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Comment by kart23 | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone been to an ikea restaurant recently? I think post-covid they made a bunch of cost-cutting changes, because I remember the food being pretty darn delightful and tasty. I went a month ago and got cold mashed potatoes, disgusting veggies, and just plain horrible mac-n-cheese. Also, all the silverware and dishes had been replaced by single-use wooden sporks and paper plates.

I'm probably never eating at ikea again. The meatballs are decent, but you can get them frozen and they taste exactly the same.

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I last ate at an IKEA about a week ago. It was as-expected, on regular porcelain plates with metal utensils. The mashed potatoes were hot, but I didn't have their normal veggie mix or mac-n-cheese -- I always get the "veggie medallion" substituted in from their salmon plate.

I suppose that the most we can draw from our mutual experiences is that different IKEA restaurants are running at very different levels of quality right now. Hopefully yours was just having a bad day.

(To be fair, most cafeteria-style mac-n-cheese is disgusting. Or I just have weirdly high standards for this specific food.)

Could it be a staffing issue? In Australia, the service industry is scrambling to fill shifts as COVID hits harder post-restrictions. A restaurant might shut or offer limited service because they can't offer a level of service that would escape bad reviews damaging them for the future.

A friend told me about dishwashers at one place here getting $85/hour because they were so desperate. I'm guessing this was Sunday rates, but still.

Using recyclable plates/cutlery might help cover for that temporarily.

The whole point of the Ikea restaurant is that they are show casing a lot of their own products in there: the cutlery, plates, tables, glasses, chairs, tables, etc. are all stuff that they sell in the store as well. I think they have some variations between countries in what they offer exactly in terms of food. So, greasy/bland diner style food is what you get in the US mainly because that is what people would expect to get in a place like that in the US. Likewise, the German Ikea has some German things (I've been there). I do wonder what they would do in a place like Italy. They tend to be super picky there. Serving mac and cheese there would probably get the chef lynched.

If you violate Italian food etiquette you won't survive. I would rather tell Kim Jong-un he is fat.

"Restaurant Refuses to Grate Cheese for Customer's Seafood Dish, Calls it an 'Obscene Request"

https://www.vice.com/en/article/wjvdxz/restaurant-refuses-to...

It is not just IKEA. Besides shrinkflation, there must be something like shitficflation, because here in C. Europe, mince and sausages became basically inedible over the past 12 years. Which is a shame as I used to enjoy both.

This is going to feel like a personal attack, but it's intended to be commiserating:

Welcome to getting old.

Is that why eating out isn’t as much fun as it used to be either?

Yes.

It also becomes increasingly expensive to find enjoyable/delightful food.

Why do I feel young again at a tiny butcher shop then? Same old good sausages as always. Although for a much higher price...

To be honest, I really took that into account. For example this crap fat (known by everyone) momma-pizza's taste has deteriorated from 8 to 6. High quality single-malt's taste has deteriorated from 7 to 5, while mince and sausages have seen such an insane drop, that they are literally no longer edible (so <3). In my childhood I'd rate them 7 or 8.

But yeah, feelings get blunt with age, not only the feelings of pleasure, but also the feelings of suffering. That's why it is much easier to run 42km at age 35 when it is literally 3 times much more difficult than at age 25..

I legit prefer the veggie meats to supermarket burgers/mince.

I think so, because we have seen inflation already in most areas of life: rising prices (and I'm thinking of pre-2022). However food has somehow more or less stayed level. Much of it means we were paying the same for ever worse quality food.

I am wondering how Costco is doing with their chickens and hot dogs.

Those were openly acknowledged to be loss-leaders even before COVID. But I wonder how long they're going to stay with their current pricing, with food prices soaring across the board. End of an era, probably.

And I have no doubt they're what holds Sam's Club pricing down too, as soon as they bump their prices so will Sam's.

If those are indeed loss leaders, what would be the reason for the addition push for the products recently? Nowadays there are Costco employees bringing pizzas to the checkout lines and trying to sell them. Are these overproductions due to a drop in demand?

My Costco has never returned to making pizzas, neither frozen nor in the "restaurant" since the pandemic started. I can't even imagine them selling pizzas in the checkout.

that's odd, I talk with a couple people about costco finds and nobody ever has had their cafes stop making pizzas.

The costco menus are nationalized though - Costco Canada for example got the Polish Dog long after it had disappeared from the US, as well as chicken strips, fries, wings, and poutine. They also apparently still get brown mustard and sauerkraut even though, again, those disappeared from the US when COVID hit. So maybe you are not in the US? But pizzas are definitely still in cafes in the US - apart from the Combo Pizza which did disappear at the start of COVID along with the brown mustard and sauerkraut (RIP my tastebuds)

https://www.sheknows.com/food-and-recipes/articles/2536803/c...

Costco Korea gets some very interesting items, including a pork cutlet, bulgogi bake, abalone porridge, and a blueberry smoothie or at least they did pre-COVID (no idea since, I don't live there).

https://www.businessinsider.com/costco-food-court-in-south-k...

Costco Japan apparently got a cheeseburger, salad in a cup, the bulgogi bake, and clam chowder.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Costco/comments/sfedjh/food_court_i...

The hot dog, however, is a Costco icon. One must partake in communion before leaving the Church.

I will take a look through the deli section next time I'm there, but I do agree on that one, I think the take-n-bake went away when covid hit. I can't remember noticing them since then at least, but I don't like them and don't seek them out (they're different and not as good as the cafe ones).

My store is a smaller one and is missing many of the items in the other stores 30-45 minutes away. For example, no pre-peeled garlic, no standby generators (why?! suburbanites probably would buy more home upgrades than urbanites...), a more limited selection of household goods, etc. It is up to the discretion of the manager.

I have recently seen them hawking fresh-baked artisan rolls in the entry foyer near the TVs though, so I would definitely believe they might be hawking pizzas in the checkouts as people are lined up to wait. Maybe there is a push for that from corporate, sell more made-in-store foods like that.

They probably just have some employees with a hot-bag going around being like "hot fresh pizza, take one home to the kids!" or something, and the cashier rings it up when it's your turn. That's basically what they were doing with the artisan rolls last time I was there, only (again) in the entry foyer.

> The hot dog, however, is a Costco icon. One must partake in communion before leaving the Church.

The truly devout amongst us make the sign of the cross upon entering the building.

This way you get to drink your soda as you browse the aisles and get a free refill after checkout.

I don't think pizzas or the artisan rolls (which are what I've seen) are loss leaders. Even at $10 a pie, they're probably making a buck or two. Pizza is cheap to make, so is bread.

I'd be surprised to see them hawking chickens or hot dogs in the line but who knows. Costco goes hard on customer satisfaction, that's why they offer regularly-stocked loss-leader items like that in the first place.

> here in C. Europe, mince and sausages became basically inedible

Are you referring to frozen, processed meat? In North America you can find fresh ground meat at most supermarkets and the store-made version is generally made from the butcher's trimmings e.g. steak cuts. Fresh in that it's labeled with an expiration date, at most 2-3 days from production. USDA guidelines and all that.

Ah yeah Freakonomics coined the term “skimpflation”, like how costs are the same but when you go to a hotel there’s no room service, or you go to a Denny’s and wait 2 hours for a server to even acknowledge you. Businesses are just skimping everywhere.

As someone that's worked in a few slaughterhouses and meat-production places, I'm very curious as to what you mean by "inedible".

Off flavours? Old (actually toxic, or just near it) meat? Too much bread fill? Too much fat? (from what I've had of traditional Polish meals I'm guessing that last one wouldn't be a problem)

Buy them at farmers markets not the store.

How are wooden sporks and paper plates cost-cutting? They're single use, so you need to keep buying them, whereas you can wash silverware and dishes. And they're probably the cheapest possible silverware and dishes known to man since IKEA makes them.

Sounds more like a hygiene thing than a cost-cutting thing.

IKEA doesn't make anything. Their entire competetive advantage is inventing logistics 2.0

IKEA is well-known for it's innovative designs. They're just focussed on cost-saving for the most part.

If you are in logistics, and concerned with engineering for packaging, you have to analyze IKEA. They are among the very best at that.

They are not among the very best, they literally invented it and still hold the steering wheel.

That's like saying Apple doesn't make iPhones.

Washing does require some amount of labor and water usage. We don’t get sodas in reusable bottles to return either for that reason.

We actually had that in Denmark prior to the turn of century... and basically only that or glass bottles for beverages, as cans were also banned. Now it's just like in other countries.

Bars often have returnable bottles for soda, and I occasionally see the same bottles at supermarkets. (Irma near me has Schweppes in glass bottles.)

Maybe people don't like to carry the heavy bottles around.

Also, all that glass adds substantially to the shipping weight. (almost half a kg per bottle, adds a lot of weight to a truckload of soda)

I was talking about reusable plastic bottles, though, which were washed and refilled in a similar way to glass bottles in Denmark. This was still the case in the 1990s, but it stopped at the turn of the century.

The energy to product these single-use utensils costs less than what a dishwasher person would cost with the current labor shortages, I suppose.

We recently moved, and as is tradition here in Denmark, we ended up buying most of our big living room “look at my furniture and judge me” stuff at cool “styley” places and then the rest (and a meatball dinner) at IKEA.

I haven’t been to IKEA since I lived in a dormitory that was close to IKEA two decades ago, where the meatballs and soda-refill made for a good hangover stop, but the plate I had two weeks ago was exactly like I remembered it to be. Not great, not terrible.

I was sad that they don’t do soda refill anymore though.

Saw you're at UCSD? I'm at UCSD. Want to meet up? citizenten@tuta.io

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