How economical is your local Taco Bell?
taconomical.com
taconomical.com
It's not the only one that serves alcohol - there's one in downtown SJ and probably some more around. I notice the website doesn't tell you which ones are Cantinas though.
my sample size is small, but I've found it far from top tier
(I would put Five Guys and Shake Shack as top tier fast food, and In-N-Out except for their fries).
There is also a pretty good Panda Express right there you can grab takeout from and Park in the beach parking lot.
There is another Taco Bell cantina right near our apartment near oracle park. They have really good prices for alcohol compared to the surrounding bars.
I once had someone while eating stand up and just take their pants off in the KFC/Taco Bell in Tenderloin...
When I get to a Taco Bell, I look for how clean the tables are, how well-arranged the sauce/napkin station is, and how clean the fountain drink area is. If any of those are actively a disaster, it tells me the food quality is probably going to be worse (yes yes, its already terrible)
Taco Bell is my favorite fast food, but I'm on a boycott after an app-induced billing error that ate an entire gift card... Their customer support is atrocious so I'll just spend my money elsewhere.
I don't recall them selling alcohol in those days (I was also much too young to drink then) but it was pretty cool even back then.
It fine and all but it was still just a normal Taco Bell like you said, the only thing nicer about it is the decor.
Maybe not the most expensive, but the most beautiful?
Similarly, St. Thomas had a Taco Bell in Charlotte Amelia. It didn’t last long. The Hard Rock Cafe lasted a bit longer.
Forget the food, the views were incredible.
https://locations.tacobell.com/wa/seattle/210-w--mercer-st-....
Anyways, you hear horror pricing stories about this one store.
It just goes to show data cleaning is hard. It’s true for statistics and it’s probably just as true for LLMs.
(2) The app gathers statistics. Marketing and sales are so addicted to massive amounts of all kinds of information they have trouble finding veins that are not collapsed and their coworkers all carry naloxone. In most organizations, the marketing and sales people make most product decisions and a mobile app is a (free) product distributed by the chain.
(3) Data collection. Not only can anonymized data be monetized, but selling data directly attributable to individuals is a major source of revenue for many organizations, and I doubt Taco Bell (or Yum! Brands in general) is not among them.
Price discrimination is about raising prices.
Any idea what the going rate is for the kind of data that could feasibly be collected from restaurant apps?
Well, they might be now since California passed a higher minimum wage for fast food workers.
> afford not to replace human jobs
There's practically no such thing as replacing human jobs; having a machine replace some of your /tasks/ (taking orders) lets you spend more time on the other tasks (preparing the orders) and makes you more productive.
Apps are used rather than PWA websites because most users find it difficult to save a mobile website to their homepage and mobile web push notifications etc add extra friction compared to native apps.
As for app vs website, I agree, website would be similarly good. This could be said about tons of apps.
Speaking of which, we stopped going to fast food burger places because 75% of them can’t make things like “a hamburger with no cheese or any other toppings except ketchup”, or “a cheeseburger with no other toppings”.
I suspect an LLM that supports audio input would outperform most drive through window attendants.
Oddly, I’ve noticed there is no correlation between speaking english as a first language and being able to understand those orders.
So my conclusion it is just a data harvesting scheme.
FWIW, as one data point, this is what I've used it for a few times, and it worked without issue. (A co-working space has it next door and that made it a lot more time-efficient, avoiding the line and having to wait in store.)
Though I have run into the problem you've described with other services, where it rejects your request much later than it should. Like with AWS letting you configure a server for launch before informing you that you don't have permission to launch servers:
http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2016/02/some-of-my-geeky-t...
Everything has an app. And pretty soon everything will have an “AI”.
I installed the Wendy's app a while back, and by optimizing my selections, all of my orders since then have cost less than half of menu prices on average. For example, get a $3 item for $1 with any other purchase (so you tack on a $1 frosty), or buy a $6 item get another free. Taco Bell's app deals aren't quite as deep but you get the point. When tons of people are placing orders this way, menu prices must creep up to compensate.
In my experience, they will send you discounts (BOGO) or free stuff when you're most likely to buy. One of my teammates and I both installed their mobile app. I would get free coupons for like nachos or a taco on the days that I regularly went, usually in the mornings and the coupons were only good for about 24 hours. Conversely, my hockey teammate used to get his later in the afternoon because he was religious about stopping on the way home from our gams which was usually pretty late at night.
They're banking on (and usually right) that if they give you a small carrot for something free, you'll use the app to buy more stuff. In my experience it really took a lot for me to not buy more than I needed. So I would include the freebie along with whatever else I was buying to try and save a buck or two. Whereas my teammate would get his normal order plus whatever freebie they were offering.
either way, it worked. Many times instead of going somewhere else, I would go there, and use their mobile app and get my freebies.
Techno fascism never looked so bland
I don't have taco bell app, experience is from international McDonald's app
The other day I was at McD's and an elderly lady was stressin' it because she had no idea what to do. There were two cash registers but nobody staffing them and a disorganized group of people waiting for their food and not even a clear queue for the people behind the counter to see that somebody was waiting. She asked me what to do and I told her she could order at the register but a minute later I realized I was standing in front of the register waiting for my food and that probably the workers wouldn't see her. I stepped out of the way and made sure she was highly visible at the register and when I got my food I told the worker that this woman was waiting for her food and she seemed quite annoyed but I didn't feel I could take it for granted they were paying attention.
The elderly lady was probably doing what mom does when presented with a kiosk, pretending to be too dumb to click on a picture of the food they want.
For our rural area with relatively low population, it makes sense. But even in the suburbs nearby, Chipotle, etc., are going to online-ordering only.
100 miles from my home.
0. You can set up favorite orders, and get all the nutrition info you care to. And make fiddly custom orders without worrying someone will screw up typing it in.
1. They don't have to pay a cashier to type in your order if you do it for them. And it's more likely to be correct, and more likely to make upsells (would you like to add a drink to your order?). More cynically, you can't complain that their cashier doesn't understand English since you are now the cashier.
2. Price discrimination. Fast food is an unusual mix of fast and cheap, and not everyone values those two equally. Cheap customers can spend time clipping coupons and browsing app deals while fast customers can make their order via drive through without having to futz around while driving. The app replaces newspaper circulars and mailers, esp now that nobody subscribes to local news anymore.
3. You can order ahead, increasing table turn time, spending less time at their limited seating and limited parking. And you spend less time waiting in line to order, waiting for your order to be prepared.
4. It functions as a loyalty program, buy 10 get one free style (but a bit more complicated).
5. Less fighting over coupons at the counter for the franchisees that don't want to accept them - the app just refuses them. And frankly, some of the penny pincher franchisees may not be savvy enough to set up refusals.
6. If a location runs out of something they can flag it and you won't show up disappointed they can't fill your order. Or they can advertise a per-store menu.
Their business model is - they big up the price of all the available spots such that no one can make money unless they charge exorbitant prices. After they capture the majority of the market, they're free to charge a ton of money.
How they haven't been charged for collusion and price fixing is beyond me.
Anyway, typically, if you find a huge brand like Starbucks or McDonald's - or a brand that owns all its locations (not franchised) like Chipotle, the prices will not be extreme.
I'm pretty sure it's because they're cutting the (govt-owned/operated) airports in on the action.
It looks bad for you to be a >$100B company and trying to price gouge your loyal customers at the airport.
European airports are worse. I never spent so much on a coffee than at Zurich's airport. It was swiss markup over the usual swiss markup.
Portland, as another commenter said, tends to have the same price in the airport as their restaurants outside.
On the other hand, last time I took my family to Chipotle, my kid had liquid poo for 2 weeks with onset a couple hours after eating there. We have never been back since. That place scares the you know what out of me.
I've seen speculation about undiagnosed lactose intolerance but frankly Taco Bell doesn't use that much cheese on their cheesiest items compared to say, a pizza, which is another very common food in the US and has way more cheese.
Someone has to pay back the loans and/or bonds plus interest… or a lot of someones chipping in with their hot dogs, tickets, drinks, etc...
Do the Franchises put limits on the pricing power of individual stores?
Fast food is probably one of the least popular areas to have dynamic pricing because a huge part of the value prop is consistency.
It was nuts.
- For comparisons to cost-of-living, see "Big Macs and the Cost of Living Crisis" (abc.net.au) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41169538
And since we were getting her McDonald’s, we often ended up getting it, especially during Covid, and gained weight, and it was a vicious cycle.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/british-teen-stacey-irvine-hosp...
Its just that after 15 years you die of it, before you are very unhealthy, especially for kids.
I think this isn't true in any meaningful way. Absolutely, making it (or any fast food) a big component of your diet is not going to promote good health. The more often you eat them, the more likely it will have an impact on your health, mostly from the increased sodium and trans fats. Consistently living with high blood sugar and higher LDL will increase your bad health outcomes. But in the example of the parent, it's not just the negative consequences of consuming fast food, but the negative consequences of not eating anything else (so lacking in many micronutrients).
The good news is this makes the marginal impact of one meal over your lifetime is absolutely miniscule. It's not like each meal increases your risk of mortality a linear amount.
About macnuggets : I might be extremist in the way I consider alimentation but I consider that even one McDonald's nuggets is bad for health not only for the immediate impact on your body, which is indeed minimal from one meal, but mostly because it gives a bad Habit.
Everyone likes junk food, it always tastes better than healthy food so you're putting yourself at disadvantage at the very first bite in a chicken nugget. A bit like what happens with drugs, the first time is the most important and the more you do after the worst it's going to be to get out of it.
I have one kid who will demand the giant tray of cupcakes from Sam’s Club then proceed to eat half of a cupcake twice and never think about them again (in this case, we actually did buy the giant tray for a BBQ and had left overs). We simply continue to offer her other, healthy food while she goes through a phase on something.
The other kid remembers where everything is, despite being very young. She will scream about certain foods she wants (too young to talk) and work us to specific cabinets and drawers where that food was. We have to be a lot more mindful of what food we expose her to and be prepared to nudge her towards better options. Push her too hard and she simply gets stuck on that one specific food item she wants.
While you’re right that kids won’t literally starve themselves, food can be a battle point in a day filled with other things. Sometimes you just have to read the kid and bend so you don’t ruin other priorities.
The biggest red flag is why on earth are kids fed junk food to begin with? Maybe their parents also love it, making it harder to set a better example at home? Hard to say.
More recently, she apologized for putting me through that nearly every day growing up.
It's definitely hard but this can be overcome with work. In my much younger days I had this reaction with a lot of foods that I now eat.
I knew I was going to have to overcome a lot of my hangups about food in order to be at least semi-healthy, so I did in my late teens/early 20s. Before that the only thing I ate was pasta.
My wife and I have agonized for most of our daughter's life about feeding her. She has autism and ADHD, and will often forget to eat if we do not work hard to get her to eat. If she eats a food whose textures, smell, or taste trigger her, she will vomit immediately. She hates to vomit, and will refuse to eat ANYTHING after this happens (even her comfort foods). She doesn't want to be around food at all at that point.
She is very small for her age and underweight (we have routine consultations with her endocrinologist on her growth, and have had countless conversations on whether we should start growth hormones with her. There are so many things to consider around that decision, it has been quite a challenge).
We have a dietician that we consult with regularly, both about her eating and her growth. She, along with both our endocrinologist and pediatrician, feel that getting her calories is the most important thing, and that we can sacrifice quality for quantity, because even when she has freedom to eat whatever junk she wants, she has trouble eating enough. Both the dietician and her therapist think it is very important we never turn food into a battle, since she already has so many issues around eating that we don't want to make it worse.
I appreciate your question being in good faith, but I do get frustrated when people make comments about my daughter's diet, as if we haven't agonized over this for the 8 years of her life. This is something we deal with every day, and I find it both frustrating and amusing when people think they can solve the problem in a single internet comment.
Things that work for some kids don't work for all kids.
When I made that comment I lacked all of this context of being underweight, having already struggled with this for so many years and also regularly seeing all the different types of doctors that you go to, so without that information I think it's easier for people to jump to conclusions, but I understand it can be time-consuming to add all that context every time you want to comment. As you can imagine a lot of people are quick to call out things that might look like bad parenting when they assume none of that context exists.
Good luck!
Well, I grew out of it in my teenage years. No guarantee that your daughter will too but I figured you might want to hear that there might be hope in your future :)
P.S. I am vegetarian now. Go figure.
Our daughter went through a phase were there were only a few things she wanted to eat. Our pediatrician said to feed her what she will eat and be patient because her tastes will change. He was right.
Our final diet for her was based on recommendations from her pediatrician, dietitian, and therapist.
While she might not have starved if we withheld chicken nuggets, she became extremely distressed and disregulated, which lead to other problems.
She has moved on from chicken nuggets, but her eating pattern is still the same. She will have only one food at a time that she will eat for proper meals, and that food will rotate every few months. After a few months of only eating one type of food, she will suddenly declare she does not like it anymore and move on to something else.
Her current food is actually Chicken Tikka Masala from one particular restaurant. Hopefully somewhat healthier than nuggets, although it gets expensive.
The corporate is located on a major collector street with many other fast food options while the franchise location is in the transition zone between a walkable downtown and car oriented development but both have a drive-thru. Not sure if it's just corporate policy to keep prices at a low baseline for their locations or it's due to there being competition from other fast food restaurants nearby but it's just half a mile between them so a 67% price difference is pretty strange.
1) Covid caused a huge reduction in business.
2) Businesses charged more per person to sustain themselves.
3) Post-Covid people are buying less due to the higher prices so its sticky.
My local Qdoba is so expensive I won't eat there any more, but a few people do. What would happen if they dropped prices significantly and advertised that to bring people back? I don't know... There are only so many person-meals in a day, so people are eating somewhere, are they staying home? Are grocery sales up?
https://wolfstreet.com/2024/08/30/our-drunken-sailors-are-at...
Only for some. Household debt is at an all time high, and evictions and utility disconnections are skyrocketing. Homelessness is at record highs. Hunger in the US is soaring too. 18 million households last year struggled at some point to secure enough food, the worst its been in nearly a decade. Many people are suffering under the outrageous prices companies are charging.
That's because people have more money than ever so they're using credit cards more. It's also partly due to inflation. Household debt-to-income ratios are not high.
> evictions and utility disconnections are skyrocketing
I don't believe this is true.
> Hunger in the US is soaring too.
This is true, but it's because the extended child tax credit from 2020 expired - so we can fix it anytime we want.
The evidence isn't hard to find.
examples:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/whos-getting-evicted-america-...
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/home-foreclosures-highest-lev...
https://www.npr.org/2023/06/21/1183408490/evictions-are-incr...
https://denverite.com/2024/09/12/denver-eviction-cases-incre...
https://www.azfamily.com/2023/11/02/maricopa-county-breaks-2...
https://apnews.com/article/homelessness-increase-rent-hud-co...
As for utilities things would be even worse except for states working to prevent disconnections during heat waves
https://www.power-grid.com/customer-service/customer-shutoff...
https://cordcuttersnews.com/1-in-5-u-s-households-struggle-t...
https://www.opb.org/article/2024/05/31/oregon-electric-utili...
https://energyjustice.indiana.edu/our-work/_news/20240822-be...
Another side effect of the pandemic is that spending habits changed and people realized how easily they could do without foods and products they were used to getting. When people weren't able to get the things they wanted they were forced to try alternatives, or even cooking for themselves in some cases, when they wouldn't have otherwise.
I'm not sure. I've seen too many businesses mismanaged into the ground. It's way too common for big businesses to act like they suddenly have a monopoly even though competition still exists, and then go all surprised Pikachu face when revenue dries up.
Please explain what tax purpose losing money (or earning less money than possible) serves.
Citations?
but that's what people do, in aggregate. It's why manufacturing all went to china in the last 2 decades.
That’s why SoCal has the highest land prices, but not the highest priced food at restaurants.
> Jackson has become a second home for various celebrities, often due to Wyoming's income tax regime, including Sandra Bullock, RuPaul Charles, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, Nikki Sixx, and Harrison Ford.
I only knew about Harrison Ford living there before I read the article, guess it shows my age...
Previously discussed in 2023 on https://www.reddit.com/r/tacobell/comments/13xrssr/build_you... Seems like franchisees in different regions collude on pricing on that item.
I still bitterly miss the Chili Cheese burrito, Taco Bell's crowning achievement. RIP chilicheese.org :-(
https://web.archive.org/web/20190313160757/http://chilichees...
Just went to check out the beautiful old town. We also have considered moving there. Honestly the Taco Bell was a real highlight, but that isn’t meant as a slight, I just loved Taco Bell growing up.
They didn’t have Baja Blast though :-(
Next time I want to check out the Mondrian museum.
Look at Colorbrewer for some alternative suggestions:
I ended up making a small game to show how frustrating it can be to use UIs that rely on color alone to express information.
One small suggestion: keep score separately for each level so you can compare at the end and see how much icons helped.
The problem is that they decided to use dark for BOTH ends of the scale, with light in the middle, so in the absence of color perception we can only tell whether a price is extreme or moderate.
For me close colors on a red / green scale are difficult to differentiate. If I enable accessibility features, it will make every photo look incorrect. iOS has an excellent option to adjust the degree of color filter. Mine is set to tritanopia (blue/yellow) the only about 5 percent intensity to give me a good balance.
The core problem is that many (r,g) pairs are equivalent, or nearly so. It's worth noting then that at least one of two properties holds:
(a) Your mapping is bijective. You shift things around, e.g. by swapping the green and blue channels. Any bijective technique other than the identity will, by definition, add hue distortion, making things potentially hard to interpret. You're able to, e.g., gain the ability to distinguish red and green, but that comes at the cost of not being able to distinguish red and blue, since the confused pairs still exist in the output space.
(b) Your mapping isn't injective. Many input colors map to the same output colors. One way this might be helpful is in pushing the (r,g) split toward its extremes. Maybe leave (50,50) alone, map (40,60) -> (10,90) and (30,70) -> (1,99). How much that helps varies [0], but it comes at the cost of reduced dynamic range. You traded telling colors apart for telling images with subtle variations apart. And, again, there's a hue distortion.
If we don't have any good options, what levers do you have available to play with?
1. You can (ab)use the brightness channel to carry color information. This isn't very effective since brightness steps are harder to perceive than hue steps. Most implementations will instead prefer to keep the perceptual brightness the same (for the particular colorblindness described, reds will be less bright than in normal vision and greens more bright, so you need to add a correction factor). In the abstract, I do like using the brightness channel. When out at sea I'll wear strongly tinted orange sunglasses to make detecting buoys easy (everything else is dark, but the orange buoys are bright as day).
2. You can compress the (r,g) split as described above, making reds more red and greens more green.
3. You use the blue channel somehow. This is a catch-all of sorts, but if you're keeping brightness the same and not fixing the problem with just (r,g) (and, again, people want to keep brightness the same and can't fix the problem with just (r,g) [0]), then you're mixing blue into the equation. With a goal of minimizing hue distortion, no implementation does anything as extreme as my proposal of swapping the blue and green channels. They all, instead, trade some of the (r,g) discriminative ability for extra blue. Implementation details vary. I particularly like the ones which have a sequence of tests and do a little ML to come up with a nice (r,g,b) -> (r,g,b) scheme tailored for your eyes. However it's done though, you're saturating the blue channel with extra information.
All mappings can be represented as some combination of (1,2,3), and mostly (3) in practice, which perhaps helps explain why the techniques aren't amazing in general. They all assume the goal is telling red from green, but your real goal is telling apart all the colors you need to tell apart in whichever UI you happen to be working with. The extra constraint of minimizing hue distortion helps with that, but you're still in a world where the colorblind filter helps for some UIs and doesn't for others, actively making others worse. God-forbid they have both off-red and off-blue buttons when the filter's solution was trading some red for some blue.
And you can work around that a bit by not letting the filter be quite so strong, but that comes at the cost of not being as helpful in the actual red-green case. It's one more lever that helps a bit at the OS level. You'd really like customization for the particular UI you're looking at, kind of like what user style sheets were supposed to do for the web.
[0] You don't really get "pure" colors from an LCD, so this is even less effective of a technique than it could be, and it really messes with the math (you want something kind of like an integral over relative response curves convolved with the LCD's spectrum). The particular flavor of red-green colorblindness described though, you can sometimes tell very pure reds from very pure greens.
You could animate it by changing the mapping over time; then colorblind people would see that two identical colors are changing differently.
You could also try replacing colors with a pattern but it wouldn't work that well.
Presumably none if you build your site in an accessible manner. It costs basically nothing to accommodate the 1/12 of the population that has color-blindness.
Then we could generate our own scale with whatever number of steps an app requires. Or compute on the fly for a continuous scheme.
Unless you are specifically looking for drain-o for your digestive system.
'good, inexpensive tacos' isn't what they sell. they sell Taco Bell (TM).
I could give this housemate an around-the-globe tour of pan-Latin cuisine and they would come back from their tour hungry for Taco Bell (TM).
I can sort of relate -- sometimes I can be surrounded by some of the best food the world has to offer, but I crave a packet of Top Ramen.
Some things offer something above and beyond what we perceive as quality, I suppose.
I've had plenty of other tacos elsewhere and they are all tasty, but something about TB's meat is super unique and tasty to me I can't get enough of it. Mind you I can't stand all the new menu items they added past tacos in the last 30 years. But the tacos are special. :-)
I haven’t eaten there in a while but I don’t recall thinking it was healthy at all, quite the opposite.
This is from their marketing, but it’s pretty honest based on my experience: https://www.tacobell.com/nutrition
I pay some attention to nutrition, and I still eat Taco Bell sometimes even after cutting out most other fast food restaurants.
Made it really easy to buy a bean crunchwrap with sour cream and cheese swapped for guacamole and potato.
I went there so my Mexican girlfriend could try it. She was disappointed that the Dorito shell tacos are just unflavored orange tostadas, not actually a big Dorito like their ads / marketing suggests.
How do yall let them get away with that? :/
Same thing for the Big Mac version: https://mccheapest.com/
False, you get a few sprinkles.
My toddler unwrapped one of their burritos and... it was all shell. It was pretty traumatic. I stopped thinking I was getting a deal. My homemade burritos are literally 10x more filled. Taco bell is great at wrapping their shells.
I assume they make it up in volume.
You can also see this by swapping the product to Guacamole
I was noticing how regional some high prices are. My theory is that there are areas where one person owns all of the franchises in the region and have started acting more monopolistic.
Obviously there are other areas where the high prices make sense. The rich old tourist/snowbird areas of Florida? Obviously going to be expensive. Locations inside of cities that have high rents and operating costs are also likely to be more expensive. Although Minneapolis seems to have escaped the cost trap somehow.
Edit: That Taco Bell doesn't allow in app ordering.
This is pretty fascinating showing how prices are skewed to what the local market will withstand. For max profits. If I'm reading this correctly.
What else is in a Taco Bell bean burrito? Onions, cheese, oil, salt. Something else?
I finally started using the app after they screwed up my order a couple times.
I park by the building, order and pay through the app, and then drive-thru.
I guess they're just aiming at rich tourists.
That's about the only time I can stomach Taco Bell.
Enjoy your free information, don't expect better. There is no money in it. At best, you can cheer on the owner for a few years before they realized they helped a million people save a few dollars at taco bell, and they had 15 minutes of internet fame.
2 bucks each feels like robbery.
The US clearly eats way too much fast food.
I semi-agree. We have too many people complaining about economics. Cut out fast food, and suddenly they have an extra few thousand dollars to spend.
Anyway that combined with the fact that fast food chains can leverage cost saving measures like putting their employees on food stamps and economies of scale mean nobody can beat them on prices, so for those that don't have a grocery store and wouldn't know how to cook a meal even if they did, for your daily dinner the 5$ McDonald's burger or whatever is genuinely your only choice unless you wanna eat gas station canned chili.
Meanwhile now I live in Taiwan and every alley is chock full of original, small business restaurants all serving population that basically exclusively eats out for every meal and it's lovely.
A small minority of Americans live so remote (either in blighted urban or rural areas) that they don’t have a choice in cooking.
I'm curious if you think it's because Americans are too lazy or undisciplined or stupid or something to find and cook food? Is it hard to believe there's structural issues making it harder there than in other places? I mean even if you just open a map the geographical obstacle should be pretty apparent... It's an enormous country.
I'll walk myself out....
Literally unusable. /s
It was going to be replaced by the volcano crunchy gordita cheese.
Also wtf is a lava taco?
Taco Bell's cheesy name for "spicy" -- although if one truly enjoys actual spicy these are just mild as far as "spice" goes. Runs more along the line of "they tried to add some pepper flavor, but forgot to add any heat".
Gee, thanks.
If this factored in local cost of living this might actually be useful so you could see where Taco Bell is unusually cheap or expensive relative to the area.