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gregorvand

Having lived in NYC, Hong Kong and Singapore, the best system around all of this is ..

Singapore hawker center.

Turn up to somewhere ~10 mins or less from your location. Have a great meal for $5 (US) or less.

Continue

No delivery fees, delivery emissions or waste. Talk to people... The list goes on.

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There are food courts elsewhere too. The main difference is government subsidized rent, and an older generation of people who are willing to work very hard for low overall income. The former can be solved by politics but the latter cannot. It is simply not sustainable. Look at the people who are working in these hawker centers: they are almost always old, and they are willing to work hard so that their children can work less hard in a nice air conditioned office. When these people retire, there will be no one to occupy these hawker centers at this price of food.

FWIW, Door Dash drivers aren't making much either.

Food preparation is harder work than driving, especially the kind of Asian food in hawker centers.

American mall food courts make me sad. Do you like Sbarro? What is Sbarro?

It does vary a bit. There is a cut above the Sbarro's, McD's, etc. that you probably see increasingly but they can be relatively pricey.

I take your point the majority are more middle aged / elderly working in these. However I personally know two sets of young guys running stalls and they love it. They’re from working class backgrounds and appreciate the freedom of running their own company. I think we’ll see a natural regeneration of hawkers, it only happens when the current want to give up or rents tip above their limits.

Oh I understand that these exist too. On instagram I was showed an ad about young hawkers having "innovations" to classic dishes, like Hokkien mee kosong, but of course they aren't the majority. I suppose the young hawkers competently use modern media to increase their reach.

Danish culture has the concept of a work canteen as a basic expectation in any work arrangement, no matter the size of the company. I don't know why this isn't more popular everywhere else. Even if I had to take a slightly lower pre-tax salary I'd love not having to get takeout all the time.

I’ve worked several places, and it’s only the bigger companies that have a canteen.

Most smaller places it is “bring your food” or they get food in from a caterer to set up in the break room.

Or, if they're in a reasonably dense area, people go out to a nearby restaurant. Bring your own lunch has almost certainly declined over time. During the 10 years or so I worked for smaller companies in cities, it seemed as if going out for lunch with coworkers or otherwise was pretty much the norm. (Otherwise there were company cafeterias at the larger firms.)

Isn't that both unhealthier and more expensive ($ and time) than the alternatives?

Yes.

Can be, but e.g. in London all the major office space hubs also have a bunch of places that cater to office worker lunches. They tend to be comparatively cheap (emphasis on “comparatively”, mind you), and healthier than restaurant food.

When I was in London, I saw something that I don't recall seeing anywhere else: small (but much larger than a 7/11 type store) supermarkets selling packaged food and they had a dining area (tables, chairs, cutlery) after the checkout. I think they even had microwaves.

Often smallish but a big cut above US convenience stores such as M&S/Sainsbury in the UK are pretty common in Europe generally. I still wouldn't be inclined to use them for lunch sandwiches in general but they have better than the slop you'll get at a US 7/11. I can't say I've really observed the dining area in general outside of some of the big food halls. (There are food markets with such but those exist in some big US cities as well.)

I think their lunch sandwiches are perfectly acceptable, I used to eat a Sainsbury's meal deal every day. Anecdotally I find the UK's prepackaged supermarket sandwiches are much nicer than than the equivalents on the continent.

When I worked downtown a number of years back a lunch special in Chinatown was about $6 and a nice break in the middle of the day. Not sure there was even a microwave in the office. Another company did have a lunch room but there were a number of good soup and/or sandwich places within a few minutes walk. Meals in any case were pretty similar to what I’d make at home and maybe a few dollars more expensive.

downtown, uh, where?

Boston. Chinatown was maybe a 10 minute walk away. Other "downtown" location I worked was Nashua which was maybe 45 minutes north. No Chinatown but a bunch of small soup/sandwich places. Other (bigger) places I worked were suburban/exurban and there were very limited convenient options other than within the company.

Boston is tops for walkability. I think people don't appreciate this if they're not familiar with Boston but you can walk from one side to the other of downtown Boston in 30 mins and pass a half dozen T stations on the way.

> work canteen

I had a job through a temp agency back in 2019, and we were occupying a rather spacious and well-equipped office building belonging to our client. One of the perks was free sodas and well-appointed break rooms, with fridge, microwave oven and all. However, there was no cafeteria nor canteen. Worse yet, there was no restaurant or deli within any reasonable walking distance to the site. It was a vast and dedicated office park with very large corporations as tenants, and evidently most of them did typically have cafeterias, or their actual employees had other arrangements.

Therefore I found myself preparing something at home to bring as "lunch" every day, and it was difficult because I am not good at preparing food at all. We were only alotted 30 minutes total to eat, and I found that barely enough time to put it together, heat something, and wolf it down. It was the most distasteful aspect of working there, having no other choice for breaks. We were working "swing shift" into the night (off at 10pm or so) and so the choices for meals after work were quite slim, and I was riding the bus anyway.

There are many office parks and corporate centers around here that feature at least one little deli or sandwich shop on the corner, that is walking distance for employees. I really don't think I'd accept work on-site at a place that lacked a cafeteria or a nearby restaurant.

> One of the perks was free sodas

Really bad for health, especially for people working into the night and presumably don’t get enough exercise.

Whenever I have a situation like this I get fat. I’d rather not have food from the company…

>I'd love not having to get takeout all the time

Why don’t you make food at home and bring it?

Hawker centers, like many other nice features of Singapore, is powered by immigrants paid much less than other citizens, while being strictly regulated in a way that only a wealthy yet tiny country can do.

I'm not saying it's necessarily all bad, just that it's not something we can replicate in western countries.

Who do you think is delivering food?

That's just part of it. Anyone can deliver food, but effectively being a small food stand is completely different.

Now having enough small food stands to create a hawker center is even more difficult. But having a hawker center 10 minutes from anywhere, ran exclusively by immigrants but somehow still properly regulated?

> is powered by immigrants paid much less than other citizens

I mean, that's how Deliveroo and other delivery services (Uber eats and equivalents) works (at least here in Europe).

It was a mistake from my part to write a quick comment, there's much more than having a low pay that makes it impossible to have a similar hawker culture in other countries.

Singapore is effectively a big city, just the difference in geometry between it and pretty much any country you're thinking of makes it impossible to have a "hawker center 10 minutes of walk away from anybody".

Until this year, only citizens / PRs were eligible to work at hawker centres. Even today, it’s quite restricted.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/hawker-stalls-can-...

Partially true but not really. You're thinking about food courts, not hawker centres.

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