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Re:Are Mail-Order Meal Kits Doomed? by roel_v on Tuesday February 26, 2019 @06:46PM (#19259524)
"Almost supermarket prices"

This is the problem - it's not going to be 'almost supermarket prices'. It'll be a 10-20% markup, which is a lot for food.

Re:Are Mail-Order Meal Kits Doomed? by Uhhrrr on Wednesday February 27, 2019 @03:58PM (#19266868)
But it's not necessarily so much if it saves me an hour of driving and shopping.
Re:Are Mail-Order Meal Kits Doomed? by roel_v on Wednesday February 27, 2019 @07:31PM (#19268130)
People don't value their time like that, at least, most of them don't. I mean, some do, but at my hourly rate the time I spend on driving and shopping is much more than its cost and I still balk at paying e5 for grocery deliveries, and I program economic models for a living! (instead I always order a few products that give me free delivery, and/or select a not so popular delivery time slot).

Point being, economic modeling and naively assigning a time value equal to or even just related to people's normal hourly wages is - well - naive, and does not yield accurate representations of real world behaviors.

Here's another example: I used to have a cleaner who I'd pay e10/hour. She'd park across the street from my house, paid parking, e6 per day. There was free parking available at 10 minutes walking distance. So for 20 minutes of walking, she'd save 6 euros, i.e. e18/h, almost double what she could make from her actual work! And yet she continued to pay for parking, even after I did this math for her. Point being: people are sensitive to costs in very non-intuitive (some might say: irrational, but I don't like the connotations of that word) ways.