This says it's using AmazonBrandFilter's list of brands. Why would we use/support this chrome extension instead of the upstream one [1] which is actually doing the important maintanance task?
"Knockoff" seems to be literally describing itself.
It seems like AmazonBrandFilterList is one of the lists they use. It also seems like there a couple extra features that doesn't have. Either way, it's not like they're hiding the use of it. It would be another thing if it was being secret about it.
On top of that, it has a more restrictive license than AmazonBrandFilter. Given this appears to be a very simple AI project, why not just reimplement any missing functionality from AmazonBrandFilter into something under a free license? The most difficult to duplicate component is MIT.
I should check my purchase history, but I probably use Amazon more for buying stuff that they would classify as a "Knockoff", but isn't (i.e. there is no established brand they are knocking off). Because for legitimate brands, I try to simply buy elsewhere.
Cuts two ways. Why should I pay $200 for a BigBrand dog bed if this knockoff site shows SHRDLU has the same thing for $40? We all know that BigBrand gets it from the same supplier.
The real knockoff problem I see is that you buy what you think is BigBrand and get shipped Knockoff because someone is mingling inventory.
Whenever I see keyboard-mashed company names I know I can go to Temu/AliExpress and get it directly there. You can tell when they are all sourcing from the same batch and instead of paying $40 the same thing is often $3.28 if you don't mind waiting a week.
I used to do this more often, but I find the gap is narrowing a lot. Most of the time I find I don't save enough to justify getting it in two weeks over 1 day.
> We all know that BigBrand gets it from the same supplier
We don't know that. Look at Project Farm's review videos, he tests a lot of knock off and brand name products and it's almost always a get what you pay for situation. Knockoffs look similar, but use cheaper materials almost always.
The question is almost always, do you need the quality that you get from name brand. Not "why can I get name brand quality of half price"
Are we talking knockoffs like actively pretending to be the brand, or knockoffs like an off-brand copy of the exact same product? It's rare to find quality that can only be found with one brand—and then, it's mostly extremely expensive consumer electronics.
Depends on your own taste for risk, should the knock off brand have worse QC: what big brand gets you is the ability to sue them should their products fail catastrophically or cause you harm:
I worked for a hardware startup ten years ago now, and a big problem that was rampant at the time (and seemingly has only gotten worse) is that basically the Contract Manufacturers (CMs) in China take the BOMs and plans they’re given, and since they already have the molds, the same product will mysteriously be produced with a knock-off name, within weeks of your product being produced in china. At the time (and still) I didn’t know enough about whether the CMs are doing it themselves or they’re selling the information to a company to produce, or what, but if you want to manufacture something in China, you’re begging for it to be copied immediately.
While I have my own disdain for the current length of copyright law, it’d be great if China at least had some variety of it. This sort of crap may be an eyesore for the big companies, but its a death-knell for small startups, and Amazon is enabling it.
Reminds me - I was working for a Canadian network equipment manufacturer and at one point a client in Asia was trying to get support for a bunch of units of uor hardware (modems). Long story short, turns out they bought knock offs that didn't even bother changing casing leaving contact info on modems for our company.
I remembering hearing from a former Cisco employee once that in the mid 00s this would happen to them and the knock off router manuals were literal photocopies of the Cisco ones with very half-assed attempts to block of Cisco.
I stopped buying from amazon unless its a known brand, anything random I am just buying from costco instead. Had enough of the trash, or used product i keep getting from amazon
I've used https://www.onlyamazingseller.com/ in the past, and while it doesn't show reliable third-party sellers (it shows only products sold directly by Amazon), it does get rid of much of the stuff I don't want to buy.
Even better, buy direct from the manufacturer instead of Amazon. I've found most of the time you get the same price and free shipping without giving Jeff Bezos a dime.
- Return experience is TERRIBLE. I'm not kidding, with Amazon you've got one click to a QR code and a UPS store dropoff. Some of these mfgs you are jumping hoops for a week plus! And then have to box, buy a label, often pay for shipping and more. IF you can even get in touch with someone.
- Shipping experience is TERRIBLE. How does FedEx stay in business? I'm serious - the express port of their name is a joke. Stuff will randomly get stuck in a warehouse for a week. I've had their call center tell me that for SURE it will be delivered x date (because the online tool shows that date) but the package is still out of state at 9PM. So they'd need to get it in state, then to distribution center and then to a truck to my house by midnight - surprise surprise that didn't happen.
- I've gotten used products from the mfg? Do they get amazon returns back and then try to ship direct with those? How does this work that the new product is under the amazon.com seller and the mfg has the USED?
- You get on more mailing lists going direct. ULINE and friends now ship me these huge catalogs following tiny tiny purchases. Catalogs are still a thing!
I bought a weed whacker directly from the maker about 5 years ago, and since then have received literal tons of their catalogues in my tiny mailbox. They send > 80% of all the mail I receive. I've regretted it ever since. Now I feel like I need to keep my address a secret unless there's a good reason not to. Amazon has had it since the last century and has never abused it.
I'd buy more from such if it was easy to hide my personal info from them.
This. Amazon has the best checkout and delivery system in the world, and that alone is worth a few extra dollars. The excess crap gets caught in the appropriate filters and I just end up with my item in a box.
That hasn't been my experience. They are rarely cheaper, especially once you include the shipping fee. And the shipping experience is lackluster most of the time, and downright frustrating a lot of the time.
I have tried desperately to do this and come up short about 75-80% of the time. I tried for years to buy local also and got screwed over every time I tried. Things just aren't like they used to be where people gave a shit about quality and service.
What do you mean? Where is the percentage of "75-80%" coming from? Local service is great, and I'm happy to pay a little extra to see my neighbors employed.
My biggest issue here is delivery date certainty. So often the manufacturer will list "2-5 day delivery" or similar. But no way to tell which side of the country they ship from.
I was the same way and got tired of it so I keep a layer in front of my life just like I do on the web with multiple identities, emails, VPNs, etc.
I pay $100 per year for a private mailbox near my apartment, registered under an LLC with a registered agent (not in my name and in another state) where I get deliveries in that name. that llc uses a fintech bank where I can spin up as many debit/credit cards as I want, I rotate them just like api keys. I also keep a twilio phone number that only receives texts with a webhook that goes to my discord. any sort of loyalty card etc goes under that number. I can enable phone calls if I need to, and of course a 2nd/3rd email account attached to this.
> Amazon has excellent and consistent customer support
We've been dealing with different Amazons. Also, credit cards in my experience are built to deal with that stuff. Have you encountered protection issues by using your credit card? The only chargeback I've initiated was against Amazon and my credit card company handled it swimmingly.
Most of the time you’re giving that info to stripe or Shopify. But also credit cards are protected - you can dispute charges - so it’s not a huge risk IMO
I often find things are more expensive on the manufacturer's site than they are on Amazon or Ebay. I assume because they know you are ding price comparisons on marketplaces.
I often try to do this, but it's rarely cheaper, and occasionally much worse. I recently bought a beach tent directly from the manufacturer, and when it showed up, it had a big Amazon sticker on it, and didn't actually have the product inside; it was clearly something Amazon had returned to them. Meanwhile, they haven't responded to e-mails and there's no way to return it, so, uh, I just got scammed.
I keep doing it anyway, but it's certainly not because it's a better or cheaper experience.
If you see something that looks like obvious dropshipping, chances are you can find it for a fraction of the price without the middleman on Temu, AliExpress or DHGate.
I own a dozen Amazon brands that are probably largely of the kind that OP would want this to get rid of (sourced from China, not name brands by any stretch, only sell on Amazon). For the most part I would say this extension is not a great idea (obviously very biased!), since I purchase brands that have high quality products that typically have pretty poor branding/online presence that I can improve. My stuff is very frequently of the same quality (and sometimes from the same factories) as much pricier stuff but at a lower cost. To some of those suggesting you can get this stuff on Aliexpress, in some cases that is true, though of course the big benefit of buying from Amazon is that there's no risk to buying no-name stuff because if it's junk you can return it.
In any case, I gave this a try to see which of my brands it would filter out. It's weirdly inconsistent.
One of my brands was filtered out because there's no brand name at the beginning of the listing. That's just an outright bad rule, because Amazon generally decides whether or not the brand name appears first. This brand is trademarked and has Brand Registry, so it qualifies for that treatment, just not getting it right now. Also, a number of other brands without brand names did not get the same treatment (and these are very much the type of products this is designed to filter out).
On another one, it misunderstood the product model, which is at the beginning of the product name, as the brand and hid it based on that. That one was a bad one because the model is only three characters, which is extremely unlikely for a brand name.
One product I sell is a hunting accessory, so I did some searches there. It hid everything by the brand KUIU, which is a well-known and very high end hunting brand. Definitely wrong there.
So yeah, sort of an interesting idea, but the execution is pretty sloppy and the creator clearly doesn't have a full understanding of how Amazon listings work.
These vibe-coded, LLM-generated websites look ALL the same, lol. They have the exact same tells nowadays. The output of LLM's in web-site generation used to vary quite a bit last year but now they all produce the same generic soup. Some sort of model collapse is happening.
After 30 years of the web, a "common" component model and "UI standard" is now inadvertently metastasizing into existence. Sadly, it is a crappy standard with many of the UI decisions (cards with icons on their own line) being utterly brain-dead.
Going by the "How it works" section of the GitHub page (not the web site), it appears to be both whitelists and blacklists, plus heuristics for unknown brands to flag the keyboard-mash brands that are almost certainly junk.
I wonder why in the age of LLMs these brand names continue to exist. I just prompted deepseek in Chinese to give me some novel brand names in english for a lighted dog collar (something I recently searched for and saw the crazy brands), and it gave me a bunch of plausible sounding names. Granted, not particular inspired, but names that an English speaker would recognize as reasonable brand names
They want to sign up for the Amazon Brand Registry[1], which requires a valid US trademark, and these crazy names are approved faster because they're obviously unique. See NYT[2]
Reality: A few years ago this would have been relevant. Most people can only afford the knockoffs now.
My Chipotle meal cost $17 yesterday. It used to cost $8. The $9 difference is going to come out of my budget to buy authentic brands and buy local stuff.
If you don't like it, make my Chipotle meal $8 again or double my salary, reduce my taxes, and don't pull random geopolitical shit that crashes the S&P500 every other weekend, and then we'll talk.
That sounds really cheap, if you don't consider that you need to do all the shopping, you need to prepare all the food, and deal with probably a bunch of food waste.
Are you someone who has the capability to be constantly making money any time you want to? If not and you just have a normal 9-5 job or something close to it, you have plenty of time to shop for an hour once a week, then spend 10-30 minutes a day making your own lunches and dinners and still come ahead financially -- way, way ahead.
I have no idea where you're coming from with the "dealing with food waste" part so I'll just ignore it.
Do you enjoy eating just rice wrapped in a tortilla or something? Burritos are a harsh illustration of the economy of scale. Doing a quick tally with sale prices, and I'd think buying all the ingredients to make one single burrito would be upwards of $20-25, at least. Never mind the time to cook each ingredient that needs to be cooked. And most of these supplies and prep are going to last what, ~4 days before they spoil?
Although honestly someone who repeatedly visits Chipotle for anything more than "convenient meal on a road trip" would probably enjoy just rice wrapped in a tortilla. Support your local burrito joint!
> And most of these supplies and prep are going to last what, ~4 days before they spoil?
Rice lasts a very long time. Tortillas last a long time in the fridge (you can probably freeze them?). Freeze the meat. Beans last forever. Sour cream and cheese last a long time in the fridge and you'll certainly use them for other things.
Guacamole/avocados/other veggies are potentially harder to deal with for long term storage, but that depends and it looks like there are some options. Salsa also keeps for many, many months.
As far as time goes, if you're single, many of the ingredients could be cooked in a batch and then frozen, even as whole burritos.
This is what you said: "Make your burrito or bowl at home, and it'll cost $4 or less"
That statement implies you can straightforwardly save by substituting that one meal with a made at home meal. The reality is much more complicated, as shown by your backpedaling to making several burritos and other meals.
I could just as easily lob that economic literacy jab right back at you. For example, perhaps OP has a burrito once a week, to break up the monotony of eating a home made sandwich every other day. That would be savvy, right?
You're not wrong. People are going to be on about "just cook at home" but the general point still is correct. Life has just become a lot more expensive.
We need to realize that the cost of food at grocery stores has gone up a lot too.
This says it's using AmazonBrandFilter's list of brands. Why would we use/support this chrome extension instead of the upstream one [1] which is actually doing the important maintanance task?
"Knockoff" seems to be literally describing itself.
[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/amazonbrandfilter/m...
It seems like AmazonBrandFilterList is one of the lists they use. It also seems like there a couple extra features that doesn't have. Either way, it's not like they're hiding the use of it. It would be another thing if it was being secret about it.
On top of that, it has a more restrictive license than AmazonBrandFilter. Given this appears to be a very simple AI project, why not just reimplement any missing functionality from AmazonBrandFilter into something under a free license? The most difficult to duplicate component is MIT.
I should check my purchase history, but I probably use Amazon more for buying stuff that they would classify as a "Knockoff", but isn't (i.e. there is no established brand they are knocking off). Because for legitimate brands, I try to simply buy elsewhere.
This is an example: https://www.amazon.com/MiiKARE-Universal-Rotating-Adjustable...
You'll find lots of different manufacturers selling this on Amazon, but there is no well known brand that makes these.
> This is an example: https://www.amazon.com/MiiKARE-Universal-Rotating-Adjustable...
i wonder if it would be faster to 3d print that gadget than amazon prime it
Cuts two ways. Why should I pay $200 for a BigBrand dog bed if this knockoff site shows SHRDLU has the same thing for $40? We all know that BigBrand gets it from the same supplier.
The real knockoff problem I see is that you buy what you think is BigBrand and get shipped Knockoff because someone is mingling inventory.
Whenever I see keyboard-mashed company names I know I can go to Temu/AliExpress and get it directly there. You can tell when they are all sourcing from the same batch and instead of paying $40 the same thing is often $3.28 if you don't mind waiting a week.
I used to do this more often, but I find the gap is narrowing a lot. Most of the time I find I don't save enough to justify getting it in two weeks over 1 day.
> We all know that BigBrand gets it from the same supplier
We don't know that. Look at Project Farm's review videos, he tests a lot of knock off and brand name products and it's almost always a get what you pay for situation. Knockoffs look similar, but use cheaper materials almost always.
The question is almost always, do you need the quality that you get from name brand. Not "why can I get name brand quality of half price"
He also routinely tests three or four identical products with nothing distinguishing beyond different paint jobs.
Yes, but those are three or four knock off products. The brand name is always different.
Are we talking knockoffs like actively pretending to be the brand, or knockoffs like an off-brand copy of the exact same product? It's rare to find quality that can only be found with one brand—and then, it's mostly extremely expensive consumer electronics.
Depends on your own taste for risk, should the knock off brand have worse QC: what big brand gets you is the ability to sue them should their products fail catastrophically or cause you harm:
https://www.geekwire.com/2019/lawsuit-ruling-dog-leash-purch...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1k2ydn1rz8o
It seems like the retailers can be held responsible should "ASDAS_A!kr" drop off the radar, but might still be easier to sue local.
(I know "local" companies still find ways to settle / weasel their way out of responsiblities, but at least you know where to reach them...)
I worked for a hardware startup ten years ago now, and a big problem that was rampant at the time (and seemingly has only gotten worse) is that basically the Contract Manufacturers (CMs) in China take the BOMs and plans they’re given, and since they already have the molds, the same product will mysteriously be produced with a knock-off name, within weeks of your product being produced in china. At the time (and still) I didn’t know enough about whether the CMs are doing it themselves or they’re selling the information to a company to produce, or what, but if you want to manufacture something in China, you’re begging for it to be copied immediately.
While I have my own disdain for the current length of copyright law, it’d be great if China at least had some variety of it. This sort of crap may be an eyesore for the big companies, but its a death-knell for small startups, and Amazon is enabling it.
Reminds me - I was working for a Canadian network equipment manufacturer and at one point a client in Asia was trying to get support for a bunch of units of uor hardware (modems). Long story short, turns out they bought knock offs that didn't even bother changing casing leaving contact info on modems for our company.
I remembering hearing from a former Cisco employee once that in the mid 00s this would happen to them and the knock off router manuals were literal photocopies of the Cisco ones with very half-assed attempts to block of Cisco.
China supports Chinese interests.
So far, you think there is some universalism sentiment. You're wrong.
I stopped buying from amazon unless its a known brand, anything random I am just buying from costco instead. Had enough of the trash, or used product i keep getting from amazon
I've used https://www.onlyamazingseller.com/ in the past, and while it doesn't show reliable third-party sellers (it shows only products sold directly by Amazon), it does get rid of much of the stuff I don't want to buy.
Even better, buy direct from the manufacturer instead of Amazon. I've found most of the time you get the same price and free shipping without giving Jeff Bezos a dime.
I've had bad experiances trying this:
- Return experience is TERRIBLE. I'm not kidding, with Amazon you've got one click to a QR code and a UPS store dropoff. Some of these mfgs you are jumping hoops for a week plus! And then have to box, buy a label, often pay for shipping and more. IF you can even get in touch with someone.
- Shipping experience is TERRIBLE. How does FedEx stay in business? I'm serious - the express port of their name is a joke. Stuff will randomly get stuck in a warehouse for a week. I've had their call center tell me that for SURE it will be delivered x date (because the online tool shows that date) but the package is still out of state at 9PM. So they'd need to get it in state, then to distribution center and then to a truck to my house by midnight - surprise surprise that didn't happen.
- I've gotten used products from the mfg? Do they get amazon returns back and then try to ship direct with those? How does this work that the new product is under the amazon.com seller and the mfg has the USED?
- You get on more mailing lists going direct. ULINE and friends now ship me these huge catalogs following tiny tiny purchases. Catalogs are still a thing!
Every time I do that I get frustrated:
- shipping sometimes goes to from day(s) to weeks
- suddenly their ads start going to email
- please review us emails
I'd rather bezos get his cut.
I bought a weed whacker directly from the maker about 5 years ago, and since then have received literal tons of their catalogues in my tiny mailbox. They send > 80% of all the mail I receive. I've regretted it ever since. Now I feel like I need to keep my address a secret unless there's a good reason not to. Amazon has had it since the last century and has never abused it.
I'd buy more from such if it was easy to hide my personal info from them.
Can't you get a few thousand dollars by suing them for spamming you?
Not for physical mail.
This. Amazon has the best checkout and delivery system in the world, and that alone is worth a few extra dollars. The excess crap gets caught in the appropriate filters and I just end up with my item in a box.
That hasn't been my experience. They are rarely cheaper, especially once you include the shipping fee. And the shipping experience is lackluster most of the time, and downright frustrating a lot of the time.
I have tried desperately to do this and come up short about 75-80% of the time. I tried for years to buy local also and got screwed over every time I tried. Things just aren't like they used to be where people gave a shit about quality and service.
What do you mean? Where is the percentage of "75-80%" coming from? Local service is great, and I'm happy to pay a little extra to see my neighbors employed.
They were talking about buying directly from the manufacturer (presumably to be delivered) instead of Amazon (definitely to be delivered).
You're talking about buying from a local shop. Unless that local shop is also the manufacturer, then that's a whole different discussion. :)
Well yeah, but GP also writes about local shops and complains about quality and service...
My biggest issue here is delivery date certainty. So often the manufacturer will list "2-5 day delivery" or similar. But no way to tell which side of the country they ship from.
I'd rather not spread out personal info like credit cards to more parties than necessary while Amazon has excellent and consistent customer support.
I was the same way and got tired of it so I keep a layer in front of my life just like I do on the web with multiple identities, emails, VPNs, etc.
I pay $100 per year for a private mailbox near my apartment, registered under an LLC with a registered agent (not in my name and in another state) where I get deliveries in that name. that llc uses a fintech bank where I can spin up as many debit/credit cards as I want, I rotate them just like api keys. I also keep a twilio phone number that only receives texts with a webhook that goes to my discord. any sort of loyalty card etc goes under that number. I can enable phone calls if I need to, and of course a 2nd/3rd email account attached to this.
> Amazon has excellent and consistent customer support
We've been dealing with different Amazons. Also, credit cards in my experience are built to deal with that stuff. Have you encountered protection issues by using your credit card? The only chargeback I've initiated was against Amazon and my credit card company handled it swimmingly.
Every time I talk to them I ask for a gift card for compensation for whatever problem and they give it to me.
Credit cards are pretty locked down, you can't connect to that network without a verified identity to be sued when unauthorized charges are made.
Many CC let you generate one time use CC numbers if you’re actually concerned about manufactures information security.
Most of the time you’re giving that info to stripe or Shopify. But also credit cards are protected - you can dispute charges - so it’s not a huge risk IMO
I feel like a better solution would have been anonymized/single use card numbers.
Sometimes I try to do this, and they fulfill through their Amazon store anyway.
I often find things are more expensive on the manufacturer's site than they are on Amazon or Ebay. I assume because they know you are ding price comparisons on marketplaces.
amazon shipping speed, return policies, and customer support are simply too good.
I often try to do this, but it's rarely cheaper, and occasionally much worse. I recently bought a beach tent directly from the manufacturer, and when it showed up, it had a big Amazon sticker on it, and didn't actually have the product inside; it was clearly something Amazon had returned to them. Meanwhile, they haven't responded to e-mails and there's no way to return it, so, uh, I just got scammed.
I keep doing it anyway, but it's certainly not because it's a better or cheaper experience.
And do the same for knockoffs as well.
If you see something that looks like obvious dropshipping, chances are you can find it for a fraction of the price without the middleman on Temu, AliExpress or DHGate.
How can a HDJWNSK brand gain our trust and become respected if we're not even trying its products?
By word of mouth, HDJWNSK just rolls off the tongue.
It cant get trust, as it disappears after a month.
I own a dozen Amazon brands that are probably largely of the kind that OP would want this to get rid of (sourced from China, not name brands by any stretch, only sell on Amazon). For the most part I would say this extension is not a great idea (obviously very biased!), since I purchase brands that have high quality products that typically have pretty poor branding/online presence that I can improve. My stuff is very frequently of the same quality (and sometimes from the same factories) as much pricier stuff but at a lower cost. To some of those suggesting you can get this stuff on Aliexpress, in some cases that is true, though of course the big benefit of buying from Amazon is that there's no risk to buying no-name stuff because if it's junk you can return it.
In any case, I gave this a try to see which of my brands it would filter out. It's weirdly inconsistent.
One of my brands was filtered out because there's no brand name at the beginning of the listing. That's just an outright bad rule, because Amazon generally decides whether or not the brand name appears first. This brand is trademarked and has Brand Registry, so it qualifies for that treatment, just not getting it right now. Also, a number of other brands without brand names did not get the same treatment (and these are very much the type of products this is designed to filter out).
On another one, it misunderstood the product model, which is at the beginning of the product name, as the brand and hid it based on that. That one was a bad one because the model is only three characters, which is extremely unlikely for a brand name.
One product I sell is a hunting accessory, so I did some searches there. It hid everything by the brand KUIU, which is a well-known and very high end hunting brand. Definitely wrong there.
So yeah, sort of an interesting idea, but the execution is pretty sloppy and the creator clearly doesn't have a full understanding of how Amazon listings work.
These vibe-coded, LLM-generated websites look ALL the same, lol. They have the exact same tells nowadays. The output of LLM's in web-site generation used to vary quite a bit last year but now they all produce the same generic soup. Some sort of model collapse is happening.
After 30 years of the web, a "common" component model and "UI standard" is now inadvertently metastasizing into existence. Sadly, it is a crappy standard with many of the UI decisions (cards with icons on their own line) being utterly brain-dead.
Pour one out for anyone who hoped to start a new brand.
Especially those who planned to use a random password generator to come up with their brand name
We need this but for books. These days it is impossible to buy any programming related book that is not a bootleg copy.
I'd be interested to know how this works. Whitelist? Blacklist? Something else?
Edit: appears to be using blacklists.
Going by the "How it works" section of the GitHub page (not the web site), it appears to be both whitelists and blacklists, plus heuristics for unknown brands to flag the keyboard-mash brands that are almost certainly junk.
I wonder why in the age of LLMs these brand names continue to exist. I just prompted deepseek in Chinese to give me some novel brand names in english for a lighted dog collar (something I recently searched for and saw the crazy brands), and it gave me a bunch of plausible sounding names. Granted, not particular inspired, but names that an English speaker would recognize as reasonable brand names
They want to sign up for the Amazon Brand Registry[1], which requires a valid US trademark, and these crazy names are approved faster because they're obviously unique. See NYT[2]
[1]: https://sell.amazon.com/brand-registry
[2]: https://archive.is/IQs4i / https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-co...
Don't give them ideas.
Now we just need GitHub Without the Vibes
Reality: A few years ago this would have been relevant. Most people can only afford the knockoffs now.
My Chipotle meal cost $17 yesterday. It used to cost $8. The $9 difference is going to come out of my budget to buy authentic brands and buy local stuff.
If you don't like it, make my Chipotle meal $8 again or double my salary, reduce my taxes, and don't pull random geopolitical shit that crashes the S&P500 every other weekend, and then we'll talk.
That is because the value of the dollar is half what it used to be. In other words, inflation has been 20% per year for 5 years.
So why do they keep telling us it's 4%?
Depending on your date range, much of this difference might be the same inflation that has happened everywhere in the market.
Make your burrito or bowl at home, and it'll cost $4 or less.
That sounds really cheap, if you don't consider that you need to do all the shopping, you need to prepare all the food, and deal with probably a bunch of food waste.
This was actually tried. Cheaper and healthier
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRtoUoBgjDw
Are you someone who has the capability to be constantly making money any time you want to? If not and you just have a normal 9-5 job or something close to it, you have plenty of time to shop for an hour once a week, then spend 10-30 minutes a day making your own lunches and dinners and still come ahead financially -- way, way ahead.
I have no idea where you're coming from with the "dealing with food waste" part so I'll just ignore it.
is this your first time being introduced to the concept of cooking?
Why is it a sin in America to take advantage of economies of scale for cooking but not for anything else?
Do you enjoy eating just rice wrapped in a tortilla or something? Burritos are a harsh illustration of the economy of scale. Doing a quick tally with sale prices, and I'd think buying all the ingredients to make one single burrito would be upwards of $20-25, at least. Never mind the time to cook each ingredient that needs to be cooked. And most of these supplies and prep are going to last what, ~4 days before they spoil?
Although honestly someone who repeatedly visits Chipotle for anything more than "convenient meal on a road trip" would probably enjoy just rice wrapped in a tortilla. Support your local burrito joint!
> And most of these supplies and prep are going to last what, ~4 days before they spoil?
Rice lasts a very long time. Tortillas last a long time in the fridge (you can probably freeze them?). Freeze the meat. Beans last forever. Sour cream and cheese last a long time in the fridge and you'll certainly use them for other things.
Guacamole/avocados/other veggies are potentially harder to deal with for long term storage, but that depends and it looks like there are some options. Salsa also keeps for many, many months.
As far as time goes, if you're single, many of the ingredients could be cooked in a batch and then frozen, even as whole burritos.
[delayed]
But you wouldn't be making a single burrito. You'd be making several over several days, and/or using the leftover ingredients for other meals.
Economic literacy is truly dead, isn't it? Good lord.
This is what you said: "Make your burrito or bowl at home, and it'll cost $4 or less"
That statement implies you can straightforwardly save by substituting that one meal with a made at home meal. The reality is much more complicated, as shown by your backpedaling to making several burritos and other meals.
I could just as easily lob that economic literacy jab right back at you. For example, perhaps OP has a burrito once a week, to break up the monotony of eating a home made sandwich every other day. That would be savvy, right?
You're not wrong. People are going to be on about "just cook at home" but the general point still is correct. Life has just become a lot more expensive.
We need to realize that the cost of food at grocery stores has gone up a lot too.
What an awesome extension!