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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

I kinda wonder… I mean, we mostly didn’t use the kitchen in my dorm (I only became aware of it because dummies set off the fire alarms using it).

A person might be fine, like in a typical dorm, with a microwave, microfridge, and electric kettle.

Especially if there was a low-cost cafeteria in the lobby.

People live in the city because they want to eat out, right? We should start at the realistic assumption for typical city-dweller behavioral patterns, not, like, take a suburban house and try to randomly time-multiplex part of it…

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>People live in the city because they want to eat out, right?

No? Having a usable kitchen does not mean you cannot eat at restaurants, and surely a good portion of people who like to eat at restaurants also want to be able to cook at home sometimes, if only to save money. This is not even going into the fact that eating at restaurants is almost always unhealthy.

The kitchen is a cost, the availability of food outside lessens the need to pay that cost.

In terms of saving money, I’m not sure. Yeah, if you order every meal bespoke from a chef, that’s not very affordable. But cafeterias are an old idea and can be fairly cost effective.

There are healthy restaurants (in Boston at least, I’m sure they are in every city). Although these sort of places tend to be a bit yuppie and overpriced.

Maybe in Asia, but in the us eating out is crazy expensive. People living in cheap housing are not eating out all the time post covid.

Not necessarily. I have a stew place by me that is $12 for a plate of veggies + meat that is easily two meals for me. There are plenty of food trucks around with good options in the $5-10 range. And that's before we're looking at stuff from a bodega.

And $6 for a serving of stew is close to an order of magnitude more expensive than it is if you make it at home.

$5 a meal x 3 meals a day x 30 days a month is $450 a month. That's a decent amount of money, and it's questionable at best whether you would save that much in rent by removing a kitchen entirely from the amenities available to a tenant.

Are you thinking of making a stew at home, or warming up a pre-made can of stew?

Making a stew at home. Canned stew would be a few dollars a can in my area.

It makes sense that dining out is expensive, but it's weird that premade meals in grocery stores are so expensive, and that there's not a super cheap middle ground where they use economies of scale to have 1 person cook cafeteria slop for 100 and sell it for pennies. Is it a food safety thing? Is it that kitchens are available enough that anyone willing to eat that would just make it themselves?

I guess there's labor in portioning or serving, and a lot of labor on the back end for cleanup? It's an interesting problem, because I know that I can make a ton of food way more easily and cheaply than small individual portions, and when I look at breakdowns of restaurant costs, somehow rent isn't an outlier, labor and materials contribute a lot to the costs. But I feel like having already purchased the necessary equipment (or amortizing it across 100,000 meals or whatever) I could feed 100 people with less than $100 at Costco. But you can't go to a restaurant and get something bad for $5 that fills you anymore, not easily. Where's the money all going?

Eating out is just treated as a luxury good in the US. It’s weird because we’re all aware that food can be made inexpensively in a cafeteria. K-12, some universities, even some workplaces have them.

Of course, luxury food is a fine thing to have. The lack of a basic option is weird, though.

It's fine that it's broadly treated as a luxury good, but it feels like more and more even the traditionally "cheap" options are getting pricier.

> It makes sense that dining out is expensive, but it's weird that premade meals in grocery stores are so expensive, and that there's not a super cheap middle ground where they use economies of scale to have 1 person cook cafeteria slop for 100 and sell it for pennies. Is it a food safety thing?

Most of what currently ails the restaurant sector can be traced to real estate costs. Even if your food and labor are free, real estate kills you as you have to put your restaurant where your customers can get to you.

And the problem is being exacerbated by private equity having piled into commercial real estate. I can point to all manner of restaurant sites that closed up because the rent got jacked up and then were left idle for 5+ years. Standard landlords simply can't eat that level of rent loss. Private equity, however, will take an almost infinite loss in cash flow as long as they can kick the can down the road indefinitely and never have to pay actual cash.

People value convenience and most people are poor cooks.

Grocery store margins are pretty high on prepared food.

Eating out in the US being crazy expensive is somewhat of a self-causing problem.

When you have a big kitchen and eating out is expensive, you cook at home unless you have money to splash. When only money-splashers go to the restaurant, restaurants shift up-market and offer lots of choice instead of, say, one dish.

And also, when restaurants are expensive and so everyone is cooking at home, everyone starts requiring a home kitchen. When everyone requires/has a home kitchen, it doesn't make sense to shift down-market to cater to those without kitchens.

Go back in time 300+ years, and it was pretty common for urban residents to eat out daily. Not just because it saves housing space, but also because indoor fires were often banned to reduce the chance of the entire apartment block burning down. It was not universal, obviously, but it was pretty common.

Right, NYC ironically had the cheapest eating out options even though it's one of the most expensive metros. But now the dollar slice is dead, and bringing back a single SRO building isnt bringing it back. The transition period is too rough for anyone to invest enough to make it happen, so now we're stuck with everyone having a kitchen and eating out being expensive.

Go back in time 2000+ years to Rome and most apartments didn't have kitchens. Eating out was far cheaper than eating in. The primary cost was fuel, and restaurants use far less fuel per diner than a home kitchen.

It's because commercial real estate is eating businesses alive, but the government can't do anything about it because a good chunk of the economy depends on propped up commercial real estate valuations

> People live in the city because they want to eat out, right?

Dining out is expensive. It's essentially incompatible with the target demographic who need extremely low cost housing.

Add an 'instant pot' or similar (or replace the microwave with one if you're really short on space) and you actually have a huge variety of available meals with a regular outlet + countertop. Home kitchens are designed around old fashioned stoves that required a lot of space to produce heat, and they've stayed around because everyone likes to have lots of counter space. These days the actual cooking process can be done quite well even in a very small area.

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