Surprising that the legendary Taco Bell in Pacifica isn’t the most expensive one, though it is close. It has a fireplace, it serves margaritas, and it has a walk-up window for hungry surfers.
And, critically, with the high volume they're able to keep supplies fresh and staff well-trained. Taco bell is still just salty, fatty fast-food, but that one is top-tier (locations right off major interstates in well-lot towns tend to have better food too). The vast majority of locations are worse -- bad burrito folding, sloppy ingredient measuring, stale tortillas, crusty beans, .... I think the public sentiment would be better if people hadn't experienced low-volume Taco Bells.
That one is okay, but I don't feel like it's much better than others in the Bay Area. Actually, I was surprised the menu isn't more different.
It's not the only one that serves alcohol - there's one in downtown SJ and probably some more around. I notice the website doesn't tell you which ones are Cantinas though.
We were there to watch the whales that have been hanging out last month and the amount of people there was mind blowing. Kind of a shame because we didn’t want to deal with such a crowd. But when I ate there in 2019 it was delicious. I can’t remember how much we paid.
Not sure why you’re downvoted but you’re right. Although none of the places you mentioned are technically “fast food” — they’re fresh made to order always which is counter to the concept of fast food and as a result are very good respectable food.
There is also a pretty good Panda Express right there you can grab takeout from and Park in the beach parking lot.
There is another Taco Bell cantina right near our apartment near oracle park. They have really good prices for alcohol compared to the surrounding bars.
Taco Bell in SoMa and the one in Tenderloin tended to have a lot of strung out, mentally ill, or homeless persons. It was nice that they were allowed to take a seat and enjoy water or whatever food they purchased, but it also affects the cleanliness of the restaurant.
I once had someone while eating stand up and just take their pants off in the KFC/Taco Bell in Tenderloin...
When I get to a Taco Bell, I look for how clean the tables are, how well-arranged the sauce/napkin station is, and how clean the fountain drink area is. If any of those are actively a disaster, it tells me the food quality is probably going to be worse (yes yes, its already terrible)
Sounds like this is the one in SoMa in San Francisco. I used to work remotely for an office around the corner from there and would prefer to go to this TB for dinner (I'm a cheap traveler... My company doesn't have to worry about me expensing fancy meals). The issue with this one, if I remember correctly, is that there are a lot of homeless who hang out there. ("Un-housed"? "Vagrant"? I'm not sure what the proper term is, but I'm genuinely not trying to be offensive).
Taco Bell is my favorite fast food, but I'm on a boycott after an app-induced billing error that ate an entire gift card... Their customer support is atrocious so I'll just spend my money elsewhere.
Apparently the prices are scraped from the mobile app. I installed the mobile app and for some reason, and that location can’t be found inside the mobile app.
Actually, you cannot (I can’t anyway) order from that location from the website either.
It just goes to show data cleaning is hard. It’s true for statistics and it’s probably just as true for LLMs.
(1) Studies have shown that patron will make larger and more frequent orders when placed through an app rather than in person. This increases revenues.
(2) The app gathers statistics. Marketing and sales are so addicted to massive amounts of all kinds of information they have trouble finding veins that are not collapsed and their coworkers all carry naloxone. In most organizations, the marketing and sales people make most product decisions and a mobile app is a (free) product distributed by the chain.
(3) Data collection. Not only can anonymized data be monetized, but selling data directly attributable to individuals is a major source of revenue for many organizations, and I doubt Taco Bell (or Yum! Brands in general) is not among them.
In addition, price discrimination: you can offer deals in the app to price-sensitive consumers that don't cannibalise in-store sales from convenience-sensitive ones. Same concept as couponing.
Which is a roundabout way to say what they actually do, which is to offer "price sensitive" consumers the same prices they used to offer everyone if they are willing to go through stupid hoops worth of "deals" and "coupons" and "engage with our app every day or else your Good Little Consumer (tm) score goes down and we stop giving you discount pricing", and then raise the prices for everyone else.
(1) My advisor in grad school taught me to speak in bulleted lists (2) It's a habit I've been trying to break in the LLM age. (3) I am always telling Copilot to knock it off with those stupid lists and just talk normal.
U.S. labor is expensive, and the app delegates the order-taking job from an employee to the customer, keeping food prices more competitive and/or keeping the restaurant profitable. (Land cost is the other big expense.)
I wonder what the income disparity is between minimum-wage Taco Bell employees and Pepsi’s executive team is, and how much the difference has grown in the last 20 years. I would be willing to bet that the company could, in reality, afford not to replace human jobs and still pull in huge profits/pay their shareholders and corporate officers quite a lot of money without requiring a bunch of my personal information in order to buy the worst taco I’ve ever had.
Fast food workers are not minimum wage. I don't know about Taco Bell, but McDonald's has had signs up offering $18/hr in the Bay Area for a while which is like $3 more.
Well, they might be now since California passed a higher minimum wage for fast food workers.
> afford not to replace human jobs
There's practically no such thing as replacing human jobs; having a machine replace some of your /tasks/ (taking orders) lets you spend more time on the other tasks (preparing the orders) and makes you more productive.
Higher productivity in this environment pretty much universally translates to fewer staff on shift. It’s just another way to lower costs at the expense of non wealthy people. Why do you think it’s so hard to find help in any big box store nowadays? Or why most of them only have one or two cashiers working when lines get longer and longer?
PS: $18 an hour in the bay in 2024 might as well be under minimum wage. It’s unconscionably low if one wants to maintain any standard of living.
The app makes it so your food is ready soon after you arrive. You can spend all the time browsing the menu and ordering before arriving at the physical location and then the food is already prepared or is made upon your arrival.
Apps are used rather than PWA websites because most users find it difficult to save a mobile website to their homepage and mobile web push notifications etc add extra friction compared to native apps.
Apps are used for data collection and marketing via notifications. That's the real value, not saving time for the user. The user is rewarded with the ability to avoid lines and targeted discounts.
I just typed "taco" in the search bar of Safari and the second autocomplete result was for the restaurant 1.7 miles from me, the third was for the tacobell.com. Easy!
In contrast I struggle to find apps installed on my iPad because the icons look all the same. Apple has a leg up on Android but for me Apple's icons are mainly forgettable or meaningless and most icons from third parties are a forgettable stylized letter, forgettable anime character, or abstract icon. The colors on the default background often obscure the edges of some icons so I find it hard to spot even icons I use a lot.
As a result I hide as many Apple icons as I can (What's the difference between the App Store, Apple Store, and iTunes store?) and avoid installing apps because each app I install makes it harder to find the ones I really use. The Taco Bell app would be brand destroying for me because I'd keep seeing it get in the way of finding the app I really need and would be popping up irrelevant and annoying notifications at all the wrong times -- you just don't want people associating your brand with petty annoyances.
There is no reason it needs to be a PWA. People had plain ordinary web sites to order food online a decade using cgi-bin and the equivalent before there were things like Angular and React.
You found a link to tacobell.com, that's great, but you're like 1/10 of the way there now. You have to open it, load all the resources, give it permission to use your location so you can find which store to order from, place the order, enter your payment information, and then move to your email app to get order updates. An app caches all of that locally, has your information saved, is pre-cleared for location permissions, etc.
> People had plain ordinary web sites to order food online a decade using cgi-bin and the equivalent before there were things like Angular and React.
This is true. I wonder if there is any difference in the $ amount of food ordered using iOS/Android apps now vs food ordered using cgi-bin then.
I don't mind the minor inconveniences of the web like approving a location check. My email client provides very good tools for dealing with spam, notifications and spam notifications. If a brand wants to make their web site load excessive resources that is their loss because the site will be slow and drive people to another brand.
Back in the day people were much less into the e-commerce habit and not using mobile technology so they weren't ordering food on the go.
Another question is "What relationship to people have to fast food?"
I worked at a company that did geospatial analysis such as retail location selection. We had a theory that people chose fast food because they were on the way from point A to point B so the right way to think about it was not about the density of commercial or residential development in an area but rather about the density of trips that pass by a point. I was involved in a pilot project to use touchscreens to collect data at the POS just before the mobile age made it possible to collect trip data directly.
Thus my consumption of fast food is opportunistic: I eat at Taco Bell sometimes because it is in a neighborhood with a Wal-Mart, Gamestop, Petsmart, Staples, an illegal cannabis dispensary (not like I can't get better weed elsewhere), award-winning wine store, etc. I get hungry On most days I would go to the street taco stand on the other side of the parking lot. which has the best tacos I've seen outside Los Angeles but if it is Sunday maybe I go to the Bell. It's not like the scene in Demolition Man where Sylvester Stalone goes to a fancy dinner at Taco Bell because "all restaurants are Taco Bell" in the future.
If I am traveling maybe I am driving down the freeway and see a sign for a Burger King and stop. Maybe I walk out of the Oculus at the WTC site and see both a Chopt and a BK and, even though I have a BK gift card in my pocket, the line looks really long at the BK and I go to the Chopt because it is really fast food.
I can see that Taco Bell wants to develop a special relationship with me but I don't want to develop one with Taco Bell. Really I don't find it easy to install an app (until I broke my old iPad, my old iPad insisted that I log in with my Apple account password whenever I wanted to install an app despite the fingerprint scanner working just fine for everything else. I don't know my Apple account password because I keep it in a password manager and the app store was the one thing that would make me require to use it when I am on the go. When I bought a new iPad this cleared up. I go to the Bell maybe 4 times a year, it is just not worth having another app cluttering up my device making it harder to find the apps that really matter to me.
For customers to feel like they're saving time (versus having a cashier take their order) the kiosk isn't it: you can't on average discover and select on a screen faster than you can speak. The time savings of the app/website is from building the order on the way there, reducing the in-store interaction to speaking your name or order number (which is mostly constant across all methods of ordering).
As for app vs website, I agree, website would be similarly good. This could be said about tons of apps.
I don’t know anyone who likes having to order through the apps for fast food places, or regards them as a time-saving convenience—rather, they’re an inconvenience the places make you suffer to get what should be normal menu prices under the broader inflation rate, rather than the 300% markup above that all these places have applied to their menu prices.
Saves having to wait on a line at the drive thru. Or on a line inside the store. Nope, can't do that: they don't take orders at the cashier, so you have to use the kiosks which take even longer.
So I use the app to order while at home, drive to the restaurant and grab my food and leave.
Oh for sure, speaking to a cashier is the quickest/best, and scrolling on a screen (kiosk or app) is slower/worst. I'm just pointing out that if the store will reduce conversations with cashiers by shifting ordering to a screen, then the app is far superior to the kiosk: order before you arrive, avoid germs, frictionless invocation of the loyalty program, etc.
also, there's only so many kiosks available just like there's only so many human staffed registers. This means there's potential for waiting in line. If every one has an app, there's no line. Ever. Well, except for when you show up to pick up your order and have to wait for everyone else.
Of course all of that is just the icing on top of the data harvesting cake
Kiosks need an app as well, but also custom hardware, cleaning, etc, and customers can't order in advance. You could have a website, but lots of people currently expect an app.
The app works better for the drive thru, and also for families with kids that like to push buttons on the giant ipad.
Speaking of which, we stopped going to fast food burger places because 75% of them can’t make things like “a hamburger with no cheese or any other toppings except ketchup”, or “a cheeseburger with no other toppings”.
I suspect an LLM that supports audio input would outperform most drive through window attendants.
Oddly, I’ve noticed there is no correlation between speaking english as a first language and being able to understand those orders.
>I suspect an LLM that supports audio input would outperform most drive through window attendants.
I think this would lead to a lot of really frustrating errors in a food ordering context. In my experience LLM speech recognition is really prone to inserting or removing negation words, which can really shift the meaning. This is a problem in any speech recog use case but there's often sufficient context to understand when the error has occurred. In a list of what a customer does / doesn't want, there is no additional context to fill the gap.
"Cheeseburger with ketchup mustard onion no tomato" -> "Cheeseburger with ketchup mustard onion tomato" or the inversion
You can correct this to some degree with an order confirmation step but the error rate would mean a lot of customers need to make a correction, which adds time to the process and increases customer frustration.
At that point I'd rather the drive thru have a touchscreen and just let me input the order directly, versus having to argue with an LLM about which ingredients i want included or excluded.
I was reading Graham's On Lisp which works a nice example of Augmented Transition Networks which were popular in the 1970s for writing parsers that could parse controlled vocabularies. For that matter I remember similar kinds of grammar to control voice response applications for platforms like TellMe circa 2001. I bet it would do fine for food ordering.
(This is why a non-native speaker can do this job well, you don't need to know a lot of the language to parse orders like 芥兰牛肉)
Theoretically you can order from it and you order is ready when you arrive. The last time I tried this, I had my passenger try and place our order. At the end of the process the app let us know we can't order online from that store.
So my conclusion it is just a data harvesting scheme.
>Theoretically you can order from it and you order is ready when you arrive. The last time I tried this... the app let us know we can't order online from that store.
FWIW, as one data point, this is what I've used it for a few times, and it worked without issue. (A co-working space has it next door and that made it a lot more time-efficient, avoiding the line and having to wait in store.)
Though I have run into the problem you've described with other services, where it rejects your request much later than it should. Like with AWS letting you configure a server for launch before informing you that you don't have permission to launch servers:
lots of fast food have apps that track purchasing and give you coupons or deals that you can't get just ordering in the store now. It's like loyalty cards for McDonald's or tb.
This is the real answer. Price discrimination used to involve physical coupons, but now the coupons are in the app. Since apps are easier to obtain (and have in your pocket at all times) than physical coupons, the price discrepancy (between full price and discounted price) is wider than ever, to ensure revenue is sustained despite the higher percentage of discounted orders. That means high menu prices making the news, ostensibly due only to costs (inflation, minimum wage, rent, etc.) but actually due in part to app discounting.
I installed the Wendy's app a while back, and by optimizing my selections, all of my orders since then have cost less than half of menu prices on average. For example, get a $3 item for $1 with any other purchase (so you tack on a $1 frosty), or buy a $6 item get another free. Taco Bell's app deals aren't quite as deep but you get the point. When tons of people are placing orders this way, menu prices must creep up to compensate.
I've come to realize I don't want to put that kind of brain energy into ordering fast food. So I just stopped going. I make up some refried beans and some meat (normally chili verde) and freeze them (separately) for when I want 'fast food'. If I have to play (and learn how to maximize) some corporate dark pattern games then nah, I'm good bro.
The friction of playing the game is how price discrimination has always worked, whether clipping coupons or fiddling with apps. You either spend time to pay less (and perhaps brag about it to make smalltalk just like this, which is like volunteer advertising) or you spend more to save time.
It's weird, but it's actually an incredible way for the more well-off to subsidize the less well-off (at the risk of enticing some folks, who have the means but love a deal, to be penny-wise pound-foolish at everyone's expense including their own). At the end of the day, more people get fed at the price point they can deal with.
That's an interesting point! For simplicity, let's divide into 3 segments: poor, middle, rich. Poor can only pay with coupons, rich can't be bothered/seen and only pay full price, middle can pay in full but some of them decide to use coupons because it's deemed worthwhile (so really 4 segments). Suppose middle doesn't exist, and prices are set in a way where tons of poor people are fed while also maximizing profit from rich people; perhaps this means giving the poor a 50% discount.
Now introduce the middle. The portion of them paying with coupons is anywhere from 0% to 100%. The restaurant makes massive profits from them at 0%, and makes no profits from them (but covers all costs) at 100%. Let's say it starts near 0% because initially nobody knows about coupons and over time rises near 100% once the information has spread around. Profits decrease so something must be done to counter that. Shallower discounts (say, 25% off instead of 50% off) is a possibility, keeping the discrepancy tight, as you suggest. But increasing menu prices, while leaving the huge discrepancy, is also a possibility!
Either method will get the profits to the desired level. But only one method -- maintaining the large discrepancy -- sustains the goal of maximizing the number of poor people fed. Therefore, a restaurant with that goal will choose that method; a restaurant without that goal simply won't issue coupons. The discrepancy, if one exists, is therefore constant regardless of how many penny-wise pound-foolish people are in the middle.
This. 30 minutes ago I ordered 4 of those $5 meal deals for my family of 4, applied the 20% off coupon and we all ate for $17 after tax. Hard to beat that.
I liken it to the impulse aisle at the grocery store.
In my experience, they will send you discounts (BOGO) or free stuff when you're most likely to buy. One of my teammates and I both installed their mobile app. I would get free coupons for like nachos or a taco on the days that I regularly went, usually in the mornings and the coupons were only good for about 24 hours. Conversely, my hockey teammate used to get his later in the afternoon because he was religious about stopping on the way home from our gams which was usually pretty late at night.
They're banking on (and usually right) that if they give you a small carrot for something free, you'll use the app to buy more stuff. In my experience it really took a lot for me to not buy more than I needed. So I would include the freebie along with whatever else I was buying to try and save a buck or two. Whereas my teammate would get his normal order plus whatever freebie they were offering.
either way, it worked. Many times instead of going somewhere else, I would go there, and use their mobile app and get my freebies.
I assume many/most of the people regularly eating at these places are very price sensitive. And, especially with demographic shifts in the West, non-premium places are going to be doing everything in their power to replace employees with automation and self-service. A lot of shoppers may grumble but they'll go with the lower prices.
The goal of the mcd app is to generate growth metrics in the tech domain to inflate their ticker value through data mining, and coercion is happening through i flating prices and then offering discounts just by downloading the apps. It's absolutely rubbish short sightedness to price pressure people into using your app.
Essentially yes, except they make it when you arrive (at least if you pick up in the drive through). This is good design, because food from Taco Bell has an expiration date of about 3 minutes after it's cooked. It's good (well, not good, but it's food) right when it comes out, but once it cools down a bit it becomes essentially inedible.
Not specific to taco bell but I like to order in person personally, but will seek out an app if I have a large order to put in and want to make sure I get all the adjustments right.
I’ve never used it, but I’ve used the Starbucks app a bunch. Order on the app when I’m 5-10 mins away, and can just roll up and grab my food/drink, vs waiting in line, ordering/paying, then waiting for prep. Useful when you’re tight on time or just don’t feel like waiting. I assume the Taco Bell app is similar.
Targeted offers to make you order, think promos they offer through the app instead of blasting it on TV commercials it's much cheaper, loyalty rewards and also order for pick up to save time.
I don't have taco bell app, experience is from international McDonald's app
The weirdest experience I had was a local burger joint I walked into that was completely empty with nobody eating there and nobody working at the counter and it didn't help that the decor was completely "blacked out". My first impression was that it wasn't open but I placed my order on a (ordinary sized) tablet and got my food and the people who came out to serve it were really nice.
The other day I was at McD's and an elderly lady was stressin' it because she had no idea what to do. There were two cash registers but nobody staffing them and a disorganized group of people waiting for their food and not even a clear queue for the people behind the counter to see that somebody was waiting. She asked me what to do and I told her she could order at the register but a minute later I realized I was standing in front of the register waiting for my food and that probably the workers wouldn't see her. I stepped out of the way and made sure she was highly visible at the register and when I got my food I told the worker that this woman was waiting for her food and she seemed quite annoyed but I didn't feel I could take it for granted they were paying attention.
I've been to a couple of McD's where they outright refuse to acknowledge you if you just standing in front of the register. They really want you to use the kiosks, and I'm not even sure that they have people other than a supervisor trained to use the registers.
The elderly lady was probably doing what mom does when presented with a kiosk, pretending to be too dumb to click on a picture of the food they want.
Someone should invent a way to communicate without requiring a a 1:n app for every destination. They should make some kind of n:n web that connects everyone to every destination.
0. You can set up favorite orders, and get all the nutrition info you care to. And make fiddly custom orders without worrying someone will screw up typing it in.
1. They don't have to pay a cashier to type in your order if you do it for them. And it's more likely to be correct, and more likely to make upsells (would you like to add a drink to your order?). More cynically, you can't complain that their cashier doesn't understand English since you are now the cashier.
2. Price discrimination. Fast food is an unusual mix of fast and cheap, and not everyone values those two equally. Cheap customers can spend time clipping coupons and browsing app deals while fast customers can make their order via drive through without having to futz around while driving. The app replaces newspaper circulars and mailers, esp now that nobody subscribes to local news anymore.
3. You can order ahead, increasing table turn time, spending less time at their limited seating and limited parking. And you spend less time waiting in line to order, waiting for your order to be prepared.
4. It functions as a loyalty program, buy 10 get one free style (but a bit more complicated).
5. Less fighting over coupons at the counter for the franchisees that don't want to accept them - the app just refuses them. And frankly, some of the penny pincher franchisees may not be savvy enough to set up refusals.
6. If a location runs out of something they can flag it and you won't show up disappointed they can't fill your order. Or they can advertise a per-store menu.
IIUC, virtually all of the crazy airport prices come from management companies like HMS Host, Sodexo, etc - which manage most of the restaurants and stores in airports.
Their business model is - they big up the price of all the available spots such that no one can make money unless they charge exorbitant prices. After they capture the majority of the market, they're free to charge a ton of money.
How they haven't been charged for collusion and price fixing is beyond me.
Anyway, typically, if you find a huge brand like Starbucks or McDonald's - or a brand that owns all its locations (not franchised) like Chipotle, the prices will not be extreme.
The Starbucks in airports are usually still franchised (which otherwise is rare for Starbucks), and at least a few I’ve encountered are definitely operated by HMS Host.
Certain airports (Salt Lake City, NY metro airports) make a choice to enforce pricing that is representative of outside pricing because the perception of gouging is so bad.
Portland (PDX) had really good prices last time I was there. Seatac is OK, they have affordable fast food options and their starbucks is only slightly more expensive than on the outside.
European airports are worse. I never spent so much on a coffee than at Zurich's airport. It was swiss markup over the usual swiss markup.
The last time I flew JFK - pre-pandemic, the prices were insane. $16 for a sub sandwich (not Subway). Tasted terrible. I've never been to NYC, so I don't know if this is what they charged outside.
Portland, as another commenter said, tends to have the same price in the airport as their restaurants outside.
On the other hand, last time I took my family to Chipotle, my kid had liquid poo for 2 weeks with onset a couple hours after eating there. We have never been back since. That place scares the you know what out of me.
You're in a lot more danger of GI infection from fresh produce as in the Chipotle condiments than you are from highly processed, standardized, frozen & reheated fast food.
I don't get this joke. I eat Taco Bell occasionally and it's fine on my gut. I don't order the meat, though. Usually I'm getting a black bean crunch wrap with guac instead of nacho cheese.
I'm with you but it's a common enough sentiment that there's probably something to it, and I recall friends having issues over the years. For these people at best it's painful gas and at worst is [worse], so there is a large group of people who can't digest a particular common Taco Bell ingredient well.
I've seen speculation about undiagnosed lactose intolerance but frankly Taco Bell doesn't use that much cheese on their cheesiest items compared to say, a pizza, which is another very common food in the US and has way more cheese.
I haven't had taco bell in a couple of decades, but I used to have issues with the beef shortly after eating there (so probably not bacteria) but no issues with chicken. I suspect my body was not used to the grease, and that taco bell had particularly greasy beef.
They’re not crazy in terms of the cost structure, it’s like the $20 hot dogs in a billion dollar stadium that is half funded by taxes and half funded by loans/bonds.
Someone has to pay back the loans and/or bonds plus interest… or a lot of someones chipping in with their hot dogs, tickets, drinks, etc...
I’ve never seen a Taco Bell in an airport. But Seattle SeaTac has a McDonald’s and its prices are pretty reasonable compared to other Seattle McDonald’s. Actually, at airport is about the only time we eat at McDonald’s these days.
It’s only a matter of time before someone creates a Taco Bell dynamic pricing engine / realpage like price fixing service. I’m sure it’s already here considering most of these Taco Bell’s are owned by private equity groups.
I am surprised I have not heard about more kinds of surge pricing or other price increases to exploit consumers. For example, raise the prices across the board $1 for an hour before the adjacent stadium opens.
Do the Franchises put limits on the pricing power of individual stores?
I was thinking more local franchise owners who might not be getting the same scrutiny as corporate. Especially if you can tap into transient audiences who are unlikely to bring repeat business anyway.
- This is the same Pantry & Larder website as "McCheapest: A site that tracks the price of a Big Mac in every US McDonald's" (pantryandlarder.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38980793 . Although Taconomical allows you to choose by 9 different menu items.
I have an autistic kid who went through a phase where she would only eat McDonalds chicken nuggets... I live in a city and have 3 McDonald's pretty close to me, and the price for the same order of nuggets would vary by up to 50 cents between the 3... the cheapest place is only a half mile away from the most expensive one. It really is strange.
Ah geez, we have a five year old who has a physical disability so ate via feeding tube for a long time, and when she finally started on actual foods had the McDonald’s chicken nuggets phase. We bought an air fryer and she prefers those nuggets now thank goodness, and has been branching out to other foods.
And since we were getting her McDonald’s, we often ended up getting it, especially during Covid, and gained weight, and it was a vicious cycle.
It didn't take 15 years to cause a problem. There was a problem long before the problem became unbearable and she needed treatment. Likely also significant nutritional and metabolic damage along the way.
> even 1 meal of McDonald chicken nugget is bad for health
I think this isn't true in any meaningful way. Absolutely, making it (or any fast food) a big component of your diet is not going to promote good health. The more often you eat them, the more likely it will have an impact on your health, mostly from the increased sodium and trans fats. Consistently living with high blood sugar and higher LDL will increase your bad health outcomes. But in the example of the parent, it's not just the negative consequences of consuming fast food, but the negative consequences of not eating anything else (so lacking in many micronutrients).
The good news is this makes the marginal impact of one meal over your lifetime is absolutely miniscule. It's not like each meal increases your risk of mortality a linear amount.
I understand it's not fair to compare a dog to a baby but I'll just throw it out there. When my dogs refuse to eat the food I give him, I just take it back and surely enough 12 hours later he is eating the very same food he refused before. A kid isn't a dog but sometimes it got to get worst before it gets better.
About macnuggets : I might be extremist in the way I consider alimentation but I consider that even one McDonald's nuggets is bad for health not only for the immediate impact on your body, which is indeed minimal from one meal, but mostly because it gives a bad Habit.
Everyone likes junk food, it always tastes better than healthy food so you're putting yourself at disadvantage at the very first bite in a chicken nugget. A bit like what happens with drugs, the first time is the most important and the more you do after the worst it's going to be to get out of it.
Trying to enforce healthier eating on our daughter lead to her being underweight.
Her nutritionist, pediatrician, endocrinologist, and therapist all advised us it was better to allow her to eat her comfort foods rather than fight her on it.
Almost anything is fine in moderation. It’s honestly not that bad beyond the saturated fats, and even then an otherwise healthy and active person who eats other healthy things during the day would be totally fine having nuggets for dinner every day
I don't mean to be rude but I'm just curious... did you try simply not giving them junk food? I have done some research on this and have not found any good evidence that most autistic children will actually starve themselves for any meaningful amount of time if their picky foods are not provided.
Every child is different. Some kids you just need to let them burn themselves through a phase while supporting it was positive stuff elsewhere.
I have one kid who will demand the giant tray of cupcakes from Sam’s Club then proceed to eat half of a cupcake twice and never think about them again (in this case, we actually did buy the giant tray for a BBQ and had left overs). We simply continue to offer her other, healthy food while she goes through a phase on something.
The other kid remembers where everything is, despite being very young. She will scream about certain foods she wants (too young to talk) and work us to specific cabinets and drawers where that food was. We have to be a lot more mindful of what food we expose her to and be prepared to nudge her towards better options. Push her too hard and she simply gets stuck on that one specific food item she wants.
While you’re right that kids won’t literally starve themselves, food can be a battle point in a day filled with other things. Sometimes you just have to read the kid and bend so you don’t ruin other priorities.
Framing it as "being picky" is really not helpful. As somebody on the spectrum, my (fortunately very few) food sensitivities aren't a mere matter of preference... they're the result of me experiencing visceral, nauseating revulsion at specific tastes/textures/smells. If it's the only option, I will absolutely skip a meal entirely rather than deal with it. I would probably have to be at the point of literally (not figuratively) starving to fight past that response, and even then I wouldn't be sure about keeping it down.
Not giving them junk food doesn't equate to ignoring food sensitivities. If someone is tolerating chicken nuggets, there's a whole host of healthier food with similar textures, tastes and smells.
You have to battle the psychological aspect which says that they are different even if they smell, taste, feel the same. It really isn't that easy, if it was, parents of autistic kids would be doing it. There is also a reason why McDonald's nuggets are the go to for autistic kids the world over. They have been engineered over many decades to be the most acceptable taste and texture for children.
A friend of mine (with an autistic child) explained it as:
If you give your kid a strawberry - even within the punnet the tastes and textures will vary - even mid summer some will be unpleasantly tart.
If I make a sandwich it will be mildly different one day to the next, depending on the freshness of the items I put in, the brand of the ham, the spread, the bread.
But junk food will ALWAYS BE THE SAME. If surprise and novelty is an issue for you/your child, then eating food like that removes so much stress for everyone involved. Yes it isn't healthy, but the meal gets eaten and no one cries.
But say, one goes to get McDonald's nuggets and lightly and secretly messes up with it (adds a bit of lime one day, vinegar another, etc.) before giving it to the obsessed child. Wouldn't that remove the "always the same" aspect and thus decreasing the appeal of junk food over other foods?
Also I'm sure cheese, avocado, a carrot, zucchini or pumpkin from the supermarket are going to taste extremely similar across the months unless they are hyper tasters (in that case they'd definitely notice a change in taste across nuggets).
The difference between fresh McDonald’s nuggets and ones that have sat in the UHC/production bin for half an hour is night and day though, and that’s just the variance officially allowed by McDonald’s - don’t get me started on double-fried nuggets!
Have you tried ordering them "fresh"? It takes a few minutes longer, some cashiers won't know what that means, and they might not do it if its late and they're closing up, but I've always ordered "fresh" nuggets and french fries that are made to order instead of pulled from the baskets. Explaining that it's a food sensitivity issue will almost certainly get most of them to comply.
It works at all the fast food places for fried items, as far as I can remember (except Seattle's Dick's).
Same to me. I might not understand it but I'm not sure any kid is going to go starving with some homemade food in front of them.
The biggest red flag is why on earth are kids fed junk food to begin with? Maybe their parents also love it, making it harder to set a better example at home? Hard to say.
>experiencing visceral, nauseating revulsion at specific tastes/textures/smells.
It's definitely hard but this can be overcome with work. In my much younger days I had this reaction with a lot of foods that I now eat.
I knew I was going to have to overcome a lot of my hangups about food in order to be at least semi-healthy, so I did in my late teens/early 20s. Before that the only thing I ate was pasta.
Exactly, it gets more and more difficult the older you are and the more established the habit is, so helping your children overcome these issues early is very important and sets them up for a healthy lifestyle in adulthood. I have a friend in his 40s who is having strokes and is vehemently unwilling to eat a single vegetable. His food adversions are much worse than any child's.
I'm not saying it's easy, because it isn't. But it's very much possible.
I'm also not saying all food aversions need to be worked through, however, allowing your children to have a severely limited diet doesn't set them up for long-term success.
To add additional context to my other reply, I do not find this question rude, but I do get frustrated with people who seem to think our food problem is easy to solve.
My wife and I have agonized for most of our daughter's life about feeding her. She has autism and ADHD, and will often forget to eat if we do not work hard to get her to eat. If she eats a food whose textures, smell, or taste trigger her, she will vomit immediately. She hates to vomit, and will refuse to eat ANYTHING after this happens (even her comfort foods). She doesn't want to be around food at all at that point.
She is very small for her age and underweight (we have routine consultations with her endocrinologist on her growth, and have had countless conversations on whether we should start growth hormones with her. There are so many things to consider around that decision, it has been quite a challenge).
We have a dietician that we consult with regularly, both about her eating and her growth. She, along with both our endocrinologist and pediatrician, feel that getting her calories is the most important thing, and that we can sacrifice quality for quantity, because even when she has freedom to eat whatever junk she wants, she has trouble eating enough. Both the dietician and her therapist think it is very important we never turn food into a battle, since she already has so many issues around eating that we don't want to make it worse.
I appreciate your question being in good faith, but I do get frustrated when people make comments about my daughter's diet, as if we haven't agonized over this for the 8 years of her life. This is something we deal with every day, and I find it both frustrating and amusing when people think they can solve the problem in a single internet comment.
Things that work for some kids don't work for all kids.
Very well thought out response, I appreciate it. I think it's easy for people to form strong opinions about things they are shielded from the consequences of.
When I made that comment I lacked all of this context of being underweight, having already struggled with this for so many years and also regularly seeing all the different types of doctors that you go to, so without that information I think it's easier for people to jump to conclusions, but I understand it can be time-consuming to add all that context every time you want to comment. As you can imagine a lot of people are quick to call out things that might look like bad parenting when they assume none of that context exists.
Thanks, and this is exactly why I took the time to type out the longer reply. I could tell from your phrasing of the question that it was made in good faith, and was not an unreasonable question in the abstract. I figured giving a more detailed reply would help you and others see all of the things that make the real situation more complicated than it might seem on the surface.
Hi. I am told that this was basically me when I was young. Picky eater, vomiting, consistently 5th percentile on the growth charts. And to top it off my favorite food was, you guessed it, McDonald's chicken nuggets. My parents tried all sorts of things–making my "favorite" foods, repeatedly serving the same food until I would eat it (I wouldn't), begging and pleading, various punishments. None of it really worked.
Well, I grew out of it in my teenage years. No guarantee that your daughter will too but I figured you might want to hear that there might be hope in your future :)
Kids will definitely reduce how much they eat to the point when you take them in for their annual checkup, you will be asked why your child is underweight. The doctor will call it "failure to thrive". Depending on your relationship with your doctor, they might suspect neglect or abuse.
Our daughter went through a phase were there were only a few things she wanted to eat. Our pediatrician said to feed her what she will eat and be patient because her tastes will change. He was right.
Our final diet for her was based on recommendations from her pediatrician, dietitian, and therapist.
While she might not have starved if we withheld chicken nuggets, she became extremely distressed and disregulated, which lead to other problems.
She has moved on from chicken nuggets, but her eating pattern is still the same. She will have only one food at a time that she will eat for proper meals, and that food will rotate every few months. After a few months of only eating one type of food, she will suddenly declare she does not like it anymore and move on to something else.
Her current food is actually Chicken Tikka Masala from one particular restaurant. Hopefully somewhat healthier than nuggets, although it gets expensive.
Not the OP, but I do have an food sensitive autistic son. He will absolutely not eat rather than eat something he despises. There are obvious moral limitations on testing his resolve, but he has skipped meals (without causing a fuss) plenty of times.
There are two Taco Bell locations in walking distance of my home. One is independently owned and the other is a corporate location. The independent location is constantly priced higher than the corporate location. For some things like the Crave Box, the price can be as much as 67% more expensive but almost everything is at least 20% higher in price. The only exception are items that are part of an ad campaign that specifies price. In those cases, the independent franchise location fully participates.
The corporate is located on a major collector street with many other fast food options while the franchise location is in the transition zone between a walkable downtown and car oriented development but both have a drive-thru. Not sure if it's just corporate policy to keep prices at a low baseline for their locations or it's due to there being competition from other fast food restaurants nearby but it's just half a mile between them so a 67% price difference is pretty strange.
Ah, I should have looked through the comments before posting my own comment to similar effect. The mercer street taco bell in lower Queen Anne (aka uptown). I pass by it on the D line whenever I take my kid downtown, but we've never been there before (with Dick's a few blocks away I wonder how they survive).
There should be a term (if there isn't already) for the phenomenon of bias or flat out incorrect conclusions caused by sourcing whatever data happens to be easy/convenient rather than a complete or more apt data set.
Not sure why almost all of Tennessee is unavailable, but I can say that their prices here have risen astronomically. Our Taco Bell used to have a line around the building pretty consistently, now it’s essentially empty all the time.
2) Businesses charged more per person to sustain themselves.
3) Post-Covid people are buying less due to the higher prices so its sticky.
My local Qdoba is so expensive I won't eat there any more, but a few people do. What would happen if they dropped prices significantly and advertised that to bring people back? I don't know... There are only so many person-meals in a day, so people are eating somewhere, are they staying home? Are grocery sales up?
1) Initially
2) Absolutely
3) False. Consumer spending on non durable goods is still rising. Disposable income is still available. Durable goods spending exploded after COVID.
> Disposable income is still available. Durable goods spending exploded after COVID.
Only for some. Household debt is at an all time high, and evictions and utility disconnections are skyrocketing. Homelessness is at record highs. Hunger in the US is soaring too. 18 million households last year struggled at some point to secure enough food, the worst its been in nearly a decade. Many people are suffering under the outrageous prices companies are charging.
That's because people have more money than ever so they're using credit cards more. It's also partly due to inflation. Household debt-to-income ratios are not high.
> evictions and utility disconnections are skyrocketing
I don't believe this is true.
> Hunger in the US is soaring too.
This is true, but it's because the extended child tax credit from 2020 expired - so we can fix it anytime we want.
Just because spending is rising doesn't mean people are buying more things. Prices have increased, so people can be buying fewer goods and still spending more.
Spending on food is rising in real terms (that means counting for inflation), so people are actually buying more food, mostly because they're going to restaurants and using DoorDash more.
A lot of people have been priced out of some things, including fast food. I've got the cash to spend, but some prices are so high at this point that I can't order out like I used to without feeling ripped off, so I don't.
Another side effect of the pandemic is that spending habits changed and people realized how easily they could do without foods and products they were used to getting. When people weren't able to get the things they wanted they were forced to try alternatives, or even cooking for themselves in some cases, when they wouldn't have otherwise.
maybe people realized during covid time that it is actually so easy and faster to prepare less crappy tacos/quesadillas than Taco Bell at home from premade industrial tortillas that it isn't worth going out for a taco if you have no plan to eat a decent taco anyway.
MBAs aren't that stupid. Either they make more money by selling less at a higher price (consider, a 20% increase in price might be a 50% increase in profit), or they are sowing losses for tax purposes.
I'm not sure. I've seen too many businesses mismanaged into the ground. It's way too common for big businesses to act like they suddenly have a monopoly even though competition still exists, and then go all surprised Pikachu face when revenue dries up.
This map needs to be scaled by rent cost/sqft for commercial real estate in the county. Otherwise, the results are really just a pass-thru of rent in the burrito price.
There's always a comment like this I find. Some extra layer of data people want to see that explains the first layer, and it never ends - the data on data. Sometimes we just want to know the damn burrito prices and don't care about the excuses.
If you want to know the burrito price, you open the app/website and look at the burrito price... you don't go to a "Taconomics" website comparing taco prices across a continent. As it stands, there are a number of uncontrolled variables that mean this is not an effective analysis of "How economical is your local Taco Bell?"
Generally I would agree with you, but I just checked where I am at and it appears that the less the competition the higher the price. I compared a few small relatively poor towns that I am familiar with to larger ones that I know charge between 4 and 7 times as much per sqft for commercial real estate, and the more expensive tacos are in the poorer towns! Up to $0.40 cheaper in the larger more bougie towns. My only guess is that there is more competition in those larger towns.
Jackson Hole is a huge exception in Wyoming (also the only blue county they have). It basically compares to Aspen and other ultra high end luxury resort towns, except the Grand Tetons (and then Yellowstone) are right next door.
> Jackson has become a second home for various celebrities, often due to Wyoming's income tax regime, including Sandra Bullock, RuPaul Charles, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, Nikki Sixx, and Harrison Ford.
I only knew about Harrison Ford living there before I read the article, guess it shows my age...
A lot of states have no income tax, Washington and neveda for example. But they don’t have huge mountains and natural scenery (well, yes, they have that, but they don’t have any communities where you can buy into it as nicely as Jackson).
I knew the Taco Bell by me had raised their prices. I didn't realize my city (and state, in general) has THE most expensive BYO cravings boxes (among other things) in the US. What the hell, Florida?
The 'Build Your Own Cravings Box' has by far the highest variation in price, in particular in Florida, it jumps abruptly from regions where it's identically $5.99 to $12.99. Unlike any other item.
Incidentally, I was delighted to see a Taco Bell in Amersfoort, Netherlands, recently. Ten tacos for 14 euro isn't QUITE the 59, 79, 99 cent menu of my youth, but it isn't bad.
I still bitterly miss the Chili Cheese burrito, Taco Bell's crowning achievement. RIP chilicheese.org :-(
There are still some Taco Bells that sell the Chili Cheese burrito (at least in the Mid-West US)! Unfortunately not as cheap as it used to be (its ~$3 here), but any time I go to a Taco Bell I always ask just in case.
I live in Hilversum, a twelve minute train ride away! Moved here a year ago, I’m originally from California .
Just went to check out the beautiful old town. We also have considered moving there. Honestly the Taco Bell was a real highlight, but that isn’t meant as a slight, I just loved Taco Bell growing up.
They didn’t have Baja Blast though :-(
Next time I want to check out the Mondrian museum.
For the umpteen millionth time, please please please do not use red/green for the scale, it is very difficult for colorblind people to distinguish, which is ~5% of the male population.
Look at Colorbrewer for some alternative suggestions:
It basically comes down to using linear brightness (at sufficiently high contrast between steps) instead of random brightness. TFA could get away with almost any colors at all, even red to green, as long as it goes from light to dark.
The problem is that they decided to use dark for BOTH ends of the scale, with light in the middle, so in the absence of color perception we can only tell whether a price is extreme or moderate.
It's about 1 in 12 or 8% of men and 1 in 200 women, but I agree. Pay special attention to the accessibility of your visual communication. Avoid red/green/yellow, and try to use color _and_ pattern if possible.
Do operating system accessibility controls help you distinguish the colors? For example, both Windows 10/11 and MacOS have "color filters". https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/ windows/use-color-filters-in-windows-43893e44 b8b3-2e27-1a29-b0c15ef0e5ce https://support.apple.com/ guide/mac-help/change-display-colors-easier-onscreen mchl11ddd4b3/mac
They can but keep in mind there are a variety of different types of color blindness and varying severity.
For me close colors on a red / green scale are difficult to differentiate. If I enable accessibility features, it will make every photo look incorrect. iOS has an excellent option to adjust the degree of color filter. Mine is set to tritanopia (blue/yellow) the only about 5 percent intensity to give me a good balance.
Kind of. All those are able to do (however it's implemented) is map some (r,g,b) -> (r,g,b). If we pick on the common example of red-green colorblindness (of which there are many types; to have something concrete to work with, let's say all cones function at "normal" intensity, but the spectrum for the red cone has been shifted near to what the green cone picks up), what kinds of mappings are you able to do?
The core problem is that many (r,g) pairs are equivalent, or nearly so. It's worth noting then that at least one of two properties holds:
(a) Your mapping is bijective. You shift things around, e.g. by swapping the green and blue channels. Any bijective technique other than the identity will, by definition, add hue distortion, making things potentially hard to interpret. You're able to, e.g., gain the ability to distinguish red and green, but that comes at the cost of not being able to distinguish red and blue, since the confused pairs still exist in the output space.
(b) Your mapping isn't injective. Many input colors map to the same output colors. One way this might be helpful is in pushing the (r,g) split toward its extremes. Maybe leave (50,50) alone, map (40,60) -> (10,90) and (30,70) -> (1,99). How much that helps varies [0], but it comes at the cost of reduced dynamic range. You traded telling colors apart for telling images with subtle variations apart. And, again, there's a hue distortion.
If we don't have any good options, what levers do you have available to play with?
1. You can (ab)use the brightness channel to carry color information. This isn't very effective since brightness steps are harder to perceive than hue steps. Most implementations will instead prefer to keep the perceptual brightness the same (for the particular colorblindness described, reds will be less bright than in normal vision and greens more bright, so you need to add a correction factor). In the abstract, I do like using the brightness channel. When out at sea I'll wear strongly tinted orange sunglasses to make detecting buoys easy (everything else is dark, but the orange buoys are bright as day).
2. You can compress the (r,g) split as described above, making reds more red and greens more green.
3. You use the blue channel somehow. This is a catch-all of sorts, but if you're keeping brightness the same and not fixing the problem with just (r,g) (and, again, people want to keep brightness the same and can't fix the problem with just (r,g) [0]), then you're mixing blue into the equation. With a goal of minimizing hue distortion, no implementation does anything as extreme as my proposal of swapping the blue and green channels. They all, instead, trade some of the (r,g) discriminative ability for extra blue. Implementation details vary. I particularly like the ones which have a sequence of tests and do a little ML to come up with a nice (r,g,b) -> (r,g,b) scheme tailored for your eyes. However it's done though, you're saturating the blue channel with extra information.
All mappings can be represented as some combination of (1,2,3), and mostly (3) in practice, which perhaps helps explain why the techniques aren't amazing in general. They all assume the goal is telling red from green, but your real goal is telling apart all the colors you need to tell apart in whichever UI you happen to be working with. The extra constraint of minimizing hue distortion helps with that, but you're still in a world where the colorblind filter helps for some UIs and doesn't for others, actively making others worse. God-forbid they have both off-red and off-blue buttons when the filter's solution was trading some red for some blue.
And you can work around that a bit by not letting the filter be quite so strong, but that comes at the cost of not being as helpful in the actual red-green case. It's one more lever that helps a bit at the OS level. You'd really like customization for the particular UI you're looking at, kind of like what user style sheets were supposed to do for the web.
[0] You don't really get "pure" colors from an LCD, so this is even less effective of a technique than it could be, and it really messes with the math (you want something kind of like an integral over relative response curves convolved with the LCD's spectrum). The particular flavor of red-green colorblindness described though, you can sometimes tell very pure reds from very pure greens.
> If we pick on the common example of red-green colorblindness (of which there are many types; to have something concrete to work with, let's say all cones function at "normal" intensity, but the spectrum for the red cone has been shifted near to what the green cone picks up), what kinds of mappings are you able to do?
You could animate it by changing the mapping over time; then colorblind people would see that two identical colors are changing differently.
You could also try replacing colors with a pattern but it wouldn't work that well.
The choice of color here is not obvious to me. For example, greener could mean more money, i.e. more expensive. Also red connotes debt/negative in accounting, while black is surplus/positive. If you're eating a tomato, red is good and green is bad (unless fried I guess).
>What percent of the rest of the population is confused by not using red & green?
Presumably none if you build your site in an accessible manner. It costs basically nothing to accommodate the 1/12 of the population that has color-blindness.
What us UI hackers would find helpful as an adjunct to this is a few polynomial coefficient terms fitted to each of the x->R,G,B color scheme mappings.
Then we could generate our own scale with whatever number of steps an app requires. Or compute on the fly for a continuous scheme.
I love me some Crunchwrap Supreme (TM), but I also love me some fresh green chilli quesadilla with salsa verde from my favorite Mexican food place. I crave both at different times and can appreciate both of them in different ways.
No arguing about tastes and all, but I never understood the digestive digs at TB. Maybe I'm an outlier but it's just like any other meal.
I've had plenty of other tacos elsewhere and they are all tasty, but something about TB's meat is super unique and tasty to me I can't get enough of it. Mind you I can't stand all the new menu items they added past tacos in the last 30 years. But the tacos are special. :-)
I always assumed it was just people sharing their sensitivities to mildly hot sauces. Maybe all the extra lactose from sour cream and cheese too compared to a single slice you’d get on a burger.
Depending on what you get, it can actually be quite solid in macros and not super unhealthy. Particularly if you’re trying to hit protein goals, the $/cal or $/g protein is better than most other fast food places, and they had healthy alternatives to the typical grease-filled beef.
Taco Bell will never be the healthiest thing you can eat, but in terms of fast food, it’s not half bad. In my anecdotal experience, their quality has gone up across the board compared to years ago, and they’ve also added many healthier customization options (you have to ask for it, though).
Those places can be reasonably healthy depending what you pick; a burger is low in fiber but otherwise it's actually pretty balanced. Soda and fries are what's bad.
They've gotten better. I only order it rarely and was surprised last time by how much they were pushing chicken and black bean options that appeared... healthier. No doubt to save them money, but hey, two birds, one stone.
Yeah, I went there for the first time in a decade last week and was impressed that they had a global “Veggie mode” button on their digital menu kiosk that limits the menu to only meatless items.
Made it really easy to buy a bean crunchwrap with sour cream and cheese swapped for guacamole and potato.
I went there so my Mexican girlfriend could try it. She was disappointed that the Dorito shell tacos are just unflavored orange tostadas, not actually a big Dorito like their ads / marketing suggests.
Idk, I'm getting a $6 combo with a drink and 3 items filled with potatoes, beans, cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, sour cream in one of the most expensive metros in the US. Not too bad.
Oh of course I remember being broke and living off $1 Taco Bell and McDonalds menu. But with a drink, that would've still been $5 in 2010, in the aftermath of the 2008 recession where people had much less money and businesses had to compete on dirt cheap pricing to attract business. In my area, workers were getting paid $9/hour where they're at $20/hour right now.
My toddler unwrapped one of their burritos and... it was all shell. It was pretty traumatic. I stopped thinking I was getting a deal. My homemade burritos are literally 10x more filled. Taco bell is great at wrapping their shells.
How much does this map correlate with how economical an area is in general? Say, I want to plan a road trip through the US, will hitting the green areas result in cheaper lodging, gas and food as a whole?
I live in Munster, Indiana.... it's essentially the food court of Northwest Indiana. People stop here to avoid Illinois sticker shock. It turns out our Taco bell (1/4 mile south from the exit) is the cheapest in the area. They're ALWAYS busy.
I’d be curious to plot this next to home prices. It looks like places that are more expensive to live have higher Taco Bell prices.. which kinda checks out.
While there is a correlation there, I think it's more about supply chain. Take a look at NM, Utah, Montana, AZ, etc. There is way more density on the East Coast.
You can also see this by swapping the product to Guacamole
I was noticing how regional some high prices are. My theory is that there are areas where one person owns all of the franchises in the region and have started acting more monopolistic.
Obviously there are other areas where the high prices make sense. The rich old tourist/snowbird areas of Florida? Obviously going to be expensive. Locations inside of cities that have high rents and operating costs are also likely to be more expensive. Although Minneapolis seems to have escaped the cost trap somehow.
If you've ever looked into buying a fast food franchise you've maybe noticed that Taco Bell's are really expensive to franchise and startup. I'm guessing it's why we don't see saturation of them like we do Mcdonald's, etc. I don't think the expected yearly profit (generally around $100k/store) is any better either but they do have really high margins compared to others.
Usually it's just who the franchisor is. Different owners have different philosophies. Every Taco Bell around me is operated by the same guy and is expensive regardless of economic condition, but most of the Taco Bells around it are much more reasonable despite some being in higher-cost-of-living areas.
This seems to be missing the Taco Bell in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle. I've seen posts saying it's the most expensive Taco Bell in the country. Maybe it's excluded because it includes a KFC?
Edit: That Taco Bell doesn't allow in app ordering.
Taco Bell here in Barcelona is ridiculously expensive and extremely poor quality. There's so many great taco restaurants here where you actually get great food for good money.
I live in Boston, MA. Taco Bell is horrendously low quality, I can only imagine it's right at the border of being "barely legal to sell" it as food. If you eat it and don't get explosive diarrhea you should consider yourself lucky. People still eat it because (1) it used be (before COVID) actually extremely cheap (really, in Boston's expensive standards it was almost as cheap as cooking food at your home, but worse quality) now it's about the same as any other fast-food chain maybe slightly cheaper (2) some people like the comfort food aspect of it.
Taco Bell isn't really a taco place, it's a particular type of food. Other chains like Taco John's and Del Taco are very similar. And there is the occasional independent place that makes Taco Bell-style food. But normally tacos are Mexican food, and Taco Bell does not serve Mexican food.
The most expensive taco bell listed is my local taco bell. It's closed and has been replaced with a dumpling restaurant that is also expensive and not very good.
Love this! I'd love to take the underlying data combine it with data like average income for a county and see which counties had the most affordable Taco Bell.
This is great. Wish list: expand this or make separate website to track prices for Chipotle, Chick-Fil-A, In-N-Outs, McDonalds and other fast food chains.
It seemed as if my favorite due to its cheapness fast food had become more expensive lately, and yup, every single location in my area is a red dot on that map. Bummer.
Best of luck, these people arent making any meaningful money off their work. They are novelty websites that make the internet cool. These are good people, not paid people.
Enjoy your free information, don't expect better. There is no money in it. At best, you can cheer on the owner for a few years before they realized they helped a million people save a few dollars at taco bell, and they had 15 minutes of internet fame.
Although the U.S. does have an abundance of fast food chains, I find these types of reductionist comments unhelpful. If you look at a map of a metropolitan area in Europe, you’d likely see several McDonald's or other popular fast food chains located fairly close to each other as well.
Not sure if you've been to the USA but it's not like many Americans have a choice. As an American from a smaller town it's something that depresses me a great deal. Basically every restaurant is an instance of a chain. Outside of the cities it's rare to find an original small business. Especially because the only place to get food is sometimes a parking lot "food court" or mall, and I guess only the franchisers can afford the rent there? Idk.
Anyway that combined with the fact that fast food chains can leverage cost saving measures like putting their employees on food stamps and economies of scale mean nobody can beat them on prices, so for those that don't have a grocery store and wouldn't know how to cook a meal even if they did, for your daily dinner the 5$ McDonald's burger or whatever is genuinely your only choice unless you wanna eat gas station canned chili.
Meanwhile now I live in Taiwan and every alley is chock full of original, small business restaurants all serving population that basically exclusively eats out for every meal and it's lovely.
Where in the USA do you live? For my parent's house in Texas City there wasn't really a grocery store for ten miles and I'm not even sure delivery apps were available there. It's like trying to call an Uber in league city... MAYBE you'll get one in 30 minutes or something.
I'm curious if you think it's because Americans are too lazy or undisciplined or stupid or something to find and cook food? Is it hard to believe there's structural issues making it harder there than in other places? I mean even if you just open a map the geographical obstacle should be pretty apparent... It's an enormous country.
Per Google maps, there is an HEB, Kroger, Aldi, and Walmart Supercenter within 5 miles of what looks like all the populous parts of Texas City, TX.
I am not making value judgments. I just know that the availability of ingredients and knowledge of how to use those ingredients is there for the taking for most Americans.
Maybe people don’t have time, maybe people don’t find it worthwhile to cook for households of 1 adult, maybe people prefer the taste of super sugary/salty/sat fat laden restaurant food.
Edit:
> I mean even if you just open a map the geographical obstacle should be pretty apparent... It's an enormous country
The size of the country is irrelevant. All metropolitan areas have numerous options for purchasing groceries.
In fairness, I live in an "urban area" with 2 neighbors on the surrounding 100+ acres of land. A lot of people hear the census "urban area" and they imagine a dense downtown. That said there is no shortage of grocery stores and restaurants (if not especially high-end restaurants) around where I live.
I do suspect that most of the people who say they have no choice but to eat at McDonalds or wherever just don't want to make a meal at home.
There's also a lot of indie restaurants in Texas City. Sure right off 146 there's a sea of chain restaurants but head down Palmer to 6th and you'll find a number of indie places to eat along the way.
What proportion of Americans are traveling from one job site to the next? Surely, the vast majority are coming home every day, and the vast majority of those presumably have a kitchen.
It sounds like you're arguing that the lived experience of an itinerant construction worker doesn't matter in your quest to ensure everyone cooks all of their meals from healthy fruits and vegetables no matter how much grind it takes to accomplish. That's probably not the best way to address GP's concerns.
I once had to wait out a lease and commute an hour and a half one way when I got a new job, and I stopped at convenience stores a lot more often than I would have liked. It's not pretty but sometimes you have to compromise between many competing priorities in your life, especially if you really need the job as a springboard to something better or as a big pay increase on its own.
I empathize with other people currently in a similar situation, even if it's by choice, because unless you live off of a trust fund or are supremely fortunate you will often have to take work at the intersection of your skill set and your willingness to compromise other aspects of your life in order to get ahead.
> Not sure if you've been to the USA but it's not like many Americans have a choice.
A small portion of Americans, such as itinerant construction workers or people with 90 minute one way commutes, might not have a choice, but to say “many Americans” don’t have the option to make simple lentil/rice/vegetable/etc meals is not correct in the sense that much of the restaurant business exists due to necessity rather than desire.
The vast, vast majority of decisions to eat at restaurants are made out of convenience or preference, not time or money constraints.
This is most every Houstonian I know, including previously me. Maybe that's unique to oil and gas where you live in Pasadena and then do jobs all over. Then again on a bad day Pasadena to the energy corridor could take an hour and a half...
IDK I guess this just reminds me of the time I had a conversation with this startup guy that was totally convinced that single moms working two jobs could totally pull themselves up by their bootstraps if they had an hour of freetime at night. "She can teach herself to code, or pick up another marketable skill, and use that to get a higher paying job."
I'm not sure if it's lack of empathy, or a lack of understanding of human energy as a resource, or maybe folks like you and that guy are just super awesome energetic people... oooor maybe it's a privileged position failing to understand the reality of burden and how much harder it is to make "the good decision" after 2 90 minute commutes and a day of degrading labor vs when one spends the day working from home at what ostensibly may be a hard job with long hours but still just isn't the same level of energy cost.
BTW there are 3.54 million truckers in the USA, lack of rail infrastructure created an absurdly massive class of people that are constantly in transit and genuinely have no options other than fast food. Oh wait, sorry, they could have a fridge in their truck they fill with overnight oats they prepare at home between jobs.
I think "choice" is a weirdly binary term in these kinds of conversations. We can all choose to run 5ks every day. You could choose to memorize every USA president and their home state. You could choose to start a garden - why don't you garden? It saves money, generates dopamine, and increases your resilience to market shifts in food costs. Why don't you choose to do pullups every day? Pullups are a very useful compound bodyweight exercise that improve strength and require literally no equipment other than a tree branch, and according to google, 99.9% of Americans live within a mile of a tree.
You should re-read your comments. You made falsifiable claims, which were shown to be false. Has nothing to do with empathy or other feelings nonsense.
The small proportion of Americans for whom it is unfeasible to cook were already addressed, specifically that they are a small proportion based on data regarding how far most people commute and how close they live to a proper grocery store.
> So is rationality orthogonal to feeling? No; our emotions arise from our models of reality.
> Becoming more rational—arriving at better estimates of how-the-world-is—can diminish feelings or intensify them. Sometimes we run away from strong feelings by denying the facts, by flinching away from the view of the world that gave rise to the powerful emotion. If so, then as you study the skills of rationality and train yourself not to deny facts, your feelings will become stronger.
8.5% of the working population of Americans is a lot of people. Driving a long time isn't the only obstacle people might face. I don't disagree that there's some mechanism by which the vast majority of Americans can cook every meal, or plant gardens, or do pullups every day, I'm disagreeing that it's a reasonable expectation given the environment. We should work to improve the environment.
I think you're trying to shoehorn a human situation into some pure thought experiment territory. When I say "don't have a choice" and you take me to mean "it's literally impossible," I feel like that's a bad faith interpretation. Would it be falsifiable for me to claim most Americans don't have the ability to do pullups every day? Yes of course. Negating it though is loaded because the topic isn't, "is there a mechanism by which Americans can do pullups every day," it's "is it reasonable to expect the majority of Americans to do pullups every day?"
What do you think? Is it reasonable to expect the majority of Americans to maintain 12% bodyfat while raising their 2.5 children to rational, well-studied standards, while meditating daily, while being 10 minutes early to work every day and staying 10 minutes later than their boss to ensure maximized potential for career success, while also learning to code to improve their job prospects, while supplementing their income by starting a drop shipping company, while ensuring the future of their liberal democracy by participating in local politics, while ensuring the future of their planet by engaging in climate activism, while reading at least one book per month? Which of the things on the list aren't you doing, and why "can't" you do them?
Since fast food access correlates positively with increasing local rates of diabetes and obesity, perhaps they should only be allowed a minimum distance from residential areas (and also a minimum distance from schools too).
Taco Bell's cheesy name for "spicy" -- although if one truly enjoys actual spicy these are just mild as far as "spice" goes. Runs more along the line of "they tried to add some pepper flavor, but forgot to add any heat".
> Restaurant is more expensive in places that are more expensive.
Gee, thanks.
If this factored in local cost of living this might actually be useful so you could see where Taco Bell is unusually cheap or expensive relative to the area.
https://californiaisforadventure.com/pacifica-taco-bell/
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