Why Chinatown Produce Is Cheap (2016)

this rarely gets mentioned in these articles but it&#x27;s extremely important. The Chinese food culture is substantially different than the Western food culture, and I don&#x27;t just mean the items on the menu.<p>Chinese don&#x27;t eat raw foods at all, and especially not vegetables, which they correctly (by the standards of Chinatown produce) view as being unsanitary until thoroughly cooked.<p>They have created a market that is efficient by eschewing the standards of sanitation that Western produce markets use. That&#x27;s not to say that this is <i>bad</i>. Their food culture is fully adapted to it and it doesn&#x27;t produce epidemics of food-borne illness in their community because they handle and cook food appropriately. The same approach wouldn&#x27;t work if it was mostly Westerners buying the food though. A taste for raw baby kale salad makes this entire approach to food marketing non-viable.

Ha! I figured out the reason even before I read the whole article... always a gratifying feeling. That said, there are tons of food hacks if you want to save 30-40% and have a strong stomach. Buy your cashews, cumin seeds, turmeric, groundnuts, papayas, guavas from the nearby Indian store - there&#x27;s tons of them in CA. Most of these are sourced from Fiji, Philippines, India etc, whereas Safeway would source cumin from Oregon and charge $5 per ounce. You can literally get a whole pound of cumin for that price - but no, you don&#x27;t get the &quot;organic certification&quot;, or the bar code or the USDA assurance sticker or anything that lets you know where the cumin came from in case you get some food poisoning and want to lodge a complaint. The Indian store lady dips into a giant cumin bottle and pours out a pound of cumin and takes $5 cash and no sales tax ofcourse wink wink. So yeah, depends on your ethics and cash situation. Say you want a little pep in your walk and like some extra endurance - used to be ephedra was legal and you could pop into your Chevron foodmart and buy a pill. Now it&#x27;s no longer legal, so you go to the Chinese store and get the strongest ephedra tea - free market ftw. Ofcourse if you brew something strong and land up in the hospital, the medic can&#x27;t really help you since who knows where that tea came from and what else is in it. Literally no American supermarket can compete with an Indian store when it comes to say cashews. Your Target gives you two pounds of cashews for $15. The Indian store gives you two kgs... that&#x27;s 4.4 pounds! Ofcourse it won&#x27;t come in a nice airtight jar with feel-good marketing on why you must eat your servings of USDA nuts for optimum health - instead, it&#x27;s going to be wrapped up in a cone made of newspaper.<p>If you have a &quot;tropical palate&quot; and a strong stomach, you should definitely try some of these shady joints. It&#x27;s a trip.

This feels like the proverbial dollar left on the street that economists say should not exist, so I&#x27;m racking my brain trying to figure out what&#x27;s stopping chains from replicating this. I wonder whether this alternate network is as scrupulous about source tracking and food safety regulations. Those costs could be driving up prices on the traditional retail side.

Amazing how they manage to stay so cheap while hiring people at at least minimum wage, with valid work contracts, while paying all relevant taxes and not having any ethnically discriminatory hiring practices.<p>That&#x27;s the real miracle.

Fascinating. I&#x27;m wondering if there&#x27;s an opportunity for a tech startup to replicate this network more generally. I could see the network connecting the sellers with the farmers directly, plus coordinating delivery of the veggies... it&#x27;s an easier problem than ubereats delivery as you&#x27;ve got fewer nodes. Maybe you even skip the sellers entirely, which basically gets you to CSA boxes but those always felt expensive to me (I&#x27;m not sure why)

(2016)<p>previous discussion of the WSJ article mentioned in the text: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11981063" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11981063</a>

I think another reason chinatown markets (and mexican mercados) are cheaper is also because they tend to buy up a wider grade selection of produce. When I walk traditional markets every tomato, onion, cucumber is roughly the same size and shape. In a Chinese market they often have a wide variety of sizes and shapes. This is way closer to what actually gets grown. Not every vegetable grows the same size and shape though you may think that going into a normal supermarket.

In other words, ultra-small ultra-low-overhead businesses are good for consumers.<p>Problem is, most places in America there&#x27;s a certain baseline red tape cost that exceeds the budget of these types of operations.<p>In an unrestrained market environment, people can make money by eating up little inefficiencies like a swarm of ants. When you make the baseline energy cost of existence too high (e.g. with onerous incorporation or registration or licensing requirements), you kill off all the ants. Now those small but myriad inefficiencies go unconsumed, and society loses.

Paying non union, employees who might be working under the table as they are not authorised to work is part of it, same with some restruants.<p>Many regular supermarkets pay a living wage.

<p><pre><code> &gt; she always assumed the low prices &gt; were a reflection of subpar produce </code></pre> Betting against Chinese love of food seems a poor choice

One thing this article doesn&#x27;t assert too strongly is simply that many western supermarkets just don&#x27;t have veggies that are quite common in other countries. e.g. Gherkins is quite common in India (fresh ones, not the pickled variety), tender young Okra (without the coarse threads that make it hard to chew) and something which is apparently called &quot;Chinese Green Beans&quot; but which is pretty commonly used in my native cuisine.

Maybe this is true in New York, but the produce at the local Chinese markets where I live is not particularly fresh and in some cases you can tell from the packaging that it was intended for sale at a different supermarket (I assume this indicates it wasn&#x27;t fresh enough for the original place of sale because it always looks just short of rotten in these cases).

I moved to lower Lower Eastside just a few blocks away from Chinatown two years ago. I can&#x27;t really say the article is on the money. I was really excited when I moved here first and thought the grocery shopping would be the one of the pro&#x27;s. While I don&#x27;t cook home (so not much veggie), but I used to buy a lot of ready-to-eat fruits and snacks. Perhaps it&#x27;s that particular supermarket I visit in Chinatown, but they cut corners and the quality is fairly low. I learned to never to buy anything packaged by the supermarket themselves. Perhaps, I should travel a bit further into Chinatown to enjoy the benefit of such supply network. But for now now, I go shop at the Whole Foods or Eastside Market for all my needs. I no longer want to mess with what I eat.

Cheaper and better? That defies efficient markets theory. I guess any sufficiently advanced social network is indistinguishable from magic.

This resonates with HN article this week end talking about a lot of recent startups simply being centralizing rent seekers. The Saveur article shows that an &quot;end to end&quot; model can be cheaper, at least for a specific solution point (to whit: get it fresh, cook, don&#x27;t worry so much about the cleanliness of the rind). While the centralized solution that serves most grocery stores costs more and promotes boring sameness.<p>Sometimes I want that sameness, but as the economy, or the Internet architecture for that matter, centralizes around a few corporations you end up with a bland world.

TLDR;<p>Chinatown sources from local small producers and are able to get big discounts. They also reduce cost by skimping on things like good furniture, printed labels, credit cards etc and keep their margins to 10-12% over wholesale.

I live in northern Virginia, and we have a lot of great Korean markets to shop at, and they&#x27;re always slammed with people. It&#x27;s rare that you go into the produce section and see less than two dozen people browsing. The local chain store might have 2 at any given time. And the prices and selection are incredible. The only downside is you have to do a little bit more picking to get ripe&#x2F;fresh&#x2F;good looking produce.

Off-topic:<p>Is there a browser plugin that lets you vote on how annoying a site&#x27;s ads are, so it can warn you before you go to the site? I have a feeling that kind of pressure could change the way ads are displayed, but without it we&#x27;re going to keep getting our screens engulfed by an ad with no idea how to close it.

&gt; Chinatown’s 80-plus produce markets are cheap because they are connected to a web of small farms and wholesalers that operate independently of the network supplying most mainstream supermarkets.<p>I don&#x27;t get it.<p>Why can this web of small farms and wholesalers sell produce for less than normal suppliers can?<p>If Chinatown&#x27;s suppliers are so much cheaper, why don&#x27;t the other supermarkets use them too?<p>If Chinatown is consuming the entire output of these suppliers (explaining why the other supermarkets can&#x27;t use the same source) then why don&#x27;t the suppliers raise their prices? Even if some of the chinatown vendors could no longer afford the food, surely someone else would buy it.<p>Do plywood shelves at a grocery really make a noticeable difference in food prices?

A lot of Asian supermarkets have great fish at low prices. I&#x27;d like to think its because of informal network of small independent local producers but I suspect its illegally caught by sketchy fishing fleets. Can anyone put my mind at ease?

Also tax evasion and under the table worker.

280+ comments and no one has mentioned roughly how much cheaper Chinatown produce is relative to other NYC grocery stores (I didn&#x27;t see it in the article either). Anyone care to say?

I have always liked to shop at some of these places.<p>I can find exotic stuff I need for a variety of Asian recipes that I cannot find elsewhere.

See also cheap bulk spices at Indian markets. They are a goldmine for stuff that can be costly elsewhere, even if you are not interested in Indian cuisine.<p>My theory is that, in addition to having the right connections for cheap import, their customer base probably demands a certain price point for bulk spices.

It&#x27;s not just the Chinese though. In Seattle, Rising Sun produce in Ravenna is often better than say Uwajimaya and other stores down in Chinatown.<p>That said, I found Chinatown to be the most interesting neighbourhood in Seattle :P

Where does the food in these secret warehouse networks come from? Is it actually equivalent in quality and oversight to the &quot;mainstream&quot; farm networks?

This doesn&#x27;t seem logical at all. Big chains usually have the lowest price, because they can enforce unfair deals on logistics and producers. Most things you buy cheaper from the super market than from the factory. Why should it be different with vegetables? It&#x27;s not like the garden is next to the Chinatown shop.<p>Also Chinese people are not known for their empathy. They are usually fighters. If they run more efficient than another shop&#x2F;chain they just conquer them. That they stay that small means they can&#x27;t beat the big chains.

The amount of secret networks and deals Chinese&#x2F;Chinese Americans pull off is astounding. I don&#x27;t mean that in a negative way, I&#x27;m mostly impressed (I live near Brooklyn&#x27;s Chinatown).

As a fish loving Indian, I was totally surprised to see that in Capitalist America the choice of fish was absolutely pathetic. At American fish places you only get &quot;shrimps&quot; may be &quot;large shrimps&quot; and &quot;small shrimps&quot;. Salmon, Bass, Red Snapper and just few handful of usual fish. My small village fish market offers at least 20 varieties of fish in India&#x27;s coastal region. A proper fish market would offer at least 100.<p>Then I entered 99Ranch and since then my respect of my eastern neighbours has gone up significantly. Not only they had Tiger prawns and King Mackerel, they actually understood the difference between Pampino and Pomphret.