I live in the U.S but I am Asian. When I visit Asian countries I’m always surprised that food overall (groceries and restaurants) tends to be cheaper, even in wealthier countries like Korea and Japan. Even without tipping culture they seem to be able to pay their workers and keep prices low? How do they do it?
In: Economics
This is pretty straightforward. Cost of goods to grow food is pretty low because if we’re being a little reductive you just need dirt, water, and seed or breed. All those things are cheap.
What can quickly get expensive is human labor. We’re not just talking about the farmer, but we’re talking about every bit of human labor along the way. People plant seeds or breed livestock. People water and feed their product whether its crop or livestock. People process the crop or the livestock when it is ready to go to market. People distribute the product to market.
When you’re buying a product in an expensive locale like the US, a lot of those steps that happened along the way required labor from people in those more expensive locales. When you’re buying a product in an inexpensive locale roughly the same steps all still happened, but they were paying for labor from that inexpensive market.
Think of it this way. You’re in a grocery store. You buy a bag of rice. That bag of rice was brought into the store by a trucker driver, then shelved by a stock boy, and now as you’re at the counter it is bagged by a cashier. All those people want to be able to afford their own bag of rice at some point too because they have to eat but they also have to be able to afford rent, power, water, or whatever they need in order to live wherever this store is. If this store is in Los Angeles then that truck driver, stock boy, and cashier are all going to ask for higher compensation than they would if this store was in rural Korea because cost of living is lower in rural Korea.
TL DR; food is cheaper in those locales because labor is less expensive in those locales, and labor is less expensive in those locales because cost of living (including cost of food) is less expensive. If that sounds circular then yeah, that’s how economics works.
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