Apparently bullying corporations out of being intolerably exploitative works sometimes!
Do it more.
Make them undo the damage they're doing to us.
Or make them close down.
Or both! Both is good.
Notice they didn't leave it off the table, they just added delays and obfuscation. They hope we'll get used to the idea over the next year and spring it later. Screw 'em.
Now who's Dave?
Dave Thomas.
Why?
"Surge Pricing" is coming to Wendy's. Supposedly the existing operations are being 'upgraded' with tech-heavy digital menus. So of course the first thing that comes out of some money-grubbing idiot's mouth is "How can we profit more, the better to recoup this entirely unnecessary expense?".
Everybody on the user end hates the notion of 'surge pricing' with a furious passion. Jacking up the price of something arbitrarily just because the options are limited or the conditions are suddenly difficult? It's something largely pioneered by car-sharing services, designed to extort more profits from people in a bind by making them pay a premium for a service that might not have any competition due to time, place, or other circumstance.
Now on some level, I get it. As somebody who's gotten that 2am call for a rescue from somewhere dark and cold (more times than I care to remember), I get the sentiment. You go above and beyond, you are owed. But this is something people are already on call for. Everything is already in place and all set to go. You can't just randomly double the rate just because it's 2am, or because a concert just let out. The decision to be available was made ahead of time, and the service provider is obliged to deal with the complications, not demand random amounts of additional compensation.
This sort of approach has been proven to create terrible relationships between users and services, through wholly unnecessary financial vagaries. Would you go out to lunch with ten bucks in your pocket if you knew you'd be charged twenty? Would you have even considered going out at all?
Even some of what I'd consider industry apologists have stepped forward to say "What the hell?!". In Eater magazine just today (Edit: Yesterday, now), we have this from Amy McCarthy:
It’s long been clear that, for many major corporations, cranking out every cent of possible profit is far more important than customer satisfaction, as evidenced by the scourge of “shrinkflation” and what feels like a widespread decline in food quality across the board. While in theory Wendy’s could use its new menuboard technology to discount fries when the drive-thru is deserted, dynamic pricing also offers chains the ability to implement the price hikes we’ve seen everywhere else at an individualized level. And it’s not because they need to make a little more money on their french fries to stay open. What they’re actually doing is testing you — us, consumers — to see exactly how much you’ll pay for a burger and fries when you’re in a hurry and Wendy’s is the only good option around for lunch.
I don't know about you, but I don't like the notion of paying random prices. For the same reason I don't buy food in airports- I'd rather go hungry than be held hostage.
Too many are grudgingly willing to pay premiums for the illusion of convenience, and they're being fleeced more thoroughly every single day. Where's the tipping point? Should have been a long while ago.
What's the solution? Well... it's a messy one, but quite simple in concept- If nobody made cheap stuff, there’d be plenty of resources to produce valid quality at affordable prices. Get rid of 'quick service' and 'fast casual' dining. You immediately free up incredible amounts of farmland, foodstuffs, factory production capacity, highway space, and commercial real estate. If every Fridays was a farmer's market? Every BK a bodega? Food deserts would disappear.
There's more, of course. But that's where it needs to go.
Bet it won't.
Groceries are crazy expensive for no valid reason, so a decently nourishing meal grows harder to manage almost by the day. Likewise, most food media paints elaborate pictures that will never pan out properly. Even the simple stuff gets dressed up with gratuitous expense, so the plan becomes looking at a recipe and toning it down to keep it on a budget without losing impact.
Here's an example for you. Simple recipe that supposedly makes 8 servings but could conceivably run you seventy bucks to make depending on where you're buying: Food and Wine Magazine- Sunday Sauce
Don't believe me? I normally shop at what most would call the poor-people supermarkets, and if I see bone-in short ribs, they're all sorts of expensive- never less than double what I'd comfortably pay for them. They average 13-16 usd / #. So you're already around the fifty dollar mark, and you haven't done any other shopping.
Two 28oz cans of whole tomatoes could run you another ten bucks. (Apparently you're supposed to pop them all by hand? That's silly, and an extra potential mess. Use crushed.)
Two pounds of spaghetti could well be another ten bucks (I wish I were joking, but even the cheapest generic stuff around here is near 3.00/#. Lunacy.)
Yes, these are nice round numbers for simplicity. To compensate for any rounding up, I'll stop there, and just skip pricing out all the other ingredients. I won't even talk about how onions can be upward of 1.99/# because it hardly matters,
Look at the principles of the dish. It's a braise, designed to tenderize tough cuts of meat over a long period of slow cooking. This sort of recipe started a long time ago as a way to effectively use off-cuts, cheap stuff, and leftovers. These days, there is no cheap stuff, and the same resulting product is marketed and treated like a premium item. Madness.
I'm going to make something like this later, spending the same amount of time and effort, but for a quarter of the price. How? Magic.
My local Asian market does a lot of its own butchering in-house. It lets them keep some prices a little lower than you might see elsewhere. That also lets them offer useful things you might have to dig around for in most western-style markets. My 'Sunday Sauce' (or 'gravy', as my grandma would have said) is made with pork instead of beef because it's cheaper, and with neck bones instead of those staggeringly expensive short ribs.
Now, you might think "Neck bones? What?"
Well, let me break it down.
One point of the original recipe's use of ribs is to enrich the sauce with the marrow and other flavor drawn from the bones, the same as you might when making stocks. Getting more out of less.
Another point is to use heavily worked, tough muscles since they take more time to cook and historically less expensive as a result. Every single breath you take, every time you turn your head, the exercise never stops.
Lastly, both cuts of meat also tenderize by the collagen/gelatin conversion process, so the enrichment process from the meat itself is identical.
The recipe says to remove the ribs after several hours of cooking, get the meat off, and toss it back in without the bones. That's still happening, and it's smart. Eventually the bones have given everything they have to give, so they're just dead weight. You could conceivably just eat around them, but it's much friendlier to remove what you can't eat and might accidentally bite down on. The neck will take a few more minutes of work than the ribs since there are more cracks and crevices for meat to hide in, but it's not so long as to be significant.
I didn't really change the recipe. I simply returned it to its natural state- a pursuit of affordable deliciousness.
In the end, it's all about finding alternatives you can live with, and live on.
I recently configured my desktop for some streaming (my current setup comes via my laptop for positioning/teaching in the kitchen). My plan for a desktop streaming is related in many ways, but also offers a completely different side of my skillset. This way, I've got easy access to screen capture, so I can do real-time analysis and critique of, for example, food and cooking video clips that have been posted elsewhere. Now, being just another 'reacts' is going to get lost in the shuffle, so the plan is to widen my approach. Food, cooking, book and media reviews, plus desktop gaming of all genres, the goal is to display as much of my broad spectrum knowledge as I can, in a way that's a little more difficult when it's purely in front of a stove.
My last stream was, in fact, a gaming one. I'm replaying my way through the Main Storyline of the Critically Acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV. Currently in the Stormblood expansion, which spends most of its time in Fantasy Asia, there's a lot for me to talk about even if I were ignoring the primary cast of characters themselves. Now, I'm not as aggressively well-versed as some friends of mine (looking at you, Nyri), but am nonetheless more than sufficient to offer informed commentary on the Asiatic analogues the game is (not subtly) drawing from the 18th through mid-20th century. It's fun!
(Potential spoilers in the following examples)-
These are just off the top of my head, but you see where I'm coming from. Asian language patterns, cultural norms, accents, voiceover work, acting principles, dramatic character development, and the list goes on.
So that might be a good bit of fun in the future.
A faint but persistent rumble I've been hearing in some parenting spheres is around color, of all things. The modern bad habit of sterile, bland colorlessness in architecture and interior design is a problem in all manner of ways, but somehow its muted visage has managed to overwhelm its betters at near every turn.
I could go for a while about how much of it comes from the poor ethics of landlords and 'investment property' management companies impeding personalization to adversely affect the psychology of society at large, but that's macro. For now, I'll keep it about parents and kids.
Not only does a failure to explore color and shape in one's private environment deny sensible adults an opportunity to indulge their creativity, it actively impedes the development of their children, should those same adults become parents. Babies need contrast to develop their eyesight. Shape, color, everything. Uniformity of color in something like a nursery? Generally speaking, terrible plan.
And then... there is what I consider the real worry. That parents may feel as though they have to protect their own identity, and shape their child's development in a manner that doesn't conflict with their own aesthetic sensibilities. Worst thing you could do? Maybe not, but that sort of stifling is near the top of the list.
A parent's goals and obligations are ideally quite simple: a comprehensively developed child, and a better world to leave them than they themselves had. All else is secondary.
We live in a world awash in beige, eggshell, taupe, and grey.
Raise your children to know it's not normal, necessary, or even correct.
See that they well know every color of the rainbow- the better to draw out the colors of their soul.
