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Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

I'm enjoying this discussion and I'm glad you brought up your example, but keep in mind the sort of folks ordering BBQ in Portland are a very specific class of customers :)

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Good BBQ is good BBQ - no matter if it is in Texas, Portland, Ohio or anywhere else.

No doubt, but the reason people do or don't get it vary widely be region. In Portland I expect it's more likely to be a novelty or cultural experience, and therefore the clientele to be less price sensitive than Texas.

Was that price for a half-pound moist? :)

See my sibling reply.

Color me unconvinced. I'd wager Matt's customers differ strongly, whether measured by income, self-identified culture, voting pattern, or ethnicity.

Do you have any awareness how obnoxious it is to assert you know my neighborhood better than me? When it's clear you've never been to any of these places, talked with fellow customers, etc?

It's a mixed race neighborhood. For the first couple years his neighbor in the pawn shop parking lot was a soul food cart. The clientele at both looked basically the same in terms of demographics.

While you won't find as much good BBQ in Portland as say central Texas, the Carolinas, etc, it's not some sort of exotic novelty.

I don't know why you are so determined to stereotype this stuff, but it is not helpful.

You living someplace, eating at a restaurant, and having a general gestalt of the local experience does not make you (or any of us) an expert on statements about population-level demographics or the economic implication. There's no reason to get upset that someone on the internet doesn't believe your analysis, or to call them names.

It is a statistical impossibility that any given group in Portland is the same as any given group in Texas on the metrics I mentioned, so your claim is really that these metrics don't influence price sensitivity.

It's statements like this that are revealing:

> People do value authenticity in my town. The big corporate chain restaurants are a lot more sparse here, exactly because the local places are just as cheap, far higher quality, locally owned, and using local ingrediants, etc.

There's no trade-off between chain restaurants and locally owned? The latter is just an unalloyed good and other regions of the country are just making mistakes for no reason? So no, I don't find your analysis convincing, but as I already said I appreciate your input in the discussion.

Dude, it's literally my neighborhood, which I've been in for over a decade. These people are mostly my neighbors. They're who I talk to at the corner store, at the cart pods, at the bar when we're watching the Blazers games.

Just. Stop.

I never made any claim about blanket superiority, just described factually what this place is like. You'll find plenty of people and even data supporting that characterization if you want.

Likewise I did not claim anything about equality with Texas, just that your utterly naive assertion that the customer base for the food cart I mentioned must be slanted a particular way, based on literally nothing. It is not.

You don't understand what I've already written if you think that any of this hinges on how many years you've lived in the neighborhood, or high integrated into the community you are.

I do I simply disagree strongly, just as strongly as you would had I tried to bulldoze you with a naive stereotyped view about something you personally are highly familiar with.

In any case, it's clear continuing this line of discussion is pointless.

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