rolls, cold tofu, inari, miso soup, for 3-4 people for about $15. 45 minutes (lots of tasks).

In any case I can feed three adults for about ten dollars and 2/3 of an hour of my time. Usually there are enough left-overs to make a nice lunch for myself.

I enjoy eating out, and do so about once a week. Before I got married I ate out a lot. I would spend about $900 per month just for myself. Now I make an effort to cook dinner 6 days a week and spend a total of about 800 per month on food for both of us.

I think the difference is in the scaling: cooking doesn't scale vs income in the same way that eating out does. So in the absence of enjoying the act of cooking (which I happen to) there is absolutely an hourly rate threshold past which it makes no financial sense to cook.

If I save approximately the same amount cooking vs eating out, but it takes me the same additional amount of time to cook (again, assuming you don't enjoy that), then as my income grows the smaller the savings become as a percentage and the larger the monetary value of a given amount of my time becomes worth.

When I see posts like this the prices often feel like they're chosen to be the best possible that could be achieved.

For instance, pre-made guacamole, if it's actually made entirely from real avocados, is more like $6 where I'm at if you want enough to feed 4 people multiple tacos each -- so twice the price you're quoting here.

Oh, you are right, I did the math wrong. I pay $11 for a three pack of 1 pound guacamole boxes. That's closer to $4 each. I'm in California which has a lot of Avocados. In the summer I can reliably purchase large Avocados for 4 for $5 at local markets. When I can get those I use three to make guacamole.

My general food purchasing scheme is to attempt to only purchase the foods I can get at the best prices. If I am shopping and see a 10 pound bag of organic carrots for less than $5 I will buy it and have lots of carrots that week. For example: carrot salad, egg-rolls (carrot filling freezes well), soup, or stir-fry.

I can always buy tortillas for about 3-4 dollars for at least 6 dozen. I freeze them into one dozen stacks and defrost in the microwave until they can be teased apart and finished on a pan.

Some of the best deals I get are at Whole Foods. They often have very good sales on frozen foods. Otherwise I get foods at Costco, a local family market, and Trader Joe's. In the summer I occasionally go to a flea market to get specialty items and seasonal produce.

> 1.80 jar of sauce

A jar of $1.80 pasta sauce around here is probably going to be more closely related to ketchup than real pasta sauce.

> tofu 1.5 / block

Hm. You clearly have much better food prices than I do in general, I guess.

I'm in San Jose, California. I can go to a local tofu shop and get fresh tofu for $2 per block. Otherwise I can spend about 6 dollars at Costco to get a 4 pack of a good brand tofu.

30 minutes of my time is worth a lot more than the entire cost of a delivery/takeout meal.

Your post makes me want to turn off my computer and go raise goats in the country, lest I somehow end up like you one day.

What's wrong with what he said?

His comment comes off as elitist and reeks of 'I value the potential value of my time more than the desire or effort needed to be self-sufficent with regards to food. I also hate big box stores, suburbia, and probably most office buildings.'

It reads like a top post on /r/latestagecapitalism

The best thing about late stage capitalism is that it produces enough excess goods and services that people have the option of opting out!

You mean "opting out" without ever leaving the system.

Everyone can always opt out if they're willing to drop enough things. A trivial way to opt out is to commit suicide. But are other ways too, such as moving into the wilderness and trying to make it there on your own. And that's comparatively much "cheaper" in poorer societies, since there is less to give up.

For instance, whereas in Medieval times serfs might have ran away from their lords and into the wilderness in order to avoid law and taxes, the majority of present-day criminals are found and captured in their own towns, while disgruntled citizens consider themselves to have little option but whine when it comes to taxes.

"Late stage capitalism" does indeed produce enough goods and services that people have the option of opting out. There's some pretty neat survivalist gear for sale nowadays. But they never really do.

> For instance, whereas in Medieval times serfs might have ran away from their lords and into the wilderness in order to avoid law and taxes

That and to your last point is what I was thinking about. It's harder to "opt out" of a subsistence farming existence than it is to opt out of a society where you have access to time- & resource-saving technology that enables you to multiply your abilities, as well as basic necessities at a price that allows you to have disposable income.

That's one of the gripes I have about some of the faux-sustainability crowd: it's not sustainable if it's predicated on a USD$100,000+ income.

Going to a supermarket has nostalgic value for baby boomers, but the supermarket in it's current form only predates the internet by a couple decades.

From a societal evolution standpoint it's been selected for extinction and we're keeping it alive because... why again?

> A better question is why we still have food warehouses that would be better operated by robots than people.

One reason is because not all fresh goods (e.g. produce and meat) are created equal. Hand selection of those items is part of getting the most value our of your food dollars. You can likely overcome many of the other issues; price comparison, new product discovery, etc.; but you're still left with the inconsistency of items that come from dirt.

I agree with this. But we should have lots of hyperlocal produce / butchers, not enormous food warehouses which are 90% dry goods.

>hyperlocal produce

You do realize that many places have these things called seasons? I do have a farm stand just down the road from me which has excellent (albeit a limited range of) produce in August. January? Not so much.

This might help with that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_farming

Ideally, yes, and while in my small city of Dayton, Ohio I have limited options for produce close to home my local meat producers aren't at all close to me. It's certainly not a stop on my way home. They're setup more for people with chest freezers buying half a cow at a discount to have meat for months at a time.

We're just not the agrarian society that would be conducive to providing "hyperlocal produce / butchers".

Sounds like a computer vision problem. The heuristics of judging the quality of most foods doesn't seem that prohibitive - coloration and geometric consistency puts you about 99% of the way there.

Not everything is a computer problem. It's more of an economic issue. You can deliver hand-picked only premium goods but it will cost.

High quality food delivery is certainly possible. From what I've seen of Instacart delivering from Whole Foods, it works pretty well. But it's a premium service and isn't available where I live.

Additionally, the problem gets a lot more complex if you're doing something like buying produce slightly less than ripe for use in two or three days. That introduces a considerably larger spectrum of criteria across all available produce.

I'm not going to say it's necessarily more complicated of a problem -- I chose the word "complex" purposely -- as it mostly just simplifies down to being more training data for the AI produce picker (or what have you), but it sure seems like the failure rate would scale up rather quickly in real world scenarios. That would just lead to waste we wouldn't otherwise have.

Or maybe I just prefer to pick out my own produce. It could go either way, CV isn't my field.

Either way, handling pantry goods in this way doesn't sound particularly unreasonable.

I'm sure if you build this system at a price cheaper than human labor and at least as good, people will buy it.

(Hoping this is a satirical comment, in which case: well done. If not...)

Many, many millenials aren't as fortunate to have a high-paying software engineering position like yourself.

For them, $20 per dinner every night is simply impossible.

It also adds up really quickly. $20/dinner is like $50/day if you eat out all 3 meals, which is more than $15K/year. There are people who live on $15K/year; there are also startups that have been founded on $15K.

If the price of not making that grocery run for 3 years is "I get to do a startup without permission of investors", would you still do it?

Also, it is $20/person/meal, which quickly gets out of hand with more than one person.

Exactly. I can feed 3-4 adults dinner for $5 to $15 depending on what we cook. Those same dinners would cost $30 to $70 to purchase.

> I'm wondering who in the hell chooses to drive, park, walk half a mile inside a flourescently-lit building, stand in line, pay, load a car, drive back to a house, and unbag groceries

I do. I have a list, so I'm pretty much on auto pilot in the store. This is 45 min that I can let my mind just shut down. Completely analog, no screens, no job, no worries. Nothing. Just walk the isles, load a cart and scratch a list.

> who doesn't particularly enjoy cooking, I'm wondering where the value proposition for groceries is when I can order from a huge variety of nearby restaurants,

If you don't enjoy cooking, then there really is no value proposition. Unless you think you may get to the point later in life where you wish you'd saved a bit more money. But you're young so you're still bullet proof.

> Considering there tends to be zero food waste with this option, I'm not sure I'm saving money by shopping for food...

With proper meal planning and preparing, there shouldn't be waste. But again, you don't enjoy cooking, so that's the hurdle.

My gf and I live in SF and use Sprig which is healthy and around $12-15/person including delivery. Its cheaper than when we bought groceries and cooked (which we didn't enjoy) because we had to rent a Zipcar to go to the grocery store, pay SF food prices and ended up wasting a lot that we didn't eat. We didnt waste out of poor planning but unpredictable schedules. She has sudden client meetings come up in the evening or I have to unexpectedly travel down to a different office in the south bay.

Considering my company provides breakfast and lunch, the high price for dinner isn't that bad. Also on weekends we're usually not home to cook, which increased the probability of wasting groceries we didn't eat during the week.

As millennials without children and good jobs who don't enjoy cooking, there isn't any reason to spend the time planning meals, renting a car and going to the grocery store on the weekend when I'd rather be doing anything else. If I lived in a smaller city, where I had a house and a car without an app that delivered healthy food, then it would have to change, but thats a boring life.

> hot, cooked food to my door every night for about $20/meal

I'm disappointed when it costs more than $10 total to feed my family of 5 a hot cooked meal. 1.5 lbs of beef, 2 vegetables, and a few cups of milk is ~$10. This will increase as my kids get older, but God I can't imagine spending $20 per meal per person on food. Plus, the kids get to help see how the food is prepared, our oldest (7) can help cut veggies, everyone can help set the table, and best of all we know every last ingredient that does (and doesn't) end up in our food.

I assign a value to my free time too, and preparing fresh meals with my family is pretty damn valuable.

Yeah, but what if you're 25, you live alone, you make more money than you know what to do with (on account of spending 90% of your daily time at your high-tech job), and every time you cook for yourself half of your food goes bad or you have to eat the same thing 3-4 days in a row?

Cooking at home after with all that just reminds me that I'm not cooking with a family or whatever. I'd rather go sit next to strangers and have some human interactions with people who aren't Millennials working in tech.

What kind of food are you making that you won't want to eat for 3 days in a row? You may want to consider an investment in some cooking classes or some youtube videos. Outside of brewing beer, I can scarce think of a better ROI on your man-hours than learning to cook. Try these links to learn how to start:

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=http://www.forbe...

http://www.guidingtech.com/13245/youtube-channels-learn-basi...

It will take some time to learn, and some epic failures, but within a few weeks you'll be making great food you can't wait to eat!

Without reading the article but reading this reply I can totally believe you are a millennial.

Well, there are a number of reasons. Cooking your own food tends to be physically healthier - not to mention that there's a certain zen to it. It's also a good skill to have, and it's fun. Finally, it'll make your mother happy :)

I'm wondering who in the hell sits down all day in front of a blindingly bright screen, alone, clicking away to make games and tools that get other people to sit down all day in front of their computers... So they can afford to pay for a hyper-dense closet to live in, and be fed at their door like a caged chicken, so they have more time to avoid life by using a computer.

You type this as though our ancient ancestors when to supermarkets. As though shopping at a supermarket is an act of self-sufficiency.

I guess so, relative to ordering cooked meals and groceries on line. But it's not quite binary. Any hunters and gatherers on Hacker News?

LOL.

> when I assign a value to my free time, which I like to estimate at half my hourly rate in calculations like this.

That only works when you are choose to use that free time earning at that rate. Otherwise you are simply using mental gymnastics to validate your choice (which, since it is your money and your food, certainly does not require validation from others).

Some people really enjoy not cooking and if they are willing to spend the money that's an ok decision (ignoring the health aspect).

The time spent cooking isn't time spent earning.

You can write off those last 30 minutes of work a day as the part that feeds you but ultimately you're spending over the odds for food you could have made yourself.

A grocery chain here (Kansas, so I assume most of the US) offers their full store online with free delivery ($100 minimum). Our weekly trips have been replaced by a few minutes on the laptop. The best part for me is that the orders are tracked and I can just re-order what I bought last week or make slight modifications.

No robots yet but I hope that's not far off.

Honestly I feel almost guilty when they roll up to the deliver the groceries.

Do they give the same prices for the online shopping as they do at the store?

My local store uses Rosie for online shopping and states that only advertised specials are guaranteed to have the store price.

Exact same price. You are quoted a price when you checkout online, but a human shops for you and goes through a normal checkout process in the store which weighs the fruits/vegetables etc. You are provided the same store receipt when they deliver the groceries as you would get in store. That amount is charged to your credit card.

"Considering there tends to be zero food waste with this option"

hmm, sure is a lot of energy waste though for every meal delivered.

Also, anyone who is serious of cooking at home uses all their ingredients. I don't buy more food until I've eaten or planned to eat all that I have.

Possibly. Modern delivery allows you to choose low-packaging options, and in cities is mostly delivered by electric bicycle. Also one big kitchen serving 100 meals is certainly more efficient than a hundred or so small ones.

>cities is mostly delivered by electric bicycle

Maybe in downtown, but I don't think the millennials who oppose grocery shopping are all clustered around areas where electric bike delivery is available. The would seem to be a very small representative subset.

I did mention my particular circumstances in the original post (Brooklyn)

>I'm wondering who in the hell chooses to drive, park, walk half a mile inside a flourescently-lit building, stand in line, pay, load a car, drive back to a house, and unbag groceries when all of that can be avoided by using a computer.

I've tried grocery deliveries. Invariably not everything you want gets delivered. Produce and other fresh items may not be as good as you expect. Maybe if I had Instacart with Whole Foods but then I'd spend more and it's not available where I live anyway. Lots of people aren't quite as adverse to getting up from their computer.

I understand that if you don't particularly like to cook, then someone bringing hot food over is a lot more appealing than doing something you don't enjoy.

I'll caution against drawing an equivalency between a lifestyle of eating take-out/delivery food vs. cooking (cooking, not heating up boxes of stuff) food you prepare at home.

In the former approach, you take what shows up. You can only control what you order and where you order from. In the latter approach, you can control what's going in to about as great (or little) a degree as you care to.

YMMV of course.

It just feels like 20th century americans didn't really value their time. They were the weird ones, apparently content (I don't really think that) to do all the pointless stuff they did.

$20/meal is not reasonable. Me and my wife's homemade meals are about $2.50~$3.00 each and we eat meat every meal.

Reasonable to who? Of course, it's possible to cook very economically and well. But it's hardly unreasonable for people to choose to eat steaks and expensive seafood for at least some meals.

Hot, cooked food that is mostly unhealthy for you. If you want to eat fresh meat and vegetables that taste good... it's hard to get find that from different restaurants 3 times a day.

Your sense of sarcasm and self centered posture gave me a good laugh, have an upvote sir.

I assumed it was too, but if not... I know people like this.

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