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Comment by monsieurbanana | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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-...

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?

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

> 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".

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