The funny thing about Chipotle is that in Denver, you have Illegal Pete’s which is kind of like Chipotle if they never went national. Somehow, with the economies of scale, Chipotle is still more expensive, has smaller portions, fewer toppings and menu options and overall an objective worse experience when it comes to food and the dining experience. I am always amazed and confused how that’s possible at all.
"Big business is better for consumers because economy of scale" has just always been a lie.
No business will pass on a cost decrease if it doesn't have to. A big business will always have more pricing power than a small business. A big business will therefore pass on fewer cost savings to consumers.
Also, making food the way Chipotle does just does not have any economy of scale. The workers making burritos don't get cheaper if you hire 100k of them.
"Economy of scale" is not some magic spell that you get when you pass 10k employees. Economy of scale is a lie that covers up that if you make huge investments, you can do enough engineering and machine work to replace humans in some parts of some processes. It is not intrinsic.
It is the norm that a business will spend a lot of money on cost reduction or process improvement and then just.... happily absorb that improved profit margin.
Chicken burrito costs $11.50 without any additions before taxes where I am. Closer to $12.85 with taxes.
Chipotle lists its portion size for protein to be 4oz which roughly translates to 27g of protein IF they don’t skimp on the portions (which they usually do. Unless the rest of the ingredients make up for 33g of protein, it’s very hard to get what you’re suggesting at Chipotle anymore.
On the other hand, the Mexican truck down the street sells $3 street tacos with way more meat.
The family-owned Mexican restaurant literally across the street from the nearest Chipotle sells their burritos starting at 7.99, 9.99 if you want to add a full side order of rice and beans. I can get two full meals for almost the same price as Chipotle. Sounds like OP’s local places are ripping them off.
>Unless the rest of the ingredients make up for 33g of protein
Rice and beans are decentish sources of protein, according to their website https://www.chipotle.com/nutrition-calculator/burrito (which is I'm sure generous, but probably not fraudulently so) a bean, cheese, and rice burrito is 23g of protein, and if you add chicken you get to 58g.
That’s kind of why Chillis is doing pretty well. It costs almost the same as McDonalds and for a few bucks extra, you’d get a reasonable sit down experience.
They're also benefiting from being practically the last man standing in the family dining segment. They're not in a menu category that was going to butt up against nicer sit-down dining places (if Olive Garden, for example, raised their prices much they'd be running up against sit down Italian places, likewise for Red Lobster and nicer seafood). And they adapted well to the COVID-era takeout boom, which suggests that they were actually serving food people would choose to eat, not merely offering the sit down experience like say Applebees.
All the expensive local run city restaurants benefited from inflation.
The McDonalds burger went from $12 to $18, but it's still the same terrible product. The hipster burger joint price went from $20 to $22, and that is a dramatically better burger.
The difference is that the local burger place doesn't have to show a 7% increase in profit year after year in perpetuity. Their price was set for "I can live a modest life off the profit and pay my employees a wage competitive enough to actually staff my restaurant, and therefore also end up with people more competent than your average fast food worker". That gives you more value per dollar, because more of your dollar is being spent on actual product and service rather than paying absurd and unjustifiable salaries to an entire building full of overpaid "management" and administration in the highest cost of living part of the country. Fewer shareholders to pay too.
So instead of the price delta between absolute trash and quality being $8, now it's $4.
I am told inflation is a bad thing, but it is making lots of small business that we desperately want and need much more competitive. A smaller business has far less pricing power and therefore less ability to pass on a cost increase.
I’ve said this before on HN. Behind all the AI enthusiasm and evangelism on HN and tech industry in general, people forget: When most people are out of a job, AI won’t be Doordashing you $15 burrito from Chipotle that cost $30 to deliver. You need a backup plan for when things go South and so far, there doesn’t even seem to be a conversation going on about it.
No doubt. The ingredients to make a Mission-style burrito hover around $2 in quantity. Rice and beans are cheap filler and a 10-pack of 13.5-inch flour tortillas is $3.50. Prices fluctuate, but definitely not enough to justify the current fast food pricing models, which seems to assume everyone works at a FAANG company, which is increasingly not the case. Ditch Chipotle and hit La Cumbre instead.
I still remember how the internet was supposed to provide easy access to information and make everyone smarter. Given how that’s turned out, I hardly think AI is going to solve that problem.
The internet has made people believe they are smarter than they actually are, I fear AI is only going to exacerbate that trend. Worse yet, it dampens the motivation to be smarter because being smart is hard work, and why put in all that work when you can outsource it and achieve a similar result?
I feel like a live, in-person conversation is the only way to evaluate a person's intelligence these days.
The 96 vcpu setup with 24xlarge instance costs about $20k/month on AWS before discounts. And one thing you don’t want in a pub sub system is a single instance taking all the read/writes. You can run a sizeable Kafka cluster for that kind of money in AWS.
Probably why it’s considered one of the worst places to work for. Works well when you are a small company that is trying to attract talent to build great things with the promise of big rewards. Doesn’t actually work that well when you’re trying to keep an established company stable and don’t offer much in return. If all you can offer is mediocre pay and a threat of PIP if I don’t work 60+ hours, I’d rather stay unemployed.
Amazon doesn't actually pay mediocre, they are very good for FAANG standards. But yes, when you have already cut out the slackers and still are required to PIP x% of every team despite everyone being competent, everyones' coworker relationships automatically become competitive, not collaborative. The culture starts to become a rat race of people working nights and weekends, each trying to not become the one whose family and children might have to get uprooted and leave the US within 60 days because of a PIP.
Meta is another dumpster fire. The highest level you can receive at a promo cycle is "Redefines Expectations". Congratulations, you have worked so goddamn hard, your reward is a redefined expectation and the next cycle if you work equally goddamn hard you will only "meet" that newly-redefined expectation. You're on track to a PIP!
I’m not sure what you mean by FAANG standards, but Meta and Netflix both pay way more and Google and Apple pay similar if not more with waaay better work culture. Tech companies of the last decade like Uber, DoorDash, Block, Snap, Airbnb, Snowflake etc. all pay more than Amazon while the new generation of AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are not even comparable. The only way you would consider Amazon pay to be very good is if you come from Microsoft or one of the old school companies like Cisco and IBM. I would put Amazon pay as middle of the pack or mediocre.
Amazon pay had a 30% negative revision for most tenured staff this year. It’s unclear how it plays out with new hires - there are likely still a few very strong Covid era grants out there.
It’s not bad pay, but most mid-caps should be competitive with the pay band in 2025. Amazon paid very well in 2023-2024, and paid well up through 2022.
The back dated pay structure with a 15% YoY stock growth assumption means that unless Amazon grows at 30%+ per year you would be better off at any other medium to large tech company.
Amazon pays pretty mediocre. After their boosts during the pandemic they’re solidly middle of the pack above Apple and Microsoft but below Meta and Google.
We are an Amazon/Google family, and I'm surprised how close Amazon comes to Google salary even for a non-dev UXD. It is definitely competitive (same market, about the same level, dev vs UXD).
I find it insane there are folks who unironically claim Amazon's pay is mediocre when there's only a handful of companies that pay more and Amazon's pay L5/6 is 2+x of the higher end of the the average for a senior eng.
Good for them, I guess, but also has nothing to do with the reality
I claimed Amazon's pay is mediocre in the context of this conversation, which was talking about FAANG companies. This is demonstrably true and backed up by data. You might feel that Amazon's pay is not mediocre if you compare it in some other bracket, like all US salaries. Or I could downgrade it from mediocre to "bottom-of-the-barrel" in specialized fields like AI research. But that's not what was being discussed.
I just provided anecdata of a family that has both Amazon and Google incomes, where, without revealing details about our incomes or levels, I claimed that Amazon pay one spouse receives is very competitive from what the other is receiving from Google (clouded by the different roles, SWE vs. UXD, a SWE at Amazon would probably make more than a UXD but I have no evidence that is true).
Ya, you don't know the industry then. SWEs often make more than UXDs. It is the difference between getting into computer science and going to art school (admittedly, the latter can also be very competitive).
Ah, I guess you were claiming that I was a shit SWE out of left field (because I'm just comparing myself to my wife)? I don't really get your context, you are going need to spell it out for me.
Keep in mind, L6 senior engineer at Amazon maps to staff at most firms. L5 has a crazy wide band to accommodate everyone from folks with 2 years experience in-house to 10+ years of experience.
I was told by a very intelligent man demanding a trillion dollar salary that you only need vision cameras to have full self driving in all weather conditions. All of this is apparently unnecessary.
I don't think either solution is going to be the eventual winner. I expect the eventual rollout of 5G+ to be the game changer.
Much like how a pilot captain boards a ship to steer it into port, traffic systems will be able to be a bit more 'hands on' when it comes to getting traffic through junctions safely, regardless of the weather. Hence, on the final journey through a city, the city traffic systems will be directing your car.
For the journey on highways between built up areas, variants of today's self driving systems will suffice.
Lots of people manage to drive in poor visibility without radar, lidar, etc. If that's safe and normal for people, the principle that self driving should work with just cameras isn't such a strange one.
I wouldn't call things like radar and lidar unnecessary but in principle a good AI vision system should be able to operate at the same level as a human eventually. Of course if you don't have such an AI just yet, you need a stop gap solution. But I wouldn't bet against AI getting there eventually. Probably not on Mr. Musk's accelerated and optimistic schedule though. But give it another five to ten years and things might look a bit differently.
What Waymo is doing now with much less than perfect AI is of course completely pragmatic and very impressive. I'm kind of eager to see them start operating self driving outside a few restricted zones in the US and for example in European cities. I live in Berlin, so probably we'll have to wait quite a bit for people to finally let go of their fax machines though apparently there are some trials with self driving buses about to kick off here now.
Just vision is a very reductive way of describing how we drive. We use sound to hear if something else is coming and where from, or if we're losing traction on the road, or if the road surface has changed. We can judge acceleration and deceleration in all directions using our inner ears. We can feel if the car's performing differently to usual indicating an issue with the car or different conditions. In addition when we are using our vision, if it gets obscured (i.e. snow covers the windscreen) we know how to get it off with wipers, and most importantly we're very adaptable to new conditions in a way that computers aren't, if we experience something completely new to us, chances are we'll make a reasonable in the moment decision.
> Lots of people manage to drive in poor visibility without radar, lidar, etc. If that's safe and normal for people, the principle that self driving should work with just cameras isn't such a strange one.
No camera system comes close to the capabilities of human eyes, combined with general intelligence.
I am one of those who drive in bad weather from time to time. I'm 'good at it' - but I cannot honestly call myself safe. I've been in the ditch. I've spun a 360 and only didn't hit someone else in the process because it happened nobody was there.
i grew up where bad weather was common enough that we cosidered it not worth shutting down for bad weather so we risked driving in it - but it was always a risk and many do die from taking that risk.
Same - living in a region where it gets below 0°C in the winter and also snows, you really see that those cars were designed for sunny california. It happened multiple times now that the trunk or door handles were frozen so hard, that I couldn't use the car in the morning. Also when opening the frunk while its partly covered in snow just made it slide into the frunk...
It's meaningfully different. Salary is a fixed, regularly recurring income stream. That isn't what these are. This is compensation and it has cash value, but not all compensation is salary.
He is not wrong, but we demand superhuman performance from our machines which in this case necessitates superhuman sensory abilities. Current evidence shows that having non-vision sensors is a faster way to create a reliable system. I would personally choose to ride in an autonomous vehicle with Lidars.
It seems quite likely that once self driving cars are well perfected, we will demand more than just human level driving which is currently horrendously dangerous. If lidar systems can exceed vision only, we are going to demand it as a baseline standard.
And if the US government operated with 10% of the agency or spine it ought to operate with, the entire feature would be banned and tesla fined for costing so many lives already. And the cyber truck wouldn't be coasting the roads with no safety sense whatsoever.
He is very obviously wrong since Waymo cars drive millions of trips with 0 drivers while every single robotaxi still has a safety driver in it at all times.
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