@miki One could argue food factories (restaurants) make much better food than an average person, but they don't scale very well. Still an interesting question why not.

@modulux Why are restaurants so expensive, compared to homemade meals, then? I don’t think that buying a chair from Ikea is much less economical than making one from scratch, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was cheaper. This is not the case with restaurants. I know why it happens, and taxes and overregulation are a much bigger part of the answer than evil, profit-seeking capitalists, especially in that industry, but why does this apply to restaurants specifically, but not furniture?

@modulux One interesting difference is that furniture, clothes and phones can be made mostly by machines and/or cheap labor abroad, while restaurants, by necessity, have to hire expensive, fussy employees in the city where they’re located, which causes them to price relatively to local prices, not global ones. Restaurants in San Francisco *need* to set higher prices than restaurants in a small town in Russia, because rent in California is more expensive than rent in Russia, and so Californians demand higher wages than Russians. The price, relative to your salary, will be roughly the same wherever you go, but the absolute price will be much different, just as your salary is much different depending on where you live. Phones and clothes don't have that problem, they can be manufactured exclusively where manufacturing is cheapest, and then sold at similar absolute, not salary-relative prices across the world.