4 ms·

It's cultural but also institutional. Governments think nothing of blowing tens of millions of dollars on highway construction and do not typically think about

It's cultural but also institutional. Governments think nothing of blowing tens of millions of dollars on highway construction and do not typically think about or care to invest in alternatives. Beyond a certain point (which was a long time ago) we're just building roads and highways to create artificial growth. It blows my mind how people don't realize the cultural piece either. They travel, "omg it's so walkable here! this is awesome! wow that cafe is so cute. Of course i buy bread from the local shop." then come back and it's like their experiences were completely wiped clean from their memory: "wait what do you mean not drive a car a quarter mile down the road to sit in the Zaxby's line?".

treis 5y ago
Because cafes and bread from bakeries are (relative) luxuries. Even if it's just $1 more a coffee/loaf that adds up to significant money over a year. That's the thing that I think people miss. Scale makes things cheaper and to have scale at retail you need to pull customers from a large area. You could do the same in a dense area but then you run into housing cost/size problems. I don't see how you get the typical 4/3 suburban house and a low cost of living without driving.
- ericmay 5y ago
  > Because cafes and bread from bakeries are (relative) luxuries. Even if it's just $1 more a coffee/loaf that adds up to significant money over a year. That's the thing that I think people miss. Scale makes things cheaper and to have scale at retail you need to pull customers from a large area. I wonder if all those loaves of bread and coffees cost more than tires, having 2 or 3 cars, obesity, and lost productivity from car crashes and deaths (among other things)? Scale can make things cheaper, but is cheapness the goal? And scale in this context also creates centralization which has some fragile properties at times. > You could do the same in a dense area but then you run into housing cost/size problems. I don't see how you get the typical 4/3 suburban house and a low cost of living without driving. Tear down a house in the suburbs and put in a little market/grocery store and you don't need to drive anywhere you just walk over. The only reason all of the best neighborhoods you've ever been to are so expensive is because we just don't build mixed-use, medium density development. And also you can look at countries in places like Europe to see how it has been achieved. I'm not sure the premise of 4/3 suburban house is a good one. It's like saying how can you use AWS when you have this server rack in the basement that you have to use. It's just cultural and institutional inertia driving us down bad paths because we don't have a good market mechanic to realize costs.
  - hunterb123 5y ago
    Small towns in the US already work similarly to European towns, though a bit more straightforward (pun intended). The town itself is pretty self-sufficient, usually has a co-op, general store, single main road going through downtown, sidewalks, etc. Larger cities do have suburbs like you're describing, but generally they do have their own amenities like fast food courts / grocery stores / school systems near the entrances of the housing developments, the commuting is generally only because of work, which hopefully we can make more remote to ease traffic for physical workers.
    - stan_rogers 5y ago
      ...and that's kinda what's missing in the US (and large parts of Southern Ontario) right now: small towns. Instead, you have bedroom communities that depend on an urban centre to make them work at all. No, not everywhere, but in too much of the populous parts of the country. It's gotten to the point that people just expect that that's just how things work. It made a certain basic sense, I suppose, with the GI Bill and the Levittowns it spawned post-WW2, but that should have been a very temporary solution to a baby boom housing crisis, not the permanent state of things. I grew up in a town with a population of about 1500 people, and we had two grocers, each with an actual butcher who not only cut meats, but made their own sausages, etc. Could you get fresh weirdo herbs that only grow halfway up Vesuvius in years that end in a 7? No, but we weren't missing anything anybody would actually miss either. (And if you want a really nice artisanal bread, make it - there are very few things that are easier, and autolysis means you don't have to spend hours working at it, you just wait.)
      - hunterb123 5y ago
        There's plenty of small towns, just takes moving there. I prefer them. Remote work should make them more viable, before you could either just farm or mine. Industrial period nearly killed small towns as people flocked to the city for factory work.
    - Talanes 5y ago
      >but generally they do have their own amenities like fast food courts / grocery stores / school systems Though some starkly do not. Before the pandemic, a friend was living in a San Diego area suburb apartment building that was located on a strip of land between freeways with the complex and a strip mall.
- mumblemumble 5y ago
  What I have seen in my travels is that those cafés and bakeries are not all that expensive in places where they are the norm. They occupy an environment where they have serious competition from truly comparable businesses, and a larger potential clientele. That brings market forces into play, which means they are more directly incentivized to compete on price and make it up on volume, while keeping quality high. Compare with the Great Harvest Bread location a mile or two down the street from my dad's house. (It's a chain, I believe mostly concentrated in the midwestern USA.) The bread is overpriced and hastily made. The only reason they can command such high prices is that there's nowhere else anywhere nearby that makes bread that doesn't come in a plastic bag is because they can position themselves as a sort of luxury good. But they probably also need to have high prices because people only buy bread there for special occasions.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    > The bread is overpriced and hastily made. This is contradicted by this: > But they probably also need to have high prices because people only buy bread there for special occasions. It is not overpriced, it is prices according to its supply and demand.
    - mumblemumble 5y ago
      Supply and demand is the simplest possible model for pricing, and only applies in certain contexts. The argument I'm trying to make comes close to suggesting that their bread functions as a sort of Veblen good. Which is an example of a kind of product whose pricing dynamics are slightly more complex than can be neatly explained by the econ 101 model.
      - lotsofpulp 5y ago
        Supply and demand applies in all contexts. A veblen good simply has a different demand curve, but I would need to see more evidence that bread of all things would be a Veblen good, which are due to their (presumed) utility for displaying status. Or maybe I do not hang out in circles where bread is considered a status symbol.
- felixfbecker 5y ago
  Bread from a bakery is a luxury? In Germany there is a bakery on every corner and a large, fresh loaf of bread costs under 1€!
- watwut 5y ago
  > bread from bakeries are (relative) luxuries They are not expensive. The price is comparable or the same as any other bread.

treis 5y ago

Because cafes and bread from bakeries are (relative) luxuries. Even if it's just $1 more a coffee/loaf that adds up to significant money over a year. That's the thing that I think people miss. Scale makes things cheaper and to have scale at retail you need to pull customers from a large area. You could do the same in a dense area but then you run into housing cost/size problems. I don't see how you get the typical 4/3 suburban house and a low cost of living without driving.

ericmay 5y ago
> Because cafes and bread from bakeries are (relative) luxuries. Even if it's just $1 more a coffee/loaf that adds up to significant money over a year. That's the thing that I think people miss. Scale makes things cheaper and to have scale at retail you need to pull customers from a large area. I wonder if all those loaves of bread and coffees cost more than tires, having 2 or 3 cars, obesity, and lost productivity from car crashes and deaths (among other things)? Scale can make things cheaper, but is cheapness the goal? And scale in this context also creates centralization which has some fragile properties at times. > You could do the same in a dense area but then you run into housing cost/size problems. I don't see how you get the typical 4/3 suburban house and a low cost of living without driving. Tear down a house in the suburbs and put in a little market/grocery store and you don't need to drive anywhere you just walk over. The only reason all of the best neighborhoods you've ever been to are so expensive is because we just don't build mixed-use, medium density development. And also you can look at countries in places like Europe to see how it has been achieved. I'm not sure the premise of 4/3 suburban house is a good one. It's like saying how can you use AWS when you have this server rack in the basement that you have to use. It's just cultural and institutional inertia driving us down bad paths because we don't have a good market mechanic to realize costs.
- hunterb123 5y ago
  Small towns in the US already work similarly to European towns, though a bit more straightforward (pun intended). The town itself is pretty self-sufficient, usually has a co-op, general store, single main road going through downtown, sidewalks, etc. Larger cities do have suburbs like you're describing, but generally they do have their own amenities like fast food courts / grocery stores / school systems near the entrances of the housing developments, the commuting is generally only because of work, which hopefully we can make more remote to ease traffic for physical workers.
  - stan_rogers 5y ago
    ...and that's kinda what's missing in the US (and large parts of Southern Ontario) right now: small towns. Instead, you have bedroom communities that depend on an urban centre to make them work at all. No, not everywhere, but in too much of the populous parts of the country. It's gotten to the point that people just expect that that's just how things work. It made a certain basic sense, I suppose, with the GI Bill and the Levittowns it spawned post-WW2, but that should have been a very temporary solution to a baby boom housing crisis, not the permanent state of things. I grew up in a town with a population of about 1500 people, and we had two grocers, each with an actual butcher who not only cut meats, but made their own sausages, etc. Could you get fresh weirdo herbs that only grow halfway up Vesuvius in years that end in a 7? No, but we weren't missing anything anybody would actually miss either. (And if you want a really nice artisanal bread, make it - there are very few things that are easier, and autolysis means you don't have to spend hours working at it, you just wait.)
    - hunterb123 5y ago
      There's plenty of small towns, just takes moving there. I prefer them. Remote work should make them more viable, before you could either just farm or mine. Industrial period nearly killed small towns as people flocked to the city for factory work.
  - Talanes 5y ago
    >but generally they do have their own amenities like fast food courts / grocery stores / school systems Though some starkly do not. Before the pandemic, a friend was living in a San Diego area suburb apartment building that was located on a strip of land between freeways with the complex and a strip mall.
mumblemumble 5y ago
What I have seen in my travels is that those cafés and bakeries are not all that expensive in places where they are the norm. They occupy an environment where they have serious competition from truly comparable businesses, and a larger potential clientele. That brings market forces into play, which means they are more directly incentivized to compete on price and make it up on volume, while keeping quality high. Compare with the Great Harvest Bread location a mile or two down the street from my dad's house. (It's a chain, I believe mostly concentrated in the midwestern USA.) The bread is overpriced and hastily made. The only reason they can command such high prices is that there's nowhere else anywhere nearby that makes bread that doesn't come in a plastic bag is because they can position themselves as a sort of luxury good. But they probably also need to have high prices because people only buy bread there for special occasions.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  > The bread is overpriced and hastily made. This is contradicted by this: > But they probably also need to have high prices because people only buy bread there for special occasions. It is not overpriced, it is prices according to its supply and demand.
  - mumblemumble 5y ago
    Supply and demand is the simplest possible model for pricing, and only applies in certain contexts. The argument I'm trying to make comes close to suggesting that their bread functions as a sort of Veblen good. Which is an example of a kind of product whose pricing dynamics are slightly more complex than can be neatly explained by the econ 101 model.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Supply and demand applies in all contexts. A veblen good simply has a different demand curve, but I would need to see more evidence that bread of all things would be a Veblen good, which are due to their (presumed) utility for displaying status. Or maybe I do not hang out in circles where bread is considered a status symbol.
felixfbecker 5y ago
Bread from a bakery is a luxury? In Germany there is a bakery on every corner and a large, fresh loaf of bread costs under 1€!
watwut 5y ago
> bread from bakeries are (relative) luxuries They are not expensive. The price is comparable or the same as any other bread.