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Comment by TuringNYC | Hacker News Reader

This map needs to be scaled by rent cost/sqft for commercial real estate in the county. Otherwise, the results are really just a pass-thru of rent in the burrito price.

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There's always a comment like this I find. Some extra layer of data people want to see that explains the first layer, and it never ends - the data on data. Sometimes we just want to know the damn burrito prices and don't care about the excuses.

If you want to know the burrito price, you open the app/website and look at the burrito price... you don't go to a "Taconomics" website comparing taco prices across a continent. As it stands, there are a number of uncontrolled variables that mean this is not an effective analysis of "How economical is your local Taco Bell?"

Maybe you just want to find the cheapest branch in a 10 mile radius.

Yah but if you want to click around on a neat lil web page this is great.

Shift-click to zoom out.

> you don't go to a "Taconomics" website comparing taco prices across a continent

but that's what people do, in aggregate. It's why manufacturing all went to china in the last 2 decades.

It’s hard to compare prices for 10 nearby Taco Bells in the Taco Bell app. This site makes it quite easy.

Generally I would agree with you, but I just checked where I am at and it appears that the less the competition the higher the price. I compared a few small relatively poor towns that I am familiar with to larger ones that I know charge between 4 and 7 times as much per sqft for commercial real estate, and the more expensive tacos are in the poorer towns! Up to $0.40 cheaper in the larger more bougie towns. My only guess is that there is more competition in those larger towns.

Could there be other explanations here? Like marginal cost of one taco when there might be less customers?

Also, higher labor prices, since labor is also a pretty big component of cost in the restaurant business.

That’s why SoCal has the highest land prices, but not the highest priced food at restaurants.

Wouldn't that also apply in places like NYC and LA? Where the enormous traffic volume offers lower marginal costs?

Maybe Numbeo is more to your liking.

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/

Since when does San Diego have cheaper real estate than Wyoming?

Jackson WY https://www.zillow.com/wy/luxury-homes/

Jackson Hole is a huge exception in Wyoming (also the only blue county they have). It basically compares to Aspen and other ultra high end luxury resort towns, except the Grand Tetons (and then Yellowstone) are right next door.

Or, to quote Wikipedia:

> 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...

A lot of states have no income tax, Washington and neveda for example. But they don’t have huge mountains and natural scenery (well, yes, they have that, but they don’t have any communities where you can buy into it as nicely as Jackson).

San Diego has a greater supply of labor than Wyoming.

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