
A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry - jessaustin
https://medium.com/@byrnehobart/the-slow-motion-trainwreck-facing-the-meal-kit-industry-345f14df45ad
======
Mz
I feel like the real problem with meal-in-a-box delivery services is that they
are trying to fill the empty shoes of a missing full-time wife and mom because
there are more two career couples and both spouses now "need a wife" and it
can't be found. The problem is that such a service has no real hope of taking
the place of someone with actual cooking skill who knows you well and will
tweak the recipe to your preferences, possibly without you even having to
explicitly ask or remind her.

If you can afford a meal-in-a-box service, why would you not just go to a
restaurant where the wait staff will do a decent job as a substitute for your
own live-in cook previously known as The Wife?

I mean, this seems like the worst of all worlds. Someone else decides what you
will be eating and you have to do the cooking. I can't imagine buying this.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> _If you can afford a meal-in-a-box service, why would you not just go to a
> restaurant where the wait staff will do a decent job as a substitute for
> your own live-in cook previously known as The Wife?_

I always say that these are for people with more money than time.

The reason they don't go to a restaurant is because you _like_ cooking - or at
least, you like the idea of being someone who cooks. But the ad copy is right
- shopping sucks, finding recipes sucks, throwing away food because you bought
too much kale sucks. (Not to mention, cooking a meal and eating it takes 45
minutes - depending on the restaurant, you might be in there for an hour, plus
travel time. And remember, time is what they're short on.)

Even if you find four interesting recipes and buy all the ingredients, and
cook them - this takes 3x the time than just using Blue Apron, at minimum - on
Friday you've got a bunch of assorted ingredients and no idea what to do with
them. (Because you're not a wifemom, and you don't know how to combine those
things into a meal.)

But the person they're targeting doesn't _want_ to learn to do that. They just
want to buy a pre-configured lego set, and build a spaceship they can eat.

You are not their target audience. Neither am I. But it definitely, definitely
exists.

~~~
illumin8
I've tried BlueApron and HelloFresh. I enjoy cooking, and the quality of the
recipes is great, but damn, it takes too long to make their recipes. Often,
they promise it only takes 15-30 minutes for an entire meal, but apparently
I'm not a professional chef who can wash vegetables, dice them, prepare
marinades, chop garlic, and do all of this in just a few minutes. I end up
usually spending between 60-90 minutes just to cook a recipe, which is way too
much labor for a meal that is already priced about the same as a restaurant
meal.

Granted, the food is much healthier than restaurant food, but my time is too
valuable to spend that much. I suspect that other families where both parents
work full time (like mine) are the same. Who has the time to spend an hour or
two cooking every night? And pay a premium price for it?

I'm cautiously optimistic about Tovala. They are the first one of these that
has a fairly unique system where the food just needs to be popped into their
combi-oven (bake, broil, and steam) and you just wait until it cooks.

Eventually, we will have fully automated cooking appliances where drones
deliver fresh food staples to your house and you get hot meals prepared
automatically, but in the meantime, Tovala looks the closest to creating that
experience.

~~~
munchbunny
> Often, they promise it only takes 15-30 minutes for an entire meal, but
> apparently I'm not a professional chef who can wash vegetables, dice them,
> prepare marinades, chop garlic, and do all of this in just a few minutes. I
> end up usually spending between 60-90 minutes just to cook a recipe, which
> is way too much labor for a meal that is already priced about the same as a
> restaurant meal.

I think this is one place where the focus in lifestyle magazines and meal
startups on quick and easy meals has created unrealistic expectations. As you
say, unless you have the skills of a professional chef, cooking pretty much
anything in 15-30 minutes is unrealistic. More realistically, you would expect
cooking from scratch to take 45-60 minutes.

To some extent I feel like people's frustration over the experience comes from
under-appreciation of how much time cooking takes. Unless your ingredients
come pre-chopped and pre-mixed, one hour from fresh ingredients is normal!
Just like the adage "better, faster, cheaper, pick two," cooking has a
corresponding dilemma: "quick, easy, delicious, pick two".

~~~
btilly
Are we talking your time, or wall-clock time?

Melt butter, add lemon juice, salt and a dash of hot sauce to make a liquid.
Rub liquid over chicken. Put chicken in oven at 400 until done. (How much you
need and how long you take depends on whether you did this with a whole
chicken or pieces of chicken. Let's call it an hour. Use an oven thermometer
if you don't know how to tell.)

Put some water in the bottom of a pot, put one artichoke in the pot, cover,
and put on low heat around 40 minutes before your meal.

Use a peeler to take the skin of a Daikon radish off. Peel the rest of it into
a dish. Put sour cream + salt on, mix. Sprinkle chopped green onion on top.

Shortly before you're ready, melt butter, add salt. This is to dip the
artichoke in.

Wall-clock over an hour because food spends time cooking. My time spent is
perhaps 20 minutes. Most of which is spent peeling the radish. And now you've
got a main dish with 2 side dishes and enough food to feed a family.

Now a lot of things take longer than that. For example making pancakes means
spending a lot of time actually cooking the pancakes. When I make a soup from
scratch I probably spend a couple of hours.

~~~
munchbunny
I meant wall-clock time. You have a point that there are lots of recipes that
don't need much hands-on time - I personally do that a lot.

However, since wall-clock time often does need to go up to an hour, you have
to schedule it into your day. You can't put the chicken into the oven if
you're not home. I think the allure of 15-30 minute recipes is that 30 minutes
is sort of the upper threshold for spontaneity: "I'll just cook whenever I get
home." The problem is that if your filter is "recipes that take less than 30
minutes of wall-clock time," you end up with a very restricted book of recipes
to work with.

~~~
tomjen3
I have a sousvide cooker and a slow cooker so that I can have the machines
make food for me when I am not at home.

Throw some meat into the sousvide in the morning, come home to a really nice
piece of meat that you can take right out of the machine. Save any excess and
reheat out the next day.

~~~
Chris2048
You need a pretty good (tight) container though, or the water evaporates.

I intend to get one of those blowtorch attachments to sear afterwards,
although I suspect griddle/thick base pan might do just as well.

~~~
Vendan
Not terribly, rough fit (like, my tub has a half inch gap around the hole
where the circulator goes in) will be negligible water loss unless you start
talking multi-day cook times. I just cooked some meat for 24 hours and lost
about 2~4% of the original water level

------
eresing
Here's what my family does: We hired an older woman (from thumbtack.com) to
come to our house once a week for 4 hours and cook whatever is in the fridge.
I make sure to have plenty of food in the fridge, spices, canned goods, etc.
Then she cooks enough food for my 4 person family for about 5 - 6 days
(excluding breakfast). She knows our preferences and takes requests. We pay
her $25/hr ($100 week). I feel like everyone interested in these meal services
should really just have a personal chef. Way better than these pre-made meal
services because you have complete control over ingredients and meal types.

~~~
maxander
I guess I respect having the intestinal fortitude to do the responsible thing,
but at least in the U.S., seeing any service position with obvious privilege
connotations makes people uncomfortable. The meal-in-a-box industry is another
clever way to work around this taboo, by hiding the lower-class service
workers behind a clean user interface.

Similarly, what's the value-add of Github? Primarily, it's not having to talk
on the phone to some guy with a thick foreign accent with kitchen noise in the
background. Dealing with a website, even if it's slow sometimes, is a much
less socially complicated experience.

~~~
neuronexmachina
I... assume you meant Grubhub instead of Github? ;)

~~~
rconti
that makes SO much more sense now, thanks.

------
mr_tristan
The long term trend for "meal kits" is very likely just going to have massive
local and regional competition. I'm already seeing this in Portland with
several meal delivery services that cater to different lifestyles: gluten
free, whole 30, extra protein, etc. These are successful "complete meal
delivery" businesses. I see no reason why there can't be "meal kit" variations
in the future. The cost of starting up a local meal kit business is only going
to go down.

In fact, I see a reason local variations will become stronger. A lot of these
customers have money and are interested in "farm to table" and "buy local"
ideas. So, I'd expect that they could find meal kits that fit whatever diet
they want, prepared by a local chef, using ingredients from local farms. This
is a great potential avenue for local chefs to promote their brand, in
addition to appearances on shows like Top Chef, etc.

So... why would a large company with a national brand matter at all? I could
easily see business like Blue Apron just fold overnight, but the meal kit
concept shift entirely to, well, small business. Sure seems like the big
investment dollars are basically paving the way for local competition, by
planting the idea of "meal kits" as a viable option in people's minds.

~~~
mr_tristan
Another turn of thought: the Amazon acquisition of Whole Foods could play into
supporting these small businesses. Amazon likes to think of things as
"primitives" that get turned into other businesses. Today, your small
businesses can use Amazon tools for product warehousing, selling, and even all
the associated web properties.

Now, with WF, Amazon may be able to treat fresh produce in a similar way.
Sure, Whole Foods could produce and distribute meal kits. But I'd suspect the
components of what goes into the meal kits could also be made available, such
that the "local restauranteur" could come up with the creative bit - the
recipe - and then have parts like the supply chain of high quality produce,
distribution, sales, etc, basically available via Amazon.

It's a little scary thinking about how far ahead Amazon is from it's
competition.

~~~
Chris2048
I think the future is supply chain automation - where a product/service
delivery requires multiple sub-services (packaging, storage/indexing etc) and
the use of these can be fluid and automated - Why can't I redirect stock to a
different packager at the click of a button?

------
mstaoru
...in the US. We do a similar, but very different, thing here in China,
Shanghai. Not only building the meal plans but also cooking and delivering it
every day.

The city is flat and dense, 10000+ people per sqmi dense. Every day local food
delivery companies jump on their electric scooters and deliver over 2,300,000
meals (2016 data, now probably more). In one city.

I can choose from 2,980 restaurants near me. If I add ¥5 (~$0.8) extra
delivery fee, a bit farther, making it 8,600 restaurants. Decision fatigue
multiplied by "I'm hungry just get me that deep fried chicken NOW" thing.

The food is very meh. Mid- to high-end restaurants don't do it. Good
restaurants have enough business to skip deliveries at all. Meal kits tried
and failed here, because people are just too busy and stressed to cook.
Average rent is 140% of average salary. Overtime is a norm.

So we figured, why don't we take customer data + preferences, make a feedback
loop and build FULL meal plans for them that they will 1) be happy to eat, 2)
reach their fitness goals with, 3) be able to afford? By "full" I mean
including healthy drinks and snacks. Lots of meal kit companies, food
deliveries, and meal plan builders forget this.

We're in stealth mode so far, but I believe this will work in China.

~~~
vitaminbandit
Uh, what exactly is your competitive edge? You've framed the problem but
haven't provided any details on how using customer data and preferences solves
it.

Isn't the most accurate customer preference data the actual real-time decision
that the customer makes at the time of order?

~~~
mstaoru
Hey! Didn't want to provide details that aren't relevant to the parent topic.

We built a system to calculate science-backed meal plans based on customer
data. Calories, macronutrients, micronutrients, vitamins, probiotics, fiber.
Water.

We have over 5000 cookbooks from all over the World from which we curate our
recipes, input them and get full nutritional breakdowns.

It is probably THE most important part of any diet — the ability to actually
stick to it and enjoy it. What we want to do is to completely take away the
decision fatigue, and provide diverse food that is tailored to your body.

Nutrition is complicated, and things that work for some people may not work
for the other. The feedback loop is important. If a customer wants to lose fat
or gain muscle, we track the progress and adjust their diets accordingly.

PS: "Real-time decision that the customer makes at the time of order" is
fueled by ghrelin and stress, decision fatigue and availability, and is most
often poor.

~~~
vitaminbandit
Ok, so your product is a niche fitness meal plan rather than a traditional
meal plan. Your primary objection to existing options was that "The food is
very meh." You can see how that can be confusing.

~~~
mstaoru
I think that's a big misunderstanding about meal plans in general. What is a
"fitness meal plan"? Why "traditional" meal plan cannot count macronutrients?
It's not necessarily to lose / gain weight, any food is important and should
eventually be tailored to specific people.

------
pavel_lishin
Isn't this sort of issue faced by 99% of any new business that sells a service
or a product? Unless your idea is something patentable, or you have a trade
secret that's locked up tight, or you control your product vertically (e.g.,
you own the only Unobtainium mine on the planet) - can't your business be
copied fairly trivially?

(Quick edit: who else remembers everyone and their nephew offering website
hosting/colocation at ludicrously low prices in the early-to-mid 2000's?)

~~~
moomin
Not really, no. When Dropbox applied to YC, they had to fill in a section that
specifically dealt with how hard it would be to enter their space. It was much
harder than it looks, and they convinced YC of that.

Groupon always suffered from being easy to copy and having no appreciable
network effects.

~~~
eli
Were any of the Groupon copycats successful? Maybe it just wasn't that good an
idea.

~~~
pchristensen
No. Living Social was the most successful runner up to Groupon. The problem
was that "email deal-based marketing for small businesses" was going to be
worth something, but there would only be one valuable winner and no one knew
how much that would be worth. So Groupon, Living Social, FB, Google, Yelp, and
hundreds of clones all threw in tons of money, slogged it out, and now they're
all gone and GRPN is worth $2B, 1/8th of its IPO price.

Exactly the same thing is happening with ride-hailing now. It's harder to
copy, but there's too much investment subsidizing it so no one knows what the
market will be worth once riders have to pay sustainable rates. But they know
being 2nd place will suck.

Citation: I worked at Groupon before and after the IPO.

~~~
puranjay
Werent a lot of these acquired by Groupon/LivingSocial? In theory, that would
make them "successful" since they had good exits.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Not successful at fulfilling a role in society though.

------
ambrice
We tried Blue Apron but stopped for two reasons:

\- We have toddlers, and the menu was too "fancy". It's difficult to get a 4
year old to eat squid ink pasta.

\- I felt bad about all that wasted packing material and giant ice packs.

We switched to Dream Dinners, which is a local place. My wife goes once a
month, picks out a bunch of dinners for the month, and we throw them in the
freezer. Each of the dinners fits in a gallon ziploc bag. They were generally
easier and faster to cook (pre-chopped vegetables, pre-marinated meat, etc)
and there is more choice to it and no shipping containers. Highly recommend.

------
thedangler
I feel like they should have Meal-Kits at grocery stores. They could make them
with all the extra food they have. That way you can go pick up 3 of them and
then grab more groceries if need be. It would be way better than all the
frozen meals they have.

~~~
knieveltech
Isn't the grocery store already basically one large meal kit?

~~~
fanpuns
Love this comment so much I just had to comment and tell you :))

------
ghaff
It seems that there's more potential for meaningful differentiation than in
the case of the Groupon-type services but the rush to be one of the few
winners who IPO and damn the customer acquisition costs seem like valid
points.

These services just seem very niche-y to me. I'm not really the target market
but, for any given service, there's a pretty narrow profile of cost-
sensitivity, interest in prepping/cooking but not just buying ingredients,
ability to plan a week out, etc.

Finally, if there were a real clamor for meal kits, what's to keep Whole Foods
or whoever from just assembling their own meal kits?

~~~
snarf21
I agree. It seems like these will eventually lose to just normal automated
grocery delivery. You will always need other food than just the kits even if
they are cost competitive in NYC, etc.

~~~
marssaxman
It's not just acquiring the ingredients; there's value in having someone else
plan the menu for you. Deciding what to cook can be a challenge! I host an ~8
person dinner party roughly once a week, and it is not unusual for me to spend
as much time digging through recipes, trying to decide what to cook, as I put
into actually preparing the meal.

Yes, of course you need other groceries beyond the meal kit itself, but that's
not the point - the point is that you've paid the meal service to deal with
all the boring parts of the process, which often includes the decision-making,
so you can just enjoy the cooking and eating.

~~~
ashark
I think too much ambition to be able to home-cook every kind of food under the
sun leads to much of this trouble. Focus on a narrower set of things—say, 2-3
national/regional/ethnic cuisines, and/or cooking techniques—and most of the
difficulty, expense, and even planning of home cooking goes away.

The wildly globe-hopping table of the home cook is a recent, and kinda silly,
development. You can get plenty of variety without trying to prepare meals
from every continent.

(this goes out the window if it's a major hobby, obviously, but in that case
so should complaints about its difficulty/inconvenience, which are entirely
self-imposed)

~~~
ghaff
For me it's a hobby and I do like to try new recipes/styles (while recognizing
that there are some things I don't do enough to get good at or that just take
more work than I'm willing to put in). But I mostly agree with you. I keep an
admittedly fairly thick binder of recipes that I probably use a good 75% of
the time I even need a recipe. And there are lots of simple things I can throw
together in 15 minutes given the ingredients.

------
redmalang
Whilst I'm not the target market (I enjoy cooking from scratch way too much),
I think there are a few things wrong with the analysis:

\- Surely this isn't the first business to make a loss on acquisition in
expectation of breakeven. That in of itself doesn't make this untenable. I
also feel that the Groupon analogy is a bit underbaked: Groupon (and the ilk)
were also I suspect totally unsustainable for the end businesses.

\- There is substantial scope for curation. This in & of itself may not not be
enough of course, but this doesn't seem like total commodity land either. Also
it isn't just about getting the ingredients bundled together. It is harder
than you'd think making sure standard measures of stuff in the supermarket
doesn't go to waste from spoilage when trying to cook whilst keeping
repetition low. Optimising for this is probably an interesting and not super
simple problem.

I've only been exposed to the UK variants. The above may not hold true for
other places though.

------
dsr_
There are businesses with network effects: the more people using them, the
better off everyone using it is.

There are businesses with scale advantages: doing it bigger makes it much
cheaper.

There are businesses with required huge capital investments: if you don't have
the $25 billion silicon foundry, you don't make CPUs.

There are businesses where a national brand is a big advantage, and businesses
where local is a selling point.

The meal-kit industry looks like it's halfway between grocery stores and
delivery restaurants, and that means economies of scale aren't hugely
important, but a reputation for quality is. Local/national can go either way,
but most people are willing to experiment every so often and have strong
preferences about what they like -- which means that having a lot of players
in the market is to their advantage, and long-term contracts are not.

------
motles
The one difference between Groupon and meal kit services to me is that the
meal kit services actually provide value over and over for something I
actually need to do every day, 3 times a day: Eat.

If I don't use the meal kits, that's fine, but I'm just going elsewhere -
restaurants, delivery, take-out, grocery store.

I don't need discount yoga classes or buy one get one froyo coupons every day.
You don't need discounts to survive. You can just buy less. Discounts are not
a commodity that I wish to purchase often. I have used groupon once, and have
been innundated ever since with constant spam about new deals for things which
sound like good deals but probably I wouldn't even give them a second look at
full price. So I don't bother. I don't need half that stuff anyway.

I hope meal kit services continue to thrive, despite negativity from
investors. They are a service that I truly value and will probably keep my
subscription to BA going until BA service quality drops or the food stops
being as good. So far, they haven't done either.

But for god sakes BA, EASY ON THE GARLIC. You don't need to send me a whole
bulb every time when the recipe just needs 2 cloves.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
There is clearly some value to the meal kits, but when all of the alternatives
(restaurants, grocery stores, etc) are very low margin businesses why would
you expect meal kits to have the kind of margins that would justify the high
customer acquisition costs that the current incarnations of meal kit companies
have?

------
stevewillows
A little off topic, but with the acquisition of Whole Foods, Amazon should
pick up one of these services to get people into cooking at home. With the
complaints about the estimated v real time for prep and cleaning, they should
also include a bunch of videos like ChefSteps that show how to effectively
cook and clean at the same time.

They should also sell knives and other kitchen tools.

Lastly, these meal providers should have an app with a running timer that
gives directions while you cook. For instance, 'while onions are sauteing,
wipe cutting board and crush garlic' \--- just like a GPS but for cooking.

The major hurdle for these services is that there is still a certain level of
skill assumed -- but if they aren't teaching these skills, the consumer
doesn't really come off any better.

------
agentgt
Been to a Wholefoods lately?... seen the prepared foods section or any grocery
store prepared foods lately.... seen how many people buy prepared foods?

Ever see a family eat the same thing. I mean a family of say five and not
DINKs.

Amazon acquiring WFM will just make it worse if instacart wasn't already.

~~~
mattnewport
> Ever see a family eat the same thing. I mean a family of say five

What do you mean by this? When I was growing up the whole family (of 4, plus
dog eating leftovers) ate the same meal. Is that not the norm? Is it an
American thing?

~~~
agentgt
>> Ever see a family eat the same thing. I mean a family of say five >What do
you mean by this? When I was growing up the whole family (of 4, plus dog
eating leftovers) ate the same meal. Is that not the norm? Is it an American
thing?

Yes most likely (American Thing).

I'll give you a rough anecdotal example I have seen:

A 13 year old that is a vegan, A father who is a pseudo body builder (eats
lots of meat), a picky 8 year old that will not eat certain colors and of
course a gluten, organic mommy.

And of course there is the toddler/infant age where god forbid you don't
follow the pediatricians recommendations (despite that humans have survived
this far and produce 8 billion people).

Oh and I haven't even got into timing considerations (ie some individuals eat
earlier and others later).

Yep its probably an American thing :)

------
Paul_S
I tried hello fresh back when they were promoting it aggressively. The only
good thing about it were the neat recipe booklets. I actually kept them and
made the meals again later. Everything else was bad. The produce quality was
worse than from my supermarket, missing ingredients, stupidly expensive
(outside of promotion). I'm amazed they still exist, I assume it's running on
investors' money.

------
draw_down
Switching is different in this business though. In the group deal business, as
a customer you're buying individual deals all the time. As soon as not-Groupon
has a better deal than Groupon, you switch.

In meal-kit business, you're a subscriber of one service. Switching to a new
one means entering all your info again, choosing from the list of options, and
waiting for the kits to start shipping to you.

~~~
ghaff
Maybe. Signing up for a new account is maybe five minutes work. I might
equally be inclined to argue that the switching effort is more than justified
by the variety gained by trying a different service.

------
fludlight
> Really, if you wanted proof that there was a bubble, you’d look for a
> refrigerated warehouse REIT.

I know someone working on a roll up of refrigerated warehouses. A REIT might
be part of their exit plan but I don't think these meal-in-a-box companies
even register on their radar.

~~~
nailer
For anyone else:
[http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/reit.asp](http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/reit.asp)

------
shalmanese
Local services are the penny auctions of the VC industry. Since your margins
are so dependent on achieving scale, there's a strong push to win customers at
any possible cost.

Each VC is forced to dump in increasing amounts of money due to sunk cost
fallacy for a fixed prize at the end of the rainbow. At the end of the day,
the prize won isn't worth the collective investment and the entire industry
represents a net subsidy to the consumer in the form of discounted services
and referral bonuses.

It's one of the few things that make living in San Francisco bearable as it
tends to be ground zero for these kind of gigantic customer acquisition
battles.

------
dredmorbius
OT: When did Medium start showing bottom-feeding Taboola ad content?

That's a massive disappointment.

 _Update:_ Oh, that waas content. My error.

~~~
gdulli
That was part of the content of the article, not an ad slot.

~~~
dredmorbius
Doh! My error.

Thanks. I ... cannot say how absolutely abhorrent I find that stuff. Even when
pointed out in articles.

I'm sensitised to it in part because I've taken extreme pains to block as much
of that as possible. A harder task than it should be.

------
anigbrowl
There's a simpler reason it won't work over the long term: as people get
better at cooking, they don't need things like meal kits any more and just
make smarter grocery shopping choices.

------
sarreph
Is there anything we can learn from 'daily-deal' pivots that were successful,
and apply them to meal-box ideas in order to beat the curve?

------
kschmit90
No where else can I find a group of people cost benefit analyzing to death one
of the purest, simplest, and most fulfilling aspects of life.

The general consensus here seems to be that, "My time is not well spent
preparing and consuming, by my own hand, the life giving meals I will eat."

But, of course, I've misspoken. And, now prepare for the assault of many
pedantic, infuriated, hacker news commentators.

------
mmagin
And I thought this was going to be about the companies that produce military
rations.

------
mothers
generally people who do meal-kits just aren't good at shopping. it isn't
cheaper, healthier or faster to cook than regular food. the only thing it
might be better at is faster at _preparation_ , an advantage that is negated
if you buy a sufficiently large amount of food each time you purchase and pre-
prepare (cutting chicken into slices and freezing them, etc.).

tldr: only lazy people with more time than money would be interested in this.

if anyone disagrees go ahead and post your cooking schedule and workflow. i'll
point out the glaring inefficiencies (e.g. buying small amounts of food
frequently for preparing and then complaining it takes too long to eat;
cooking small amounts of food; not preslicing meat upon purchase, etc)

the one thing i'll give meal kits is that you can get a large variety of food.

~~~
aeorgnoieang
> only lazy people with more time than money would be interested in this.

Opportunity costs are real, people's preferences are heterogeneous, and also
I'm pretty sure you're 'lazy' too – using a computer to perform all of those
arithmetic calculations it's doing!

~~~
mothers
i've never claimed i'm not lazy. i'm super lazy. if i had unlimited money i
wouldn't cook or order from a restaurant. i'd have people literally feed me
with a spoon.

this fact, however, is irrelevant from my point.

