Comment by lotharbot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lotharbot | Hacker News Reader

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My question on the first four is, where the heck are you shopping? Those are terrible prices. Are those really representative of what you see on a regular basis?

Avocados supposedly hit "record" prices of $2.50 each this summer [0]. I get 3 loaves of whole grain bread for $5 at my local grocer. Frozen broccoli is 3-4 pounds for $5 [1]. Low cal tortillas can get up near $5, I guess, if you get the fancy ones in a 10 or 12 pack.

Here are a few other things you can get for $5 (all taken from my local grocery ad [2]):

- 20 pounds of potatoes

- 3.5 pounds of frozen chicken breasts

- 3 pounds of ham

- 5+ pounds of produce: tomatoes, carrots, pineapples, squash, etc.

- 15 cans of store brand condensed soup

It seems to me like, if you're looking to feed the family, your $5 goes a lot more on this list than it does on the dollar menu. A pound of ham, a pound of squash and tomatoes, and a 10 pound bag of potatoes seems like a lot more food than two burgers, two fries, and a tiny salad. It seems to me like, if you can't do better than the dollar menu for feeding your family, you must suck at shopping [3]. Do you think "sucking at shopping" is really what fuels this meme?

[0] http://www.thepacker.com/fruit-vegetable-news/Avocado-demand...

[1] http://www.ers.usda.gov/Data/FruitVegetableCosts/ has some fantastic data

[2] http://www.benewsjournal.com/Kent%27s%20Ads/Kent%27sBRIGHAM0... -- as for cost of living, prices out here are higher than they were in Seattle. Housing is cheap, but groceries are not.

[3] one of my friends who was on government assistance really did suck at shopping. I once went with him and convinced him to replace 10 pounds of meat (of the 20 in his cart) with a big bag of potatoes, as well as bulk carrots and such. At the end of the month, he was delighted that he still had food and had a little money left over.

It is absolutely not reasonable to assume you can buy "chicken breast" for $1.40/lb. The coupon sale price for frozen Dominicks (Safeway) chicken breasts in Chicago is $4/lb. A fresh pack of chicken breast --- again, the grocery store crap --- will easily set you back $7 (which is approximately what Empire runs /lb at Trader Joe's as well).

I don't have a strong opinion about whether junk food is "truly" cheaper than "healthy" food (I cook every night and think it's generally a good idea for every family to get into that habit). I think it's a kind of a moot point, because what many poor families really lack is a history of having time in their schedules to cook. Cooking is a skill built through repetition and serving home cooked meals is a habit that is hard to establish.

What does bug me though is that every time this topic comes up, some nerd hits Google and finds either (a) some ludicrously unrepresentative price sample ("you pay $6/lb for chicken? i can get new york strip for $5.50!") or (b) some combination of beans and millet that will feed them just fine for a month on $3.

It is not enough, to win this argument, for the math to come out slightly in favor of home cooking. Home cooking needs to win on all three axes:

(i) price: home cooking has to be invariably comparable in price to McDonalds to win,

(ii) convenience: it's got to be straightforward to cook and to serve, bearing in mind that one of the hallmarks of low-income working families is shift work, and

(iii) palatability: this doesn't mean "it has to taste as good as junk food" (although realistically that is a factor); it means that you have to find one dish that you can serve four people and have them all come away satisfied.

None of those are easy to accomplish. Erin & I work hard to achieve any two. All three?

A brief anecdote. McKinnon's meat market in Cambridge sells boneless chicken breasts for $2/lb and split chicken breasts for $1/lb. I'm not an expert and can't speak to the quality, but it's really popular among residents here. I have no idea whether this is an "unrepresentative price sample", but it's a meat market in Boston a few blocks away from the red line. It's not exactly an obscure shop. I've never been there, but I'm thinking about checking it out this week as people keep telling me to go.

Google says McKinnon's sells ground chicken for $1.49 --- which is itself an absurdly low price, lower than Costco, wildly lower than the supermarkets --- a boneless chicken breast costs $0.50 more than that per pound?

It might just be regional variations. In Quincy (quite near Cambridge), Roxie's is currently selling chicken breasts for 1.79/lb.

Roxie's is a local meat market where my family used to buy most of our meat (the other place being an illegal meat auction which was held in a strip club on Sundays...and yes, I'm being completely serious).

Here's their flyer: http://www.roxiesofquincy.com/daily-add/daily.pdf

Here is McKinnon's flyer: http://mckinnonsmeatmarket.homestead.com/Menu.html. I'm not sure on ground chicken price, but you can see the prices for chicken breast on there. I've never personally been there, but there is a Yelp review from July that confirms buying split Chicken breast at $0.99/lb.

$1.40/lb for frozen chicken breasts is a sale price, but it's not out of the ordinary for what I used to see in Seattle (less than a year ago) or what I see in rural Utah now. $2-3/lb is more common, and I've seen similar prices when I visit family in Denver, the Oregon coast, and northern Cali. I don't know why Chicago is $4-7/lb for "the grocery store crap"; all I know is that those numbers are way outside of the prices I've experienced. The prices I gave are not "ludicrously unrepresentative"; they're prices I see on a regular basis.

I'm a stay at home dad who's done the shopping for many years. I shop at the closest store, tilt my shopping somewhat but not entirely toward sale items and generics, and don't do anything more extreme than grab coupons from the ads at the customer service desk. I'm not doing anything out of the ordinary, or anything that I'd expect "the poor" to have trouble doing. Everything I say here is a result of my experience feeding my family in a way that I think is pretty normal and sensible. In my experience, home cooking comes out way ahead on price -- it's not even close.

Thus, I'm very firmly in the camp that says "price" is not the major contributing factor to people eating crap. The two other factors you note, "convenience" and the "picky kid factor" (palatability), are the dominant considerations.

We're practically in chicken HQ! This is weird.

We avoid fresh chicken breasts; they're extravagantly more expensive than other better meat options.

But yes, my point is that price really isn't the issue, except that I don't believe home cooking is so much cheaper that it makes a real difference for people.

Those were off the top of my head from my last shopping trip at Albertsons. I'm sure I was wrong about the avocados — the $5 is for a pack of three avocados (though I do think that people would not value even five avocados the same way they would five hamburgers). I'm going again tonight, so I will check if I misremembered the other prices as well, but they don't sound wrong.

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