Comment by Hemospectrum | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Hemospectrum | Hacker News Reader

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"Forced" doesn't have to mean robbery at gunpoint. It just means that your range of choices conflicts with your needs. Making decisions at gunpoint is only the most obvious case.

Consider food. You need a job in order to eat. You have to work a lot of hours (maybe with a long commute on top) in order to keep your job, or worse, to make enough money to afford your food and housing. You could save a lot of money and improve your health by cooking your own meals, but that's time consuming. Every minute you spend shopping for groceries or cooking your own food is one less minute you could spend at work. So you live on fast food and a big chunk of your paycheck goes to a fast food restaurant.

Now consider the corporation itself. Its foremost incentive is to provide wealth to its owners. Any incentive to provide value to employees or customers is incidental to that goal, and there are of course ways to avoid doing that. Ideally it's just funneling as much money as possible from the customer to the shareholder.

The poor can't afford to be shareholders. So where is the money going?

"Every minute you spend shopping for groceries or cooking your own food is one less minute you could spend at work. So you live on fast food and a big chunk of your paycheck goes to a fast food restaurant."

Do poor people resent fast food restaurants for providing them with cheaper food than they can make at home (including the cost of their time)? I presume they don't. Fast food restaurants provide a valuable product that poor people want to have. I wouldn't call that fleecing.

Come now, the restaurants have every incentive to make a food product that is valuable to poor folks while still keeping costs as low as possible.

Also note that making shit food tasty while still being cheap is indeed fleecing, and the oldest trick in the book: sweet, fat, salty. Consider how cheap it is to make soft drinks, which are easily preferred by most folks, and yet how terrible they are for your health.

Humans are hardwired to seek out certain flavors and characteristics, and large fast food joints do nothing but exploit this.

Now, consider how the markets and government reward farmers for growing things that may be in excess of what people need (lol corn subsidies) and how they drive upwards prices of food perceived as a status symbol (compare "organic" produce or milk with the mass-produced varities).

It's a pretty rigged system.

This doesn't seem relevant to the financial fleecing the article is referring to.

I'm all for eliminating subsidies, educating people better about nutrition, and mandating that restaurants provide nutritional information about food that consumers are likely to see at the time of purchase.

The above is not why a lot of poor people eat fast food. A big part of the reason is that many of them don't know how to cook, so it is easier to buy something tasty than to make it.

If you know how to cook, it is pretty easy to make very inexpensive and tasty food that is also healthy and quick to prepare. It is definitely cheaper and faster than eating fast food too. In many parts of the US, the very poor do cook all of their meals because it is a skill you learn when growing up and a great way to save money. A lot of the guys I knew who weren't raised that way always ate fast food because they'd never made a meal in their life. Not knowing how to cook was a significant gap.

I always knew how to cook, so it was easy to eat reasonably well on $10-15 per week for one person. Some of those recipes were fantastic so I still make them even though I'm not trying to pinch pennies.

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