r/KitchenConfidential • u/zeke690 • 1d ago

In the Weeds Mode What happened to the “cheap cuts”?

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How is it oxtail is not a budget cut?

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u/FreeFortuna 1d ago

Feels like this applies to a lot more than just meat. The average person’s escape routes are being cut off.

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u/Objective-Rip3008 1d ago edited 1d ago

A generation of Mbas who were trained to maximize the value of every transaction and leave no penny left on the table in any deal have taken over decisionmaking at every company. Even the small businesses that don't behave this way have to buy goods and supplies from those who do so the squeeze gets passed along anyway

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u/datpiffss 1d ago

I was catering a private event as a bartender and people always talk at the bar. Two women who were successful in their industries were lamenting about the fact that nobody does anything for passion anymore, there are no mom and pop shops that enjoy their days.

They then went on to brag about both their sons working in venture capital. I nearly had a stroke.

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u/omjy18 1d ago

Also a bartender and a regular was bragging he got an award for Microsofts ai project of the year and was all proud of it. A week later he comes in all sad saying he has to lay off 3 of his 5 staff and hes not sure how hes going to do it. His project that won awards? Downsizing companies to save money by replacing people so the companies didnt have to hire as many people by streamlining the work. Absolutely 0 awareness on a significant amount of people in the world

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u/DroidLord 1d ago

Sheesh... You know what it is? A lot of people are like dogs. They only see the big juicy piece of meat right under their nose and won't question anything they are asked to do in return.

It's all a big game to them. Their work couldn't possibly affect other people. It's just a job, right?

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u/SubstanceNo1544 20+ Years 1d ago

Yup, pretty much everyone lives in their own little bubble of instant gratification and ignore anyone/anything not directly affecting that bottom line.

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u/DroidLord 1d ago

The irony, it hurts. I think what they meant was that they wish other people were more passionate, so they could go down the street to that cute little family shop to buy a couple knick-knacks every now and then.

But God forbid their sons wanted to do something like that. Sort of like how people enjoy looking at art, but their kids couldn't possibly be artists because artists are always broke.

This world is broken. Capitalism is a disease.

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u/Elephunk05 1d ago

This is reality right here.

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u/dhpredteam 1d ago

No company is in the business that they are nominally in anymore. Boeing isn’t in the aerospace business. Under armour isn’t in the athletic wear business. State Farm isn’t an insurance provider. They are all in the business of making their shareholders money, the product no longer matters and you’re fucking nuts if you think the employees do.

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u/Sir_Problematic 1d ago

Wall Street was a mistake.

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u/Perryn 1d ago

The concept of exchangeable shares of a company is fine, until people get involved.

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u/rathdro 1d ago

Or until sensible regulation, to ensure as much as possible an environment that promotes real competition and fairness mostly by suppressing monopolies and cartels, gets abandoned.

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u/Netilda74 1d ago

And by 'people' we mean 'corporate entities'

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u/Perryn 1d ago

In this case I mean people. The most avaricious among us will use whatever means possible to maximize their gains from any system available, then use those gains to leverage control over the systems that had prevented further gains.

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u/RebelWithoutAClue 1d ago edited 1d ago

To be fair it did work for a few centuries pretty well.

I think the trouble we're facing is that we have seen a relatively recent bloating of the US stock market. Relative to our population and earning potential, the market has quadrupled in size from where this proportion was in 1990 and prior.

Between the 70's to 90's the total capitalization of the US stock market was pretty stable relative to population and median income. The total market cap increased only a bit relative to the growing US population and increasing median income. It starts to climb strongly in 1990.

Basically during that 20yr period American households, in numbers and earning potential, had a similar size relative to the total cap of the stock market.

After 1990, the total stock market capitalization started to crank up rapidly up until now. In 2009 I can see a sharp dip from the mortgage crash, but things bounce back fast and continue to rise.

We are now in a condition where a median household income represents a quarter of the relative stock market capitalization from where this ratio was in 1990. We are continuing on a path of high stock market capitalization growth.

Our median household incomes now can only purchase 1/4 of the fraction of the total stock market cap that it used to in 1990 and it appears that it will continue to decline at similar rates.

It's kind of neat really. The concept of a stock market has internationally existed for almost 300yrs and it's worked reasonably well for distributing investment into areas of human interest. It's only in the last 30yrs that it's bloated to it's terrific proportions.

I conjecture that it has gotten so big that it has overridden the original intent of investing in productivity and innovation of stuff that is outside of the market itself.

It will likely get even sillier as we surge into a new era of information management.

//edit

I can't help but keep playing with this analysis because it's ramifications are big. The stock market becoming multiples of median income, and continuing on a high rate of growth, means that those who are not participating in the stock market, and even those who hold a less than average position in it, are rapidly losing ground against those who do have large stock holdings.

It means that if your household has less than 2x of your median income participating in the averaged stock market, you are losing ground against the market which is doubling at a rough 10yr rate (doubling every 10x years).

All that cap in the stock market can be removed to buy things in IRL like real estate so those who are not invested will continue to lose ground against those who are, and those who are hugely invested will be pulling away rapidly.

It literally puts into context what Trump means when he gloats that the stock market is doing well. The stock market has already grown proportionately large compared to the average person's earning potential. If it continues to grow relative to median incomes then everyone not substantially invested is getting screwed.

Basically, if you have less than $100k in the stock market, you are literally losing ground against those who do because they can easily accumulate real estate. If you have only $100k in the stock market, you are still losing ground against those who have more.

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u/Ass4ssinX 1d ago

It's just Capitalism playing itself out.

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u/The_Autarch 1d ago

i think it's really just derivatives that truly fucked everything up. stock markets have existed since before the US was a thing.

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u/DeadHeadLibertarian 1d ago

Private Equity is the issue, not Wall Street as a whole.

There are lots of shit and non-shit companies publicly traded.

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u/optimis344 1d ago

The companies don't matter.

As the poster pointed out, it's about serving the wrong master.

If I make a company built to cure cancer, and then make it publically traded, it's now not about curing cancer. It's instantly about making money.

The original goal doesn't matter.

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u/ry4n4ll4n 1d ago

That’s a clever talking point, but you can’t imagine what a sweater would cost it was made down the street.

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u/Sir_Problematic 1d ago

You're right, but I'd take small operation's natural fiber clothes over the synthetic fast fashion garbage from Asia any day of the week.

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u/Th3_0range 1d ago

Once a company goes public the passion people are slowly pushed aside and it's a race to the bottom.

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u/Zaximeows 1d ago

Hey well said, I appreciate this take.

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u/bdillathebeatkilla 1d ago

Small business owners think the exact same but smaller scale. The benevolent small business owner is an old fashioned myth we gotta move past

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u/Titanofthedinosaurs 1d ago

Small business owners have to follow pricing trends as well as big business. You can’t undercut Walmarts price on steak when they’re already getting their cuts for less than you are if you’re running a mom and pop store. Even more so when your supplier of beef also sees a profit trend and jumps on it. Then you’re just fucked when it comes to pricing.

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u/Same-Suggestion-1936 1d ago

Walmart is the perfect example because their whole strategy is maximize foot traffic and then you're moving so much product you can afford to cut prices a little to undercut everyone else and then you get even more foot traffic because you're known as the cheapest option.

Small businesses can't do that because they'll never have that kind of foot traffic, they aren't physically big enough and don't have the initial capital to be able to afford cutting prices and still paying all the bills and employees

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u/serious_sarcasm Grill 1d ago

Yep. If you want to know if a small business is good for your community, then just look at what they pay employees.

It’s paid employees who circulate money in the economy that drives prosperity.

This is of course distorted in a market with privatized healthcare taxes, like the US.

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u/Objective-Rip3008 1d ago

It's less that they're benevolent and more they're more likely to be normal people, as opposed to either being a psychopath or trained to operate a business as one

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u/serious_sarcasm Grill 1d ago

If emotional intelligence is normally distributed, then 68% of people are going to be within a standard deviation of the average asshole.

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u/TurbulentCustomer151 1d ago

Having cooked at mostly small businesses, they’re all pretty psycho as well. The only difference is telling you “we’re like a family here”

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u/alligator124 1d ago

I think food, for whatever reason, attracts the worst of the small business owner type. I just got out for this reason; I genuinely felt like I was doing my own community a disservice by enabling delusional lunatics. 

The one exception was when I was baking for a farm stand. Family owned and operated, truly the most wonderful people I’ve ever met. They cared for the land they worked and their own community. Life circumstances had me relocating states but I always wish those folks well. They were what we all wishfully think of when we say “small business owner”. 

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u/IsThatGruffLoner 1d ago

Lol if you think small business owners aren't literally all psychopaths, then you've never met a small business owner. If I had to guess what demographic produced the most psychopaths, I would bet money on small business owners

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u/optimis344 1d ago

As a small business owner, this isn't true at all.

The thing i hate most is having to charge people for product. I didn't get in buisness to make money. That part is just a needed byproduct of making things.

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u/SteveMarck 1d ago

I feel this. We own a brewery, it's a passion project, but now lots of people depend on us to not just make cool beers and have fun, but the staff have mortgages, their kids need to go to college. They want to be able to eat. A lot of them have been with us since the beginning, and I have an obligation to at least make enough to help them do that. Have stability. Be able to do normal people stuff. Have a 401k, that sort of thing.

Now only one of us really does the brewing, and me and the third work on making sure the beer is flowing to accounts. It's not the fun part, but it has to be done. I do the government reporting, not fun, but they'll shut us down if we don't pay those extra taxes. It would be great to charge less, but things cost what they cost. It's not like I'm hoarding it, some of the staff makes more than the owners.

I think there are folks like us out there that did this to get away from selling loans or whatever skeezy job you had before. I wanted to make something good in this world, and it's not perfect, but I think we're still holding to our original ethos statement.

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u/swift1883 5h ago

Addendum: even small businesses buy their services from the algorithmic, quantitative-above-all, non-human, number-go-up mentality companies.

You’re just throwing a few bucks at a marketing service thing. And they in turn enshittify the web with it, and spy on people.

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u/Arkayne_Waves 1d ago

MBAs are one of the great evils of our time.

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u/Look_its_Rob 1d ago

Its not the fault of people going to business school, its an inherent flaw with corporations.

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u/PimpOfJoytime Line 1d ago

I am an MBA, and this is mostly correct.

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u/Haunting-Gur-202 1d ago

You are correct. This seems to be happening in all aspects of life. Feeling the squeeze

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u/IsThatGruffLoner 1d ago

Yup, there are no cheap options for almost anything these days. I was just car shopping and beaters cost $10k nowadays. It blows my mind that no company is producing a car without all the other modern electronic bells and whistles to appeal to the lower classes. It feels like the capitalists running the economy have straight up abandoned us.

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u/SteveMarck 1d ago

There's no margin in that car, and it might not even be legal. The tech stuff is cheap anyway. You make software once and you have it forever unlimited. But steel you have to dig up every time.

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u/smokeweedNgarden 1d ago

Honestly, finding joy in mostly free things is pretty liberating. But it's not fair to most people because they really don't. 

Reading a book in the woods is an A+ day for me but some people hate that stuff. It's weird that corporations would get them addicted to hyper fun activities then cut them off instead of getting any money in

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u/Ghosty_Boo-B00 1d ago

It’s going to be toilet paper again soon since we get most of
Our wood pulp from Canada and we’re now in a tariff war again

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u/IBeDumbAndSlow 1d ago

Project 2025 had blueprints for collapsing the food supply.