> And for San Franciscans, the price on the menu is rarely the price you pay. Add in sales tax, a default 18-20% tip on the tablet screen, an SF Mandate or Cost of Living Fee, and 8.625% sales tax. Soon that seemingly cheap $15 lunch might be $20.
This is a key metric that the article doesn't properly account for when it comes to food prices. The asshole restaurateurs got an exception to the anti "drip-pricing" law that required all fees to be rolled into the listed cost: https://oag.ca.gov/hiddenfees
This tracks with.... basically everything except the official numbers. I routinely see people who record their grocery prices finding increases that start in the 40% range. Certainly true for soda and snacks in my experience.
There's a new second-order concern where I'm now alarmed by low prices. For example: I have no idea what johnsonville did to keep their brats at $4.99 over the past 5 years while the more local ones shot to $9-11, but it makes me grossed out and skeptical.
As the article notes, opposite effect in tech. I was perusing ipad mini and mac mini yesterday and couldn't believe what I paid $500 for in 2021. The amount of apple you get for $350 on the refurb market is absolutely batty. You can get a shitty intel mini for well under 100 bucks. Tempted to start slinging them around like chonky raspberry pis.
Yeah, my basket of goods hasn't changed and is closer to doubling in price comparing 2018 to today. Some items I've been tracking have quadrupled since 2010 or thereabouts. Your basic cup-of-noodles used to be $.20 to $.25 and is now at over $1. Beef prices are much like egg prices, quadrupling at best. Chicken is high but sales prices keep it at a modest doubling relative to previous sales for the most part. More like triple for whole chickens.
Expect the computer prices to rise since OpenAI bought out the next year's supply from two of the biggest RAM/NAND manufacturers in the world.
It’s not complicated. We also imported a lot of really cheap, high quality food from China. And now we don’t. Even if you personally were not buying Chinese tomatoes rebadged as Mexican in Grocery Outlet, the fact that they were one tenth the cost lowered prices on the produce you’ve been buying from Costco and Whole Foods. Indeed, the giant corporations have been litigating the tariffs issue as the single greatest cause. I think people just don’t comprehend that everything was imported, not just clothes and technology.
If you think about what they are actually trying to measure, it should also be clear that the primary goal of these statistics is to employ economists.
There is the raw price data, which is mostly bunk because it uses unrepresentative products. And there is obviously huge political pressure not to make basket adjustments that result in prices going up.
And then there are quality adjustments that are completely nonsensical. Worst example is obviously with something like medicine where it just isn't possible to compare the price of drugs that save lives that didn't exist fifty years ago.
Unfortunately, economists will forever be in the camp of not understanding the difference between what is measured and what can be useful (and this has serious consequences for policy, for example the understanding within modern economics of long-term economic growth is close to zero which has led to policies focusing heavily on resource usage/intensity, essentially no different to North Korean economic policy in the 50s, due to significantly understated long-term estimates of growth). Hong Kong's government didn't produce economic statistics during its period of rapid growth for this reason.
The article claims "a burrito that cost $5.50 in 2014 is now $13.95" but I just checked one of the better SF Mission taquerias that has a web site with prices (Papalote) and used the Way-Back Machine and a carne asada burrito was $9.10 in Jan 2014 and is now $13.75. That's only 1.5X not 2.5X increase.
According to the BLS CPI calculator, that $9.10 in 2014 has $12.61 of buying power as of a couple months ago, or $13.75 in late 2025 dollars is $9.92 in 2014. The price has only exceeded inflation by 9%.
** edit in 2014 it was only $1 to make it "super" (cheese, guac, and crema) now it is $3.50. So more like $10 vs $17+ now
That may be. Okay, do you think you’d start looking for another opportunity if your cushy current job was like, “we’re reducing your salary by 9%”? You probably drive to a different gas station to save literally cents on a refill. It’s not so simple to frame the subjective feeling of what 9% is, even if I agree with you that the burrito isn’t that important.
There are multiple cheaper Taquerias within walking distance of Taqueria Cancun as well. The issue is non-natives have heard of Taqueria Cancun so their clientele is overwhelmingly transplants.
I quit eating out in the Bay Area over a year ago (except for socializing) because the prices feel painfully expensive to me while my pay hasn’t increased anywhere near the rate of restaurant price hikes. $14 for a burrito that cost roughly half as much a decade ago is painful, while my salary hasn’t doubled (I’m not a FAANG engineer). It’s not just burritos; it’s $10+ fast food combo meals, $15 deli sandwiches, etc. Prices steadily increased before COVID-19, but I didn’t feel priced out of eating out until sometime around 2022-23, when prices seemed to have exploded.
I make six figures but I have resorted to making eating out a rare treat in order for me to maintain my financial goals. This harkens back to my childhood in a low-income family, though I do remember my parents taking advantage of fast food deals in the 1990s and 2000s. I pack lunches and dinners to work, and I regularly cook, sometimes resorting to frozen meals for convenience’s sake. Eating out is reserved for social gatherings and for travel.
What’s interesting is the situation isn’t that much better in Sacramento, my hometown and where I visit family members. While Sacramento has lower housing prices, eating out isn’t substantially cheaper.
On the flipside, I’m in Tokyo now on a trip, where eating out feels cheap. $10 in the Bay Area or even Sacramento doesn’t get a satisfying meal these days (it’s not even enough for a fast food combo meal in many cases), but ¥1,500 (roughly $10) in Tokyo can buy a satisfying meal. Even ¥750 can buy a satisfying meal if one looks harder.
The situation in the Bay Area is demoralizing. I’m still in the Bay because of my career and because of social ties. It’s one thing to be priced out of buying a house, but it’s another thing to feel priced out of eating out. I don’t know if the situation is better in other parts of the United States, though; I’ve heard of people in other states complain about the high price of eating out these days.
It's not just SF. The $10 lunch of 2015 is now $15. Default tipping of 20% on things that we never tipped on in 2015 (takeout, fast food) is also adding alot to the total cost.
I don't know how people are affording the various delivery services and their fees on top of it.
It's not just SF, I'm in Philly and the situation is the same for me. Eating out used to be almost a daily ritual, now I'm down to getting a pizza once a month at best.
It's funny watching people in this thread talk about food in LA being so much cheaper than in SF, because in my humble experience LA is also quite expensive compared to pretty much everywhere else in the country.
Are they talking about the city of Los Angeles or "LA"? LA can include Pomona or even San Bernardino, Riverside and OC. The prices in Silverlake are not the same as the prices in Pomona.
My local family owned tacoria now sells a $14 burrito in LA. The rest of the prices outlined in this article are also on par with LA pricing. It's hard to find a more expensive place to live the California.
LA has a low end to a lot of things that is simply missing and not an option in SF
Applebees is gonna be the same in both places but in LA you're gonna be much more able to find some categorically lower and lower priced end non-franchised place.
Seattle is truly the worst of all worlds on food. Base price, delivery price, hours, quality, variety, we are omnidirectionally chopped. I'm in Portland often, SF sometimes, LA rarely, and in all of them you can get better variety for less money later at night.
Moving from LA to SF will definitely give you a sticker shock. I used to buy nice large burritos in DTLA for $10 flat as recently as 2024. That's with tax. Later that year in SF a nice sandwich in random bodegas would cost well over $20(with tax). SF is probably the most eye wateringly expensive city in all of US. It definitely beats NYC.
Food is so much cheaper (and better) in LA than SF.
SF has such mediocre food for what you pay compared to any other city I’ve lived in*. You either have to fork over a few hundred to experience some of the stellar fine dining options in the city, or end up at some brunch place that’s probably pretty decent but you’re not leaving without at least $100 between two people.
The good food in the Bay Area I’ve always found to be in a shopping center or random places sprinkled all round the south bay and peninsula. Which, may sound similar to how LA is too, but I’d argue LA has overall a healthier food scene and variety of amazing food all within central LA - and most importantly, more affordable.
Last year I attended the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco. This is a global event, in which people coming from different countries gather together to showcase their projects, chasing the dream. Many are independent developers, looking for the opportunity or investment that could change their life.
To me, the fact that crêpes were sold at 20$ and cans of coke at 10$ at the event was a shame. The organizers turned what was once a great event to bring everyone together into a way to scalp even more indie game developers. The price to partecipate as a company was so high that even big names boycott it.
> To me, the fact that crêpes were sold at 20$ and cans of coke at 10$ at the event was a shame...
They can price as such because such purchases tend to be expensable during business travel. Corporate conferences like GDC, RSA, etc aren't targeted at ICs - they're meant to essentially be a "safe space" for vendors to meet with prospective clients.
People in SF have more money (on average) and so those selling things there price higher. Compare the average salary for $jobdescription in SF vs Minneapolis. The entire (very small) region has been a bubble of higher income and prices for a long time and is getting worse. It feeds on itself like a ratchet.
I'm in the Minneapolis area, and $14 for a burrito seems completely normal. I might look at that price differently if my spacious, modern 2 bed apartment cost more than $2400.
The other thing i've noticed about burritos is that more places take card or apple pay now. When I moved to sf in 2015 many of them were cash only, same with bars. I always assumed some amount of cash was being shuffled under the table.
And when you take cards or things like tap to pay, you pay higher rates as a biz which gets factored into overall prices. But...good luck being cash only in a lot of places.
I still carry cash because services like massage and housecleaning and some restaurants are happy to give good price breaks for cash payment, but I also love Apple Pay as a consumer.
I did something similar with restaurant prices 2 years ago. I would pick a random restaurant, and look at user uploaded photos of the menu. It was wild to see several places raise prices 2-3 times in just one year!
I'm not quite sure what official inflation index measures but you can get rough estimate of how much value dollar lost if you compare prices of bitcoin in dollars and euro at the beginning and the end of the year.
More concretely, if you converted 1btc to euro or dollar at the beginning of the year and back to btc at the end, how much fewer btc you'd end up with if you went through dollar as oppossed to euro.
If you shop at tech bro places you will get tech bro prices (I blame Mission Control). For example, Taqueria Cancun on 19th as mentioned versus other options a couple blocks east or south, or in the parts of SF that have remained Latiné.
Furthermore, a lot of these places continue to give an ethnic discount - especially when paying in cash - because someone of the same ethnic group will most likely remain a repeat customer and can induce negative WoM in tightly knit ethnic communities.
> San Francisco's Consumer Price Index increased just 2.5% year-over-year, well below the post-pandemic peaks. The Federal Reserve has declared victory. But is the inflation crisis really over?
Monetary policy is months to years ahead of what you see at the counter. See also the great money printing of 2020.
Feels like SF is over-exposed to specifically the OpenAI bubble/valuation popping. Outside of Mission Bay and SoMa, consumer spending and transit activity is still largely below pre-pandemic levels.
[+] [-] sxp|2 months ago|reply
This is a key metric that the article doesn't properly account for when it comes to food prices. The asshole restaurateurs got an exception to the anti "drip-pricing" law that required all fees to be rolled into the listed cost: https://oag.ca.gov/hiddenfees
[+] [-] 01100011|2 months ago|reply
Only in the restaurant world are customers on the hook for ensuring a living wage. It's a stupid system but is culturally entrenched.
[+] [-] RickS|2 months ago|reply
There's a new second-order concern where I'm now alarmed by low prices. For example: I have no idea what johnsonville did to keep their brats at $4.99 over the past 5 years while the more local ones shot to $9-11, but it makes me grossed out and skeptical.
As the article notes, opposite effect in tech. I was perusing ipad mini and mac mini yesterday and couldn't believe what I paid $500 for in 2021. The amount of apple you get for $350 on the refurb market is absolutely batty. You can get a shitty intel mini for well under 100 bucks. Tempted to start slinging them around like chonky raspberry pis.
[+] [-] Espressosaurus|2 months ago|reply
Expect the computer prices to rise since OpenAI bought out the next year's supply from two of the biggest RAM/NAND manufacturers in the world.
[+] [-] doctorpangloss|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] theturtle|2 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] JohnFen|2 months ago|reply
It's incredibly hard to have any actual faith in governmental assessments anymore.
[+] [-] skippyboxedhero|2 months ago|reply
There is the raw price data, which is mostly bunk because it uses unrepresentative products. And there is obviously huge political pressure not to make basket adjustments that result in prices going up.
And then there are quality adjustments that are completely nonsensical. Worst example is obviously with something like medicine where it just isn't possible to compare the price of drugs that save lives that didn't exist fifty years ago.
Unfortunately, economists will forever be in the camp of not understanding the difference between what is measured and what can be useful (and this has serious consequences for policy, for example the understanding within modern economics of long-term economic growth is close to zero which has led to policies focusing heavily on resource usage/intensity, essentially no different to North Korean economic policy in the 50s, due to significantly understated long-term estimates of growth). Hong Kong's government didn't produce economic statistics during its period of rapid growth for this reason.
[+] [-] hackingonempty|2 months ago|reply
According to the BLS CPI calculator, that $9.10 in 2014 has $12.61 of buying power as of a couple months ago, or $13.75 in late 2025 dollars is $9.92 in 2014. The price has only exceeded inflation by 9%.
** edit in 2014 it was only $1 to make it "super" (cheese, guac, and crema) now it is $3.50. So more like $10 vs $17+ now
[+] [-] doctorpangloss|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] alephnerd|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] linguae|2 months ago|reply
I make six figures but I have resorted to making eating out a rare treat in order for me to maintain my financial goals. This harkens back to my childhood in a low-income family, though I do remember my parents taking advantage of fast food deals in the 1990s and 2000s. I pack lunches and dinners to work, and I regularly cook, sometimes resorting to frozen meals for convenience’s sake. Eating out is reserved for social gatherings and for travel.
What’s interesting is the situation isn’t that much better in Sacramento, my hometown and where I visit family members. While Sacramento has lower housing prices, eating out isn’t substantially cheaper.
On the flipside, I’m in Tokyo now on a trip, where eating out feels cheap. $10 in the Bay Area or even Sacramento doesn’t get a satisfying meal these days (it’s not even enough for a fast food combo meal in many cases), but ¥1,500 (roughly $10) in Tokyo can buy a satisfying meal. Even ¥750 can buy a satisfying meal if one looks harder.
The situation in the Bay Area is demoralizing. I’m still in the Bay because of my career and because of social ties. It’s one thing to be priced out of buying a house, but it’s another thing to feel priced out of eating out. I don’t know if the situation is better in other parts of the United States, though; I’ve heard of people in other states complain about the high price of eating out these days.
[+] [-] paleotrope|2 months ago|reply
I don't know how people are affording the various delivery services and their fees on top of it.
[+] [-] HardwareLust|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] BugsJustFindMe|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] 01100011|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] kwhat4|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] goda90|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] potato3732842|2 months ago|reply
Applebees is gonna be the same in both places but in LA you're gonna be much more able to find some categorically lower and lower priced end non-franchised place.
[+] [-] buildbot|2 months ago|reply
Or a longtime establishment of the area offers 15$ ones - https://www.gorditosmexicanfood.com/menu#menu=burritos Granted these are massive compared to basically anywhere else.
[+] [-] RickS|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] manfromchina1|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] testfrequency|2 months ago|reply
SF has such mediocre food for what you pay compared to any other city I’ve lived in*. You either have to fork over a few hundred to experience some of the stellar fine dining options in the city, or end up at some brunch place that’s probably pretty decent but you’re not leaving without at least $100 between two people.
The good food in the Bay Area I’ve always found to be in a shopping center or random places sprinkled all round the south bay and peninsula. Which, may sound similar to how LA is too, but I’d argue LA has overall a healthier food scene and variety of amazing food all within central LA - and most importantly, more affordable.
* besides Seattle
[+] [-] the_sleaze_|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Lucasoato|2 months ago|reply
To me, the fact that crêpes were sold at 20$ and cans of coke at 10$ at the event was a shame. The organizers turned what was once a great event to bring everyone together into a way to scalp even more indie game developers. The price to partecipate as a company was so high that even big names boycott it.
[+] [-] alephnerd|2 months ago|reply
They can price as such because such purchases tend to be expensable during business travel. Corporate conferences like GDC, RSA, etc aren't targeted at ICs - they're meant to essentially be a "safe space" for vendors to meet with prospective clients.
[+] [-] JohnFen|2 months ago|reply
Damn! It's been a couple of decades since I attended the Game Developer conference (thank goodness), but when I used to go, cans of soda were free.
[+] [-] ihaveajob|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] superkuh|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mekdoonggi|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jonny_eh|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] the__alchemist|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] STRiDEX|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] 9x39|2 months ago|reply
I still carry cash because services like massage and housecleaning and some restaurants are happy to give good price breaks for cash payment, but I also love Apple Pay as a consumer.
[+] [-] BeetleB|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] scotty79|2 months ago|reply
More concretely, if you converted 1btc to euro or dollar at the beginning of the year and back to btc at the end, how much fewer btc you'd end up with if you went through dollar as oppossed to euro.
[+] [-] postsantum|2 months ago|reply
Should I blame SF inflation or what?
[+] [-] alephnerd|2 months ago|reply
Furthermore, a lot of these places continue to give an ethnic discount - especially when paying in cash - because someone of the same ethnic group will most likely remain a repeat customer and can induce negative WoM in tightly knit ethnic communities.
[+] [-] klipklop|2 months ago|reply
This is _not_ a thing at all. Maybe you observed it once, but this is HIGHLY unusual.
[+] [-] cosmicgadget|2 months ago|reply
Monetary policy is months to years ahead of what you see at the counter. See also the great money printing of 2020.
[+] [-] OGEnthusiast|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] etchalon|2 months ago|reply