Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

Not in this economy

I read this article about the owner of a local Mexican restaurant justifying why the price of their burrito has doubled in price (from $13 to $22) in a few years. The reasons for inflation is universal: material cost and labor costs have increased dramatically. I can appreciate this owner isn’t price gouging for the sake of price gouging. This isn’t like McDonalds: record profits after raising menu prices (read: pure greed).

What restaurant owners need to appreciate in return is that higher menu pricing is going to deter some customers from patronage. (Price elasticity: I learned this in business school.) I am amongst that group of eaters. I have great mental difficulty in paying $22 for a burrito, no matter how deliciously crafted it is, and no matter how logically sound the price came to be. (Especially not when Chipotle exists.) I guess my cost anchor for restaurant food is still in the pre-pandemic era.

Some prices just don’t make any sense to me. $9 for a small bag of popcorn chicken at Quickly is simply absurd. Before the pandemic it used to cost $5. I’ve yet to buy an order at the new price. Quickly has lost me as a customer, perhaps forever if its menu prices don’t go back down. Not to say the company should be sad about it. I see plenty of students on campus willing to pay the $9 for popcorn chicken, and $6 for a milk-tea drink.

You know those hot dog carts that pop up on sidewalks near big events? I recently found out a hot dog there is $10! Think it over: a vendor that doesn’t pay for any rent or permit still needs to charge such high prices to make money. That’s a no buy from me. Not when a hot dog and drink is (a heavily subsidized) $1.50 at Costco.

I’m just hugely price-sensitive when it comes to outside food, that’s all. Restauranteurs can only raise prices so much before it deters enough people like me for it to be a negative. Maybe $22 for a burrito is not that juncture - perhaps $30? If I’m paying that much for a burrito, it had better be the best damn burrito on planet earth.

Gaming for ants?

It seems portable gaming PCs are all the rage these days. There’s the venerable Steam Deck, the ASUS Rog Ally, and now the Lenovo Legion Go. All of them builds upon the success of the Nintendo Switch: gaming on the go. Just so long you have a battery bank with you as well. These devices don’t last very long on a single charge.

Obviously, any consumer electronics company with a gaming focus would want to emulate (read: blatantly copy) Nintendo Switch’s success. As of writing it is the third best-selling gaming console of all time, behind only the Nintendo DS (another portable gaming device), and the legendary PlayStation 2. The aim for these companies is to do for the PC-gaming market what the Switch did for console games. The market for people wanting to game on the go - or lying in bed - is massive, apparently.

I personally do not understand the appeal. I want to consume media on as big a screen as possible. Ever since I bought a 65-inch OLED television, I don’t even like watching Youtube videos on my 32-inch Pro Display XDR monitor (not at all humble brag), much less on my Mac laptop screen. I almost never watch video on my iPhone because of how relatively tiny the screen is (I only watch TikTok videos my friends send me). Game-makers and video-makers spend so much time and effort on making a quality visual product, only for people to view them on a tiny phone-sized screen? Kind of sad, actually.

That is why I am not going to spend the $700 or so on one of these portable PC game devices. Its portable-ness means absolutely nothing to me. On a long flight, I’m either reading a book, or listening to podcasts. 15-hours from San Francisco to Hong Kong is not the time to play Baldur's Gate 3. Especially in a cramped economy seat.

To each their own, of course. I’ve a friend playing Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth on remote play to his smartphone. I will be doing so on my 65-inch TV.

Control what you can

My parents recently purchased a brand-new 2024 Toyota RAV-4 (XLE hybrid trim). This is to be their forever car, one to use for the majority of their retirement period. Being a Toyota product, I have no reasons to suspect it won’t (at least) mechanically last for two plus decades. The key is to keep it meticulously serviced, by the book, at the dealership. I suspect a lot of reliability issues people experience with cars is due to not following the correct service schedule. A mere oil change at the local Jiffy Lube every six months isn’t going to cut it.

This is why I am leery about buying the typical used car. You can never be sure if scheduled maintenance is done by the book. It’s likely safe to bet that it hasn’t. Owners aren’t wont to pay for what they think is needless extras, such as brake inspection, or lubing the jams. Soon as that two-year free maintenance plan is over, that Toyota Corolla is back to oil changes on the driveway. The only used car I’ve ever bought was a Porsche 911 GT3, a six-figure specialty sports car that I can count on owners to be meticulous. That car came with a full dealer service history with all the print-outs.

So in support of it lasting more 20 years, my parents’ RAV-4 will be serviced by the book.

That is something we can control. What we cannot control is other drivers on the road. I too have every intention of keeping my own BMW M2 for a very long time. However, all it takes is one errant driver crashing into me to destroy that long-term plan. I can defensively drive as much as possible, but sometimes an accident truly is an accident. Heck, I might do something careless on the road. It only takes one scant moment of inattention.

As with most things in life, the best we can do is take care of what we can control, and don’t stress about what we cannot. That Toyota RAV-4 will last a long time if the car gods deem it to be so fortunate.

Cover your butt

Speaking of high auto insurance costs: part of the reason why it costs so much per month to insure my BMW M2 (aside from the fact it’s a fast BMW) is that I have way higher liability coverage limits than what is mandated by California. This great State of ours calls for only $15,000 for injury/death to one person, $30,000 for injury/death to more than one person, and $5,000 for damage to property (15/30/5 in insurance parlance). Those minimums are laughably low when considering the average selling price of new cars in America is about $48,000.

That means if you collide with a brand-new Toyota RAV-4, and you only have the California minimum coverage, high chance you will be personally on the hook for damages over those minimums. A total-loss for the RAV-4 is already above $30,000, so let’s not even add on any potential bodily injury of the opposing driver.

And yet the minimums aren’t any higher, because that means everybody’s base premiums would be higher as well. It seems California is incentivized to keep the minimums low, because more people would be able to afford auto insurance on the low end. (But driving is a privilege, not a right?) No need for low-income folks to carry high liability when there is nothing in their bank accounts for the opposing party to sue for.

Obviously, if you’re at least a medium earner with a some assets in reserves, you’d be risking a lot to not have higher coverage. I personally have 100/300/100 on the M2’s policy. On the other hand, I also carry uninsured/underinsured motorist coverage. Because a driver carrying State minimums can’t possibly cover a total loss of the M2. It’s kind of perverse, actually: if you have assets, you have to pay more to cover yourself and cover for other drivers’ insufficient coverage. Fair, it is not.

But I gladly pay my high insurance premiums. My risk tolerance is super low when it comes to preserving the integrity of my bank accounts. The car can always be replaced with a check from my insurance; never ever dependent on the other party’s insurance to make me whole.

Art for art's sake

Amazon’s The Grand Tour - a car show featuring the intrepid trio of Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May - released its latest episode a few weeks back. Named Sand Job, the premise is same as ever: take three used cars and drive them over a very long distance. Insert some manufactured shenanigans along the way. It’s been the same recipe since the trio was with BBC’s Top Gear, and yet we still watch every time a new episodes drops.

I tune in because the cinematography remains as beautiful as ever. The Grand Tour’s production value is immense. It’s turned into a sort of Planet Earth documentary, but with cars. Each episode is a showcase of an exotic locale that I would likely never step foot upon. Sand Job takes viewers to the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. A country that I have to admit I cannot pin on a map of Africa before watching. The drone shots of the Sahara desert is spectacular. And not once can you see the drone’s (or helicopter?) casted shadow. The attention to detail is to the maximum.

The car shenanigans is almost secondary to the motion-picture technicality, at least for me. There’s the usual explosions, cars breaking down, a drag race, and pranking James May. It’s all been done before, and I hope the trio continues to do so for at least a few more years. (Looks like this is the second to last episode in the series. Kind of sad!) They are getting up there in age, and none of them seem to care much in the taking care of their body department. What’s with guys getting to middle age and growing a large pot belly? (They are otherwise skinny without it.) A prolonged lack of a clean diet and exercising, surely.

In a world of Youtube car content - of which there is plenty - is there still room for The Grand Tour? I hope so, simply on the count of its splendid cinematography. Art for art’s sake! Let’s see if Amazon is willing to continue subsidizing such a series. Especially after it has reportedly lost a ton of millions on The Lord of the Rings…

Endless inflation

And the inflation hits keep on coming. Yesterday I was surprised with a double-whammy: renewal notices on this very domain (hosted by GoDaddy), and my auto insurance (underwritten by Progressive). Both are going up, much to my immense chagrin. Honestly, what remains in our daily lives that has not increased in pricing?

I would classify GoDaddy’s price bump as greed. How much work is there to maintain domain registration? My website is not even hosted with GoDaddy! I am failing to understand where the extra money is going towards. Maybe this site has increased in traffic enough to warrant a price increase? (A lot more pings!) That’s just my ego talking, obviously.

What isn’t greed is my auto insurance premiums going up. I have first-hand experience with how expensive it is to fix cars these days. My father’s Toyota Corolla got into a low-speed fender bender, and the whole ordeal was over $10,000. That’s about half the cost of the car new. It’s all the tech stuff in modern cars that’s driving up the costs. The Corolla has a front radar sensor, which in addition to replacing, the body shop had to drive the car to the local Toyota dealership to get it re-calibrated. Money.

So I don’t blame Progressive for raising my rates. The only slight ickiness about it is that it will probably never go back down. Cars certainly are not getting less complicated! Paying $200 a month (almost maximum coverage with high deductibles) for a car I seldom drive is the price to pay for being a car enthusiasts. My brother has a Lotus Evora - a six-figure sports car - on order. He’s going to be absolutely raked over when it comes to insuring that thing properly.

As saying goes: got to pay to play.

Get your hot dogs here

With all this complaining from me about food price inflation, the one constant I forgot about is the price of a hot dog at Costco. It seems come hell or high water, $1.50 will forever still buy you a hot dog and a soda there. A slice of pizza remains $1.99 as well. There is no freaking way McDonald’s and its $12 for a meal can compete with that.

It’s reputed that the Costco food court is a loss-leader. A marketing spend, an enticement for people to join its membership. That’s why the prices there have not kept up with inflation. That being said, Costco must be hemorrhaging cash at that side of operations now more than ever. Corporate greed aside, it’s indeed true that material costs have increase dramatically in recent years. Even Costco and its buying power can’t be immune to that.

The fact that even under these circumstances, the price of a Costco hot dog remaining the same is a testament to its corporate culture. It’s one of the few brands you can be morally satisified to do business with. (Another is Patagonia.)

But even Costco can only take on so much red ink. Word on the street is that soon, Costco will bar non-members from patronizing its food courts. Previously, anybody off the streets was allowed to buy a whole pizza for the low sum of $9.99. Not anymore! Inflation is so bad that Costco is restricting its de-facto food court subsidy to members only. There’s got to be a return on that subsidy.

The legion of blue-collar workers going to Costco for a cheap lunch will be so disappointed.