This lunch is 500 yen ($4.80) at Sukiya, a Japanese fast food restaurant which belongs to a category with about three big competitors.

I love the aesthetics of this category and they’re under remarked upon.

I think people underestimate QSRs in terms of social utility, but Sukiya et al describe themselves as mission-oriented enterprises. I believe this is largely sincere, and goes back to the 60s and 70s, when the clientele was primarily manual laborers who had migrated to work.
Japan was not a rich nation at the time, and day laborers in particular were both unlikely to be able to cook for themselves and unlikely to have much of a food budget, and so the chains sprung up offering an honest-to-goodness cooked meal delivered in under a minute for cheap.
This heritage continued over the years, even after Japan became a much more wealthy nation, and these chains function as social support and dignity for folks in diminished circumstances.

They also are a wee bit of a cartel, and I appreciate the aesthetics of the cartel:
Back when I was first in Japan, in the mid 2000s, there was an increase in the price of beef.

And the heads of the three chains got together, and decided that the price of the basic beef bowl needed to increase, but given the economic circumstances how could they hold the line.
And what they came up with, from memory, was:

“We are very sorry, given the economic environment, to raise the price from 165 yen to 180 yen, but we are doing our level best to keep it there, and have mutually decided that approximately one yen of margin is appropriate.”
(That dish is, 15 years later, about 350 yen here. I thought there was a +/- 250 yen option still available, and the mini size is around there, but historically the political economy of the dish was based off that offering. I’m slightly disappointed seeing it at 350.)
Oh a fun foodtech (really!) thing I wish caught on more in the US:

If your offering is “I plate a bit of five big pots of things I cooked in the morning and keep heated as serving temperature all day” you can get the offering almost arbitrarily cheap.

Explains bowls, curry, etc
It doesn’t take more training to prepare rice than it does to prepare a McDonalds burger but by definition the only thing in rice is rice, and the only thing in the egg is egg, etc. (There’s a bit of seasoning/sauce on the beef, prepared centrally. Only prep here is heat + plate)

More from Patrick McKenzie

There are a *lot* of software shops in the world that would far rather have one more technical dependency than they'd like to pay for one of their 20 engineers to become the company's SPOF expert on the joys of e.g. HTTP file uploads, CSV parsing bugs, PDF generation, etc.


Every year at MicroConf I get surprised-not-surprised by the number of people I meet who are running "Does one thing reasonably well, ranks well for it, pulls down a full-time dev salary" out of a fun side project which obviates a frequent 1~5 engineer-day sprint horizontally.

"Who is the prototypical client here?"

A consulting shop delivering a $X00k engagement for an internal system, a SaaS company doing something custom for a large client or internally facing or deeply non-core to their business, etc.

(I feel like many of these businesses are good answers to the "how would you monetize OSS to make it sustainable?" fashion, since they often wrap a core OSS offering in the assorted infrastructure which makes it easily consumable.)

"But don't the customers get subscription fatigue?"

I think subscription fatigue is far more reported by people who are embarrassed to charge money for software than it is experienced by for-profit businesses, who don't seem to have gotten pay-biweekly-for-services fatigue.
I like this heuristic, and have a few which are similar in intent to it:


Hiring efficiency:

How long does it take, measured from initial expression of interest through offer of employment signed, for a typical candidate cold inbounding to the company?

What is the *theoretical minimum* for *any* candidate?

How long does it take, as a developer newly hired at the company:

* To get a fully credentialed machine issued to you
* To get a fully functional development environment on that machine which could push code to production immediately
* To solo ship one material quanta of work

How long does it take, from first idea floated to "It's on the Internet", to create a piece of marketing collateral.

(For bonus points: break down by ambitiousness / form factor.)

How many people have to say yes to do something which is clearly worth doing which costs $5,000 / $15,000 / $250,000 and has never been done before.

More from Food

#bkdk sfw, drabble

-🍛

"Suprise, Kacchan!"

Izuku happily wiggles, hopping from one foot to the other like an excitable toddler, despite the fact that he's 6 foot something and a venerable powerhouse of a pro hero.

In his hand is a plate of… something… messy from each edge.


There's a message written on top in some sort of sauce, but the sauce had gotten absorbed in the rice. The mishmashed mush of vegetables (?) kind of looked like something you would pull out of a shower drain.

But the meat looks good? Browned chicken, maybe a little overspiced.

"The hell's this?"

"I made you dinner!" Izuku ushers Katsuki towards the dining table, hardly letting him take off his jacket first.

As soon as Katsuki sits, a napkin gets shoved in his lap as if they're at a fancy restaurant. Izuku becomes a whirlwind, flitting this way

and that in their home until there are a number of candles lit.

It would make the ambiance more romantic if it wasn't still daylight outside. It was closer to lunchtime than dinner, but Katsuki would let him have this.

He, instead, stares down at [the meal] and carefully schools his features. He isn't sure if he looks deadpan or intrigued like he means to, because as soon as he looks close, the veggies /jump/ on the plate, bubbling like they're still boiling.
Recent @SushiSwap Youtube AMA Summary Thread.
0/10👇

1/ Bento timeline - New lending solution that focuses on isolated lending pairs, flexible oracles, targeted interest rates, gas optimization and flash loans. Aiming for early to mid Feb. Bento Explainer here:

2/ UI changes - Deprecating and consolidating onto one domain.
https://t.co/tH4BdswQmN. New UI will cover all features. Longer term a Sushi Plugin is planned. Making it easy to incorporate Sushi into an App or website. Will attract new users (Stripe did this very well btw).

3/ Integrations with @tradingview coming. Merging of API with their trading system on Sushi trader . Will enable live Stream of prices.

4/ Collaboration & partnerships with @iearnfinance and others are to ensure they are all pushing in the same direction. Everyone helping eachother, nothing formal. Everyone sharing ideas.

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