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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

The impression I get from [1] is when a reporter visited the food was biscuits, peanut butter, toast and an onion (Apparently customers are invited to bring and cook their own food)

£9 would get you four loaves of bread[2] and three jars of peanut butter[3]. You'd have to be pretty hungry to eat enough of that for them to make a loss.

I assume the concept is fairly experimental at the moment, presumably they won't want people sprinting in, making an espresso for 3p and running out. Or I might have misunderstood what I read in [1]. In any case, it'll be interesting to see how it shakes out.

[1] http://now-here-this.timeout.com/2014/01/08/pay-per-minute-c... [2] https://www.ocado.com/webshop/product/Wholemeal-Bread-Medium... [3] https://www.ocado.com/webshop/product/Crunchy-Peanut-Butter-...

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I used freeloader as a nicer word for "vagrant". You can't buy four loaves of bread if you don't own a fridge to store it in.

Small tip: don't store bread in the fridge, it goes stale fast (and then it's cold, who wants that?).

However if there's a sale on bread you like, you can freeze it.

This sounds ridiculously frugal, but if you're hard up for cash but have a freezer and a toaster, then freezing bread and toasting it up again can make some pretty awesome sandwiches. You can also stick really cheap bulk-buy cheese on it and make a mini cheese toastie.

That said, if I were still poor, I wouldn't want to keep my stuff in the freezer at one of these pay-per-minute cafes, because it'd be gone by the next time you got to it. I also assume that they lock up at night, so I'm not really sure how this'd help vagrants all that much.

However, if you happened to be lucky with the other people in the cafe (i.e. no-one being obnoxious or noisy), then it makes a ridiculously cheap coworking space.

If you were really poor, a bread machine is probably the easiest & cheapest way to make bread. It comes out to be around 25 cents a loaf, and you can control how much you want to make per batch. You only really need yeast and flour. However, the $25 bread machine is a small investment required.

A toaster oven with small bread pans also works great and is more versatile for about $10 more. Among other things I made sweetbread this way for several months when I was in college using instant pancake mix mixed with cracked wheat.

Wouldn't making it by hand and throwing it in an oven be cheaper?

Although it depends on your oven if gas or electric, your time and effort, how much power a bread machine uses. The oven makes bread far better than a bread machine but a bread machine is better than mass produced, sliced, preservative laden white bread.

But you could time it so the bread is baked when the oven is used for cooking supper.

FYI /r/breadit

Making your bread by hand is cheaper. And I'd drop the yeast. Just do your own wild-caught sourdough. (You do need salt, however. Bread without salt doesn't really work. And water.)

If you're only optimising for cost, sure. If you're also optimising for effort, yeast is a no-brainer.

The machine is useful if you're not good at/willing to/able to plan a bit. You have to do a number of steps on a schedule when baking by hand, there's only one to worry about with a machine.

Oh, (wild) sourdough is actually optimizing for flavour. Yeast is not a great cost in any case.

Your every day grocery store bread tastes about the same after being frozen, and eaten later on. I know at my parent's place, my mom usually has 5 or 6 in the freezer, because she lives outside of town, so it makes more sense to stock up. I live in the city, by myself, so sometimes I'll buy a loaf, make some sandwiches, and toss the rest in the fridge. I don't mind it a little cold, and it doesn't go moldy before I'm able to eat the rest. If I buy fresh bread from the bakery or market, I just eat the entire thing within a day or two because it's delicious, and freezing would be a sin.

You can also make your own. Not only is it cheap, easy and costs little time, it also tastes great.

Yea--I grew up in the "if you want something to eat learn how to cook Dude". Plus, my girlfriends we so terrible(I think they were rebelling, or though it was cute?) at cooking. One of the first things I learned how to make was bread, but it always came out terrible, except pizza dough. I have perfected rice with a steamer though. Rice is cheap if you are strapped.

I can recommend this recipe: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/08/dining/081mrex.html?_r=0 (video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13Ah9ES2yTU).

It is very little total work (15 minutes max) and makes great bread, but it does require some planning ahead because of the long rise time.

I do that anyway even for a single loaf of bread since I hate dry, stale bread. The freezer keeps it fresh and to make toast just throw the frozen slices into a toaster, no need to thaw first.

I do that with the Day Old bread store.

Very true. We don't eat enough bread to keep the loaf fresh for its lifetime, and we are then left with chucking bread out. Instead, we split the loaf and use slices as necessary.

Microwaving bread briefly can make it de-stale long enough to eat.

Wrap it in a damp paper towel when you do this to infuse some moisture.

Depends on the humidity where you live, if it's humid enough to promote mold then the fridge will make it last longer.

Freeze it, then after a bit of experimentation, you can find the perfect toaster setting to defrost it (and even have it warm) without toasting it. I do it all the time.

What really annoys me is that it's possible to make bread that lasts for >30 days, but they don't due to people's stupid phobias of food treatments. Before I started freezing it all the time, I used to waste so much from it going mouldy, so I'd bet many people still do.

No, but if you have £9 a day you can buy a single loaf of bread and still have £8 left over.

I guess if you were homeless it might be worth £9 a day to have somewhere warm and indoors to stay, but the free entry museums, art galleries and libraries don't seem to get full of homeless people.

I have heard reports of 'pay what you like' restaurants getting filled up with homeless people, so I can see where you're coming from.

>I have heard reports of 'pay what you like' restaurants getting filled up with homeless people, so I can see where you're coming from.

That's really funny. Who would have thought there were more people who like eating for cheap than people who like paying for other people to eat for cheap?

but the free entry museums, art galleries and libraries don't seem to get full of homeless people.

Security Guards.

So in the UK you are not allowed to enter museums if you are homeless???

Homeless people don't always have the energy to walk around 24/7 in the museum, and they probably have "no loitering" laws. As in you can't just sleep on a bench in the basement all day and scare the children.

Also, dress codes are most likely in effect.

I think the fact that you can buy 4 liters of White Lightning for that money instead negates the necessity to find somewhere warm and indoors.

Whilst this is probably a joke, it's still a sweeping generalisation of the homeless that paints those in an incredibly unfortunate position as nothing more than cider swigging alcoholics. There are few things that irk me more than vilification of the homeless

It is no doubt a joke, and in my eyes a funny one at that. I wouldn't get too offended by it :) I know the local homeless around this area and there are very few that fit that stereotype

I don't want to vilify my fellow Londoners, but to me, that's more a sweeping generalization of London. Getting wasted seems to be the #1 hobby of most the people I know here, no reason the homeless cannot have their share of fun.

There are a few of those progressive "pay what you want" styled restaurants in Toronto, Canada.

But when it comes down to it... they're actually $12/meal minimum throughout the week, and on wednesdays (most B&M business' slowest day in north america at least) they offer something like 50 meals which are "pay what you want" and once they're out of food, they're out.

In other words, "pay what you want" restaurants don't technically exist. Not in the long run. They're more of a marketing gimmick if you ask me.

The free rider problem is a very real thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem

Did this comment thread actually happen? Where am I.

Food hacker news.

Sounds like halfway to a decent ploughman's lunch.

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