> And for San Franciscans, the price on the menu is rarely the price you pay. Add in sales tax, a default 18-20% tip on the tablet screen, an SF Mandate or Cost of Living Fee, and 8.625% sales tax. Soon that seemingly cheap $15 lunch might be $20.
This is a key metric that the article doesn't properly account for when it comes to food prices. The asshole restaurateurs got an exception to the anti "drip-pricing" law that required all fees to be rolled into the listed cost: https://oag.ca.gov/hiddenfees
A significant portion of the bottom and middle segments of the restaurant industry have been enshittified. Lower quality, less service, and higher prices.
Meal prepping, cooking at home, and fine dining only.
This tracks with.... basically everything except the official numbers. I routinely see people who record their grocery prices finding increases that start in the 40% range. Certainly true for soda and snacks in my experience.
There's a new second-order concern where I'm now alarmed by low prices. For example: I have no idea what johnsonville did to keep their brats at $4.99 over the past 5 years while the more local ones shot to $9-11, but it makes me grossed out and skeptical.
As the article notes, opposite effect in tech. I was perusing ipad mini and mac mini yesterday and couldn't believe what I paid $500 for in 2021. The amount of apple you get for $350 on the refurb market is absolutely batty. You can get a shitty intel mini for well under 100 bucks. Tempted to start slinging them around like chonky raspberry pis.
Yeah, my basket of goods hasn't changed and is closer to doubling in price comparing 2018 to today. Some items I've been tracking have quadrupled since 2010 or thereabouts. Your basic cup-of-noodles used to be $.20 to $.25 and is now at over $1. Beef prices are much like egg prices, quadrupling at best. Chicken is high but sales prices keep it at a modest doubling relative to previous sales for the most part. More like triple for whole chickens.
Expect the computer prices to rise since OpenAI bought out the next year's supply from two of the biggest RAM/NAND manufacturers in the world.
It’s not complicated. We also imported a lot of really cheap, high quality food from China. And now we don’t. Even if you personally were not buying Chinese tomatoes rebadged as Mexican in Grocery Outlet, the fact that they were one tenth the cost lowered prices on the produce you’ve been buying from Costco and Whole Foods. Indeed, the giant corporations have been litigating the tariffs issue as the single greatest cause. I think people just don’t comprehend that everything was imported, not just clothes and technology.
If you're referring exclusively to tariffs from the current admin, that doesn't really line up with the timeline on this, which started closer to the beginning of covid. I don't have a firm evidence-based take on the causality, but the vibes based take is a combination of actual input cost shock and bullwhip from covid, plus a lot of opportunism and greedflation/shrinkflation from corps that used the cover of the legitimate (BOM-driven) cost increases to squeeze hard on comparatively illegitimate cost increases. This situation was totally F'd way before 47 took office.
And then the tarrifs hit, which certainly does hurt. I was making desserts w nice belgian chocolate that went from $65 per 5lb to $90. So I'm not discounting the pain there, but the bulk of this effect seems to predate the tariffs, unless there are some from 46 admin or before that I'm not aware of.
COVID was a trade shock too. It's trade shocks. That's the word - I carefully did not say, tariffs are to blame. Trade shocks are. We are in full control of tariffs, today, so that matters, don't misunderstand me. But it's a 100% consistent story with COVID and tariffs: trade shocks.
Of course, if given the ability now, finally, to charge whatever retail wants, you could say it's opportunism. But they didn't have the ability to do that until the trade shocks.
The thing people are in denial about is that it's everything. You are saying Belgian chocolate. Some people say iPhones. Blah blah blah. I'm saying, literally everything. Everything physical had prices that had to compare to lower priced, high quality imports from China and southeast Asia. They think that a sticker that says Mexico on their fruit means Mexico. They think stickers don't lie! Do you see?
If you think about what they are actually trying to measure, it should also be clear that the primary goal of these statistics is to employ economists.
There is the raw price data, which is mostly bunk because it uses unrepresentative products. And there is obviously huge political pressure not to make basket adjustments that result in prices going up.
And then there are quality adjustments that are completely nonsensical. Worst example is obviously with something like medicine where it just isn't possible to compare the price of drugs that save lives that didn't exist fifty years ago.
Unfortunately, economists will forever be in the camp of not understanding the difference between what is measured and what can be useful (and this has serious consequences for policy, for example the understanding within modern economics of long-term economic growth is close to zero which has led to policies focusing heavily on resource usage/intensity, essentially no different to North Korean economic policy in the 50s, due to significantly understated long-term estimates of growth). Hong Kong's government didn't produce economic statistics during its period of rapid growth for this reason.
The article claims "a burrito that cost $5.50 in 2014 is now $13.95" but I just checked one of the better SF Mission taquerias that has a web site with prices (Papalote) and used the Way-Back Machine and a carne asada burrito was $9.10 in Jan 2014 and is now $13.75. That's only 1.5X not 2.5X increase.
According to the BLS CPI calculator, that $9.10 in 2014 has $12.61 of buying power as of a couple months ago, or $13.75 in late 2025 dollars is $9.92 in 2014. The price has only exceeded inflation by 9%.
** edit in 2014 it was only $1 to make it "super" (cheese, guac, and crema) now it is $3.50. So more like $10 vs $17+ now
That may be. Okay, do you think you’d start looking for another opportunity if your cushy current job was like, “we’re reducing your salary by 9%”? You probably drive to a different gas station to save literally cents on a refill. It’s not so simple to frame the subjective feeling of what 9% is, even if I agree with you that the burrito isn’t that important.
There are multiple cheaper Taquerias within walking distance of Taqueria Cancun as well. The issue is non-natives have heard of Taqueria Cancun so their clientele is overwhelmingly transplants.
I quit eating out in the Bay Area over a year ago (except for socializing) because the prices feel painfully expensive to me while my pay hasn’t increased anywhere near the rate of restaurant price hikes. $14 for a burrito that cost roughly half as much a decade ago is painful, while my salary hasn’t doubled (I’m not a FAANG engineer). It’s not just burritos; it’s $10+ fast food combo meals, $15 deli sandwiches, etc. Prices steadily increased before COVID-19, but I didn’t feel priced out of eating out until sometime around 2022-23, when prices seemed to have exploded.
I make six figures but I have resorted to making eating out a rare treat in order for me to maintain my financial goals. This harkens back to my childhood in a low-income family, though I do remember my parents taking advantage of fast food deals in the 1990s and 2000s. I pack lunches and dinners to work, and I regularly cook, sometimes resorting to frozen meals for convenience’s sake. Eating out is reserved for social gatherings and for travel.
What’s interesting is the situation isn’t that much better in Sacramento, my hometown and where I visit family members. While Sacramento has lower housing prices, eating out isn’t substantially cheaper.
On the flipside, I’m in Tokyo now on a trip, where eating out feels cheap. $10 in the Bay Area or even Sacramento doesn’t get a satisfying meal these days (it’s not even enough for a fast food combo meal in many cases), but ¥1,500 (roughly $10) in Tokyo can buy a satisfying meal. Even ¥750 can buy a satisfying meal if one looks harder.
The situation in the Bay Area is demoralizing. I’m still in the Bay because of my career and because of social ties. It’s one thing to be priced out of buying a house, but it’s another thing to feel priced out of eating out. I don’t know if the situation is better in other parts of the United States, though; I’ve heard of people in other states complain about the high price of eating out these days.
It's not just SF. The $10 lunch of 2015 is now $15. Default tipping of 20% on things that we never tipped on in 2015 (takeout, fast food) is also adding alot to the total cost.
I don't know how people are affording the various delivery services and their fees on top of it.
A random stall by the road in LA will charge you $10 flat and the same one in SF will ask for $20. Neither will have a screen for tips. THAT would make your SF purchases simply stratospheric. I have lived in Jersey City, NJ and New Orleans, LA. Neither one holds a candle to LA prices outside some random roadside vendors. Walmarts in greater LA are vastly more expensive than those in NOLA. But grocery shopping in SF is straight up nightmare where they dont seem to respect Murican money all that much if at all. LA could never.
I see a lot of references to a “K-shaped” economy where there happens to be enough well-off people who are continuing to spend to push prices further upward, even though more people are forced to cut back since they can’t afford higher prices. There’s still enough people ordering $14 burritos and having them delivered in order to sustain both $14 burritos and the delivery companies.
It’s the same with the RAM situation. Prices will continue to skyrocket as long as there are enough buyers paying whatever prices the sellers set.
It's not just SF, I'm in Philly and the situation is the same for me. Eating out used to be almost a daily ritual, now I'm down to getting a pizza once a month at best.
It's funny watching people in this thread talk about food in LA being so much cheaper than in SF, because in my humble experience LA is also quite expensive compared to pretty much everywhere else in the country.
Are they talking about the city of Los Angeles or "LA"? LA can include Pomona or even San Bernardino, Riverside and OC. The prices in Silverlake are not the same as the prices in Pomona.
My local family owned tacoria now sells a $14 burrito in LA. The rest of the prices outlined in this article are also on par with LA pricing. It's hard to find a more expensive place to live the California.
LA has a low end to a lot of things that is simply missing and not an option in SF
Applebees is gonna be the same in both places but in LA you're gonna be much more able to find some categorically lower and lower priced end non-franchised place.
Seattle is truly the worst of all worlds on food. Base price, delivery price, hours, quality, variety, we are omnidirectionally chopped. I'm in Portland often, SF sometimes, LA rarely, and in all of them you can get better variety for less money later at night.
Yeah, Seattle food is a lost cause. There is really no reliable-available-everyday type places here anymore. It's all becoming "super quirky and artisanal-we pretend to grow our own lettuce and provide great vibe" $25(+tip please to support our essential workers) BLT. Then, predictably, the place closes down once their lease is over. Rinse and repeat.
Even the old reliable mom and pop owned places (Tiryaki, Thai, Pho, Sichuanese) have all been hallowed out by what's been happening in the ID and have been transitioning to that "great vibe" model too as a last-ditch effort to survive. There was a bit of a resurgence of food trucks those last couple of years, but laws limit what can be made in a food truck.
Moving from LA to SF will definitely give you a sticker shock. I used to buy nice large burritos in DTLA for $10 flat as recently as 2024. That's with tax. Later that year in SF a nice sandwich in random bodegas would cost well over $20(with tax). SF is probably the most eye wateringly expensive city in all of US. It definitely beats NYC.
Food is so much cheaper (and better) in LA than SF.
SF has such mediocre food for what you pay compared to any other city I’ve lived in*. You either have to fork over a few hundred to experience some of the stellar fine dining options in the city, or end up at some brunch place that’s probably pretty decent but you’re not leaving without at least $100 between two people.
The good food in the Bay Area I’ve always found to be in a shopping center or random places sprinkled all round the south bay and peninsula. Which, may sound similar to how LA is too, but I’d argue LA has overall a healthier food scene and variety of amazing food all within central LA - and most importantly, more affordable.
I love Seattle and it’s food but yeah it’s really expensive by default - I haven’t spent enough time in the Bay recently to compare but it feels equally pricy.
There are still reasonable & very good places though you just have to know.
Seattle used to have good food at reasonable prices. The extreme increase in costs, much of which is self-inflicted, has killed any restaurant that didn't both dramatically increase prices and cut corners on quality. Almost all of my favorite restaurants in the city are no longer around.
Seattle had much better food 15 years ago. The average food quality has noticeably deteriorated at the same time as prices skyrocketed. It is a shame really.
Unique to us, we have anomalously high minimum wages and a specific driver fairness pay law that makes for eye-watering delivery costs. This is on top of all of SF's problems w/ density, zoning, pricing out cheap indie spaces and the artist class that would put things in them, etc.
I’ve lived in both and I can say confidently I spent more on groceries, dining out, and drinks overall for me in Seattle…despite not feeling like the care or quality was always there. The hardest thing about Seattle for me was the lack of food variety. I could only eat so much teriyaki and pho..I know these are fighting words..but I actually would rank Portland above Seattle strictly on food alone. Portland has a great food scene, and it’s not obscenely priced.
Locals would (passive aggressively) remind me though how amazing Seattle is, and I should be grateful for no income tax
LA's food scene is unbelievably good. There are individual categories of food that other places have it beat on (for example, if I want a deep dish pizza, I'm probably better off going to Zachary's, or being in Chicago), but on a scale of "I can walk into a random restaurant with no research and expect a good to extremely good meal, with plenty of variety in such restaurants to choose from" to "Evansville, IN", I haven't been anywhere in the world that has LA beat.
> I haven't been anywhere in the world that has LA beat.
I feel the same way about NYC and NOLA. Both have world class cuisine and the sheer diversity of NYC food scene can't be found anywhere in the US. And for whatever reason NYC style pizza is not as ubiquitous outside the NYC-NJ area.You can definitely find such pizza in Boston, but it cannot be found in every little corner in LA for example.
I'm sure plenty of it boils down to matter of priorities (I feel the same way about breakfast burritos as you do about NYC style pizza), but I'd rank cities on my "diverse selection of quality restaurants, weighted for rarely walking into a bad restaurant" scale with LA, NYC, Istanbul, and Edmonton in order at the "I do not need to look up restaurants, I will walk into the next restaurant I see and be pleased" tier.
SF / Bay Area is best for a few specialties such as Super burritos, specialty Thai, & shawarmas. But LA is far better for quality and taste, along with a broader range of options.
Last year I attended the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco. This is a global event, in which people coming from different countries gather together to showcase their projects, chasing the dream. Many are independent developers, looking for the opportunity or investment that could change their life.
To me, the fact that crêpes were sold at 20$ and cans of coke at 10$ at the event was a shame. The organizers turned what was once a great event to bring everyone together into a way to scalp even more indie game developers. The price to partecipate as a company was so high that even big names boycott it.
> To me, the fact that crêpes were sold at 20$ and cans of coke at 10$ at the event was a shame...
They can price as such because such purchases tend to be expensable during business travel. Corporate conferences like GDC, RSA, etc aren't targeted at ICs - they're meant to essentially be a "safe space" for vendors to meet with prospective clients.
The other thing i've noticed about burritos is that more places take card or apple pay now. When I moved to sf in 2015 many of them were cash only, same with bars. I always assumed some amount of cash was being shuffled under the table.
And when you take cards or things like tap to pay, you pay higher rates as a biz which gets factored into overall prices. But...good luck being cash only in a lot of places.
I still carry cash because services like massage and housecleaning and some restaurants are happy to give good price breaks for cash payment, but I also love Apple Pay as a consumer.
I did something similar with restaurant prices 2 years ago. I would pick a random restaurant, and look at user uploaded photos of the menu. It was wild to see several places raise prices 2-3 times in just one year!
> San Francisco's Consumer Price Index increased just 2.5% year-over-year, well below the post-pandemic peaks. The Federal Reserve has declared victory. But is the inflation crisis really over?
Monetary policy is months to years ahead of what you see at the counter. See also the great money printing of 2020.
Feels like SF is over-exposed to specifically the OpenAI bubble/valuation popping. Outside of Mission Bay and SoMa, consumer spending and transit activity is still largely below pre-pandemic levels.
People in SF have more money (on average) and so those selling things there price higher. Compare the average salary for $jobdescription in SF vs Minneapolis. The entire (very small) region has been a bubble of higher income and prices for a long time and is getting worse. It feeds on itself like a ratchet.
I'm in the Minneapolis area, and $14 for a burrito seems completely normal. I might look at that price differently if my spacious, modern 2 bed apartment cost more than $2400.
I did. Did you notice that in the article they're talking about how the price (89%) spanned a decade at least? This seems to align with what I've said in my above coment.
>That's an 89% increase over a decade, and a 32% jump in just two years. San Francisco has the highest indexed concert ticket prices in the nation, roughly 29% above the norm, according to analysis from Tickethold.
Of course prices are increasing everywhere across the USA. I am just pointing out that San Francisco has always been significantly more expensive than everywhere else even before the last handful of years. And the reason for this is very clear: SF people have been paid more on average. Probably because the demand for the small area (so nice climate wise, job availability wise, etc) exceeds availability for those things and drives up other prices. And then the ratcheting like I said.
It's the cost. The high cost of labor, due to the high cost of real estate, due to the limited availability. This is ultimately the cause of booth what you've pointed out (the average high salaries in the area) AND the high cost of local goods and services. If we had more affordable real estate, the average income of residents wouldn't be so high, and the costs of other things also wouldn't be so high.
I'm not quite sure what official inflation index measures but you can get rough estimate of how much value dollar lost if you compare prices of bitcoin in dollars and euro at the beginning and the end of the year.
More concretely, if you converted 1btc to euro or dollar at the beginning of the year and back to btc at the end, how much fewer btc you'd end up with if you went through dollar as oppossed to euro.
If you shop at tech bro places you will get tech bro prices (I blame Mission Control). For example, Taqueria Cancun on 19th as mentioned versus other options a couple blocks east or south, or in the parts of SF that have remained Latiné.
Furthermore, a lot of these places continue to give an ethnic discount - especially when paying in cash - because someone of the same ethnic group will most likely remain a repeat customer and can induce negative WoM in tightly knit ethnic communities.
You might think that, but pretty much all studies show that minimum wage increases do not meaningfully impact prices. If you want you can read more about it at https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/wiki/faq_minwage/ which includes inline references.
Of course that's a factor. The article doesn't get into causes much, but this anecdote provides a bit of color and gives a vague sense of the scale of a few factors:
> Onions that cost $9 a sack before COVID now run $80. Beef is up more than $2 a pound, adding $6,000 to his monthly costs. Labor adds another $3,000.
Minimum wage goes up and buying power goes down as a result. This is the exact spiral that was predicted and dismissed as wrongthink. It has turned into another example of the Law of Salutary Contradiction:
The Law of Salutary Contradiction states that when an event or policy is initially dismissed as impossible or a conspiracy theory, it is later acknowledged as occurring—but framed as beneficial and morally justified.
This is false. When making a prediction like "X goes up and thus Y goes down", it matters what the relative changes are. The naysayers of increases in minimum wage say things like "if minimum wage goes up by $2.50, the cost of a fast food burger will become out of reach". In fact, the labor cost component of a fast food burger is minimal, and its price need only go up by a couple of cents in response (if, indeed, given the parent corporation's profits, it needs to go up at all).
Most serious studies of minumum wage effects conclude that while it does create upward price pressure, the results are small changes. It is essentially a redistributive, rather than inflationary, mechanism.
> In fact, the labor cost component of a fast food burger is minimal
Only if you are considering the wages of the employees at the fast food restaurant. But when it extends to employees involved in the logistics, processing, and farming its no longer minimal.
Tangentially, calling the rise in wages a "living wage" in SF/DC/NYC/etc. is folly to begin with and reveals minimum wage laws are based on sloganeering and not an economic analysis.
Employees involved in logistics are already likely earning more than minimum wage. Those involved in processing and farming likely do not live in the same jurisdictions.
Anyway ...
The basic idea is pretty simple: if you work 40 hours a week on minimum wage, you should be able to rent a reasonable condition 1 bedroom, 1 bathroom apartment relatively close to where you work.
That's not a "slogan", it's an idea that's been nominally central to The American Dream for more than a half century (but also largely untrue for the last few decades in many metropolitan areas).
The current expert consensus is that minimum wage increases do not meaningfully impact prices. If you want you can read more about it at https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/wiki/faq_minwage/ which includes inline references.
That’s just a way for sulking conspiracy theorists to say “I told you so” after they’ve moved their own goalposts 50 times and have broken-clocked their way into validating their own genius.
P.S. There are way too many variables for you to draw that kind of causation from the correlation, and you’re very naive to think you could.
For most poor people, raising the minimum wage doesn't mean increasing their income, but rather reducing it to zero. It literally prohibits workers from working for low wages, effectively putting them out of job.
It’s this already debunked by the famous Danish McDonald’s example?
This is also debunked simple napkin math, even if the napkin math is generous to skeptics.
Let’s say you buy a product for $100 with these example costs:
$30 of the price goes to labor
$30 of the price goes to rent/utilities/“keeping the lights on”
$30 of the price goes to inputs (materials)
$10 of the price goes to profit.
Let’s say wages go up by 20%.
Labor goes up to $36, now your price is $106.
Wages went up by 20% but your price went up by 6%.
Maybe we have to add the labor of the input materials, but a lot of input materials have low labor costs than finished products in the restaurant industry. E.g., a tortilla from a tortilla factory doesn’t have 30% of its price represented by labor cost, since it’s made on an automated assembly line. Still, for ease, let’s just say our input materials went up by ~6% to $32
At the end of the day your total cost of your product went up 8% but all the employees got a massive 20% raise with net positive income.
This is really disingenuous and doesn't debunk anything. Who claimed that wages going up 20% would raise the overall price of the product 20%? I'm sure you can find someone on Twitter who said that because you can find any dumb thing on Twitter, but it's not a main argument.
It's obvious to everyone that labor is just one cost to the seller. People only care that the price went up $6, not how that $6 happens to break down for the seller.
I disagree with your last paragraph. This math is not obvious to most laypeople.
Many people think that if a McDonald’s worker’s salary goes from $10 to $20 that their Big Mac will go from $4 to $8.
My napkin math is extremely generous to minimum wage haters. It assumes that everyone is getting a raise and therefore all costs of all goods are going up. It also assumes basically a worst case scenario restaurant industry wage breakdown.
For example, the S&P 500’s average labor cost as a percentage of revenue is only 12%.
I haven’t even brought up the fact that people making wages that are too low to survive on already use government benefit programs, like how Walmart is the largest employer consumer of food stamps in the country. Minimum wage could be one mechanism among others to reduce corporate welfare. Walmart doesn’t deserve to have its labor costs be subsidized by the taxpayer.
If I live in India the PlayStation 5 isn’t magically price reduced to $100 just because my income is lower. Similarly, it doesn’t magically become $5,000 if I live in Monaco.
You can imagine a person who thinks McDonalds' only cost for making a hamburger is the labor and they get the beef and bread for free. But hopefully there aren't many of those people.
And it's a distraction from the main point. Without needing to look at any specific math, higher labor costs will be generally passed onto the customer because profit is not allowed to go down. That's not a defense of low wages, it's just an illustration of where the power lies.
Ah, thanks! Looking through the Yelp pics, the price rose to $8 in 2016 and $9.50 by 2019. I expect Mission growth and rent increases have been a big factor.
So, ehhm, yeah, I sort-of question the data in this article. A US$5.50 burrito in Downtown SF in 2014? Nah... even Taco Bell takeout was already more expensive than that at the time.
Also: sure, some places overdo it on the pricing: I distinctly remember walking out of a Rotterdam (somewhere in The Netherlands) establishment due to them charging 25 Euros for a lunch sandwich, like 2 decades ago, despite this not being a fancy place at all. No inflation in sight, just greed and/or an inability to read the target audience...
Yeah, I did in fact read the original article, and the glossy (unreadable) and undated photographs did not convince me. Therefore, the Taco Bell comparison, and the rest of my comment.
Mind, that's a regular burrito and it was one of the cheaper ones in SF. El Farolito was around $6 at the time. La Taqueria started at $8 for people who liked to splurge. El Papolote's yuppie burritos were like $10.
The price at Taqueria Cancun jumped again in 2014 iirc after La Taqueria won best burrito in the US normalized the higher price and got them some press (Taqueria Cancun was in one of the final brackets).
> And for San Franciscans, the price on the menu is rarely the price you pay. Add in sales tax, a default 18-20% tip on the tablet screen, an SF Mandate or Cost of Living Fee, and 8.625% sales tax. Soon that seemingly cheap $15 lunch might be $20.
This is a key metric that the article doesn't properly account for when it comes to food prices. The asshole restaurateurs got an exception to the anti "drip-pricing" law that required all fees to be rolled into the listed cost: https://oag.ca.gov/hiddenfees
"But the restaurant industry is special."
Only in the restaurant world are customers on the hook for ensuring a living wage. It's a stupid system but is culturally entrenched.
A significant portion of the bottom and middle segments of the restaurant industry have been enshittified. Lower quality, less service, and higher prices.
Meal prepping, cooking at home, and fine dining only.
This tracks with.... basically everything except the official numbers. I routinely see people who record their grocery prices finding increases that start in the 40% range. Certainly true for soda and snacks in my experience.
There's a new second-order concern where I'm now alarmed by low prices. For example: I have no idea what johnsonville did to keep their brats at $4.99 over the past 5 years while the more local ones shot to $9-11, but it makes me grossed out and skeptical.
As the article notes, opposite effect in tech. I was perusing ipad mini and mac mini yesterday and couldn't believe what I paid $500 for in 2021. The amount of apple you get for $350 on the refurb market is absolutely batty. You can get a shitty intel mini for well under 100 bucks. Tempted to start slinging them around like chonky raspberry pis.
Yeah, my basket of goods hasn't changed and is closer to doubling in price comparing 2018 to today. Some items I've been tracking have quadrupled since 2010 or thereabouts. Your basic cup-of-noodles used to be $.20 to $.25 and is now at over $1. Beef prices are much like egg prices, quadrupling at best. Chicken is high but sales prices keep it at a modest doubling relative to previous sales for the most part. More like triple for whole chickens.
Expect the computer prices to rise since OpenAI bought out the next year's supply from two of the biggest RAM/NAND manufacturers in the world.
It’s not complicated. We also imported a lot of really cheap, high quality food from China. And now we don’t. Even if you personally were not buying Chinese tomatoes rebadged as Mexican in Grocery Outlet, the fact that they were one tenth the cost lowered prices on the produce you’ve been buying from Costco and Whole Foods. Indeed, the giant corporations have been litigating the tariffs issue as the single greatest cause. I think people just don’t comprehend that everything was imported, not just clothes and technology.
If you're referring exclusively to tariffs from the current admin, that doesn't really line up with the timeline on this, which started closer to the beginning of covid. I don't have a firm evidence-based take on the causality, but the vibes based take is a combination of actual input cost shock and bullwhip from covid, plus a lot of opportunism and greedflation/shrinkflation from corps that used the cover of the legitimate (BOM-driven) cost increases to squeeze hard on comparatively illegitimate cost increases. This situation was totally F'd way before 47 took office.
And then the tarrifs hit, which certainly does hurt. I was making desserts w nice belgian chocolate that went from $65 per 5lb to $90. So I'm not discounting the pain there, but the bulk of this effect seems to predate the tariffs, unless there are some from 46 admin or before that I'm not aware of.
COVID was a trade shock too. It's trade shocks. That's the word - I carefully did not say, tariffs are to blame. Trade shocks are. We are in full control of tariffs, today, so that matters, don't misunderstand me. But it's a 100% consistent story with COVID and tariffs: trade shocks.
Of course, if given the ability now, finally, to charge whatever retail wants, you could say it's opportunism. But they didn't have the ability to do that until the trade shocks.
The thing people are in denial about is that it's everything. You are saying Belgian chocolate. Some people say iPhones. Blah blah blah. I'm saying, literally everything. Everything physical had prices that had to compare to lower priced, high quality imports from China and southeast Asia. They think that a sticker that says Mexico on their fruit means Mexico. They think stickers don't lie! Do you see?
Chinese tomatoes?
The US doesn't import fresh tomatoes from China and never has. Nor does Mexico.
Frankly, the amount of food imported from China has always been relatively small. For instance, it made up just 1% of US food supplies in 2009.
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> According to official metrics
It's incredibly hard to have any actual faith in governmental assessments anymore.
If you think about what they are actually trying to measure, it should also be clear that the primary goal of these statistics is to employ economists.
There is the raw price data, which is mostly bunk because it uses unrepresentative products. And there is obviously huge political pressure not to make basket adjustments that result in prices going up.
And then there are quality adjustments that are completely nonsensical. Worst example is obviously with something like medicine where it just isn't possible to compare the price of drugs that save lives that didn't exist fifty years ago.
Unfortunately, economists will forever be in the camp of not understanding the difference between what is measured and what can be useful (and this has serious consequences for policy, for example the understanding within modern economics of long-term economic growth is close to zero which has led to policies focusing heavily on resource usage/intensity, essentially no different to North Korean economic policy in the 50s, due to significantly understated long-term estimates of growth). Hong Kong's government didn't produce economic statistics during its period of rapid growth for this reason.
The article claims "a burrito that cost $5.50 in 2014 is now $13.95" but I just checked one of the better SF Mission taquerias that has a web site with prices (Papalote) and used the Way-Back Machine and a carne asada burrito was $9.10 in Jan 2014 and is now $13.75. That's only 1.5X not 2.5X increase.
According to the BLS CPI calculator, that $9.10 in 2014 has $12.61 of buying power as of a couple months ago, or $13.75 in late 2025 dollars is $9.92 in 2014. The price has only exceeded inflation by 9%.
** edit in 2014 it was only $1 to make it "super" (cheese, guac, and crema) now it is $3.50. So more like $10 vs $17+ now
That may be. Okay, do you think you’d start looking for another opportunity if your cushy current job was like, “we’re reducing your salary by 9%”? You probably drive to a different gas station to save literally cents on a refill. It’s not so simple to frame the subjective feeling of what 9% is, even if I agree with you that the burrito isn’t that important.
You're right.
There are multiple cheaper Taquerias within walking distance of Taqueria Cancun as well. The issue is non-natives have heard of Taqueria Cancun so their clientele is overwhelmingly transplants.
I quit eating out in the Bay Area over a year ago (except for socializing) because the prices feel painfully expensive to me while my pay hasn’t increased anywhere near the rate of restaurant price hikes. $14 for a burrito that cost roughly half as much a decade ago is painful, while my salary hasn’t doubled (I’m not a FAANG engineer). It’s not just burritos; it’s $10+ fast food combo meals, $15 deli sandwiches, etc. Prices steadily increased before COVID-19, but I didn’t feel priced out of eating out until sometime around 2022-23, when prices seemed to have exploded.
I make six figures but I have resorted to making eating out a rare treat in order for me to maintain my financial goals. This harkens back to my childhood in a low-income family, though I do remember my parents taking advantage of fast food deals in the 1990s and 2000s. I pack lunches and dinners to work, and I regularly cook, sometimes resorting to frozen meals for convenience’s sake. Eating out is reserved for social gatherings and for travel.
What’s interesting is the situation isn’t that much better in Sacramento, my hometown and where I visit family members. While Sacramento has lower housing prices, eating out isn’t substantially cheaper.
On the flipside, I’m in Tokyo now on a trip, where eating out feels cheap. $10 in the Bay Area or even Sacramento doesn’t get a satisfying meal these days (it’s not even enough for a fast food combo meal in many cases), but ¥1,500 (roughly $10) in Tokyo can buy a satisfying meal. Even ¥750 can buy a satisfying meal if one looks harder.
The situation in the Bay Area is demoralizing. I’m still in the Bay because of my career and because of social ties. It’s one thing to be priced out of buying a house, but it’s another thing to feel priced out of eating out. I don’t know if the situation is better in other parts of the United States, though; I’ve heard of people in other states complain about the high price of eating out these days.
It's not just SF. The $10 lunch of 2015 is now $15. Default tipping of 20% on things that we never tipped on in 2015 (takeout, fast food) is also adding alot to the total cost.
I don't know how people are affording the various delivery services and their fees on top of it.
A random stall by the road in LA will charge you $10 flat and the same one in SF will ask for $20. Neither will have a screen for tips. THAT would make your SF purchases simply stratospheric. I have lived in Jersey City, NJ and New Orleans, LA. Neither one holds a candle to LA prices outside some random roadside vendors. Walmarts in greater LA are vastly more expensive than those in NOLA. But grocery shopping in SF is straight up nightmare where they dont seem to respect Murican money all that much if at all. LA could never.
I see a lot of references to a “K-shaped” economy where there happens to be enough well-off people who are continuing to spend to push prices further upward, even though more people are forced to cut back since they can’t afford higher prices. There’s still enough people ordering $14 burritos and having them delivered in order to sustain both $14 burritos and the delivery companies.
It’s the same with the RAM situation. Prices will continue to skyrocket as long as there are enough buyers paying whatever prices the sellers set.
> Default tipping of 20% on things that we never tipped on in 2015 (takeout, fast food) is also adding alot to the total cost.
Start declining those tips. We have to stop putting up with that BS.
Seem quaint to remember Dunkin' donuts franchisees forbidding their employees from putting out plastic cups for tips.
It's not just SF, I'm in Philly and the situation is the same for me. Eating out used to be almost a daily ritual, now I'm down to getting a pizza once a month at best.
It's funny watching people in this thread talk about food in LA being so much cheaper than in SF, because in my humble experience LA is also quite expensive compared to pretty much everywhere else in the country.
Are they talking about the city of Los Angeles or "LA"? LA can include Pomona or even San Bernardino, Riverside and OC. The prices in Silverlake are not the same as the prices in Pomona.
My local family owned tacoria now sells a $14 burrito in LA. The rest of the prices outlined in this article are also on par with LA pricing. It's hard to find a more expensive place to live the California.
I was in Orange county for work a few weeks ago and the prices for Mexican food were comparable to what I see in the Midwest but portions were larger.
LA has a low end to a lot of things that is simply missing and not an option in SF
Applebees is gonna be the same in both places but in LA you're gonna be much more able to find some categorically lower and lower priced end non-franchised place.
Mmm 14$ sounds nice! In Seattle a burrito is hard to find for under 17$ IMO. For example, a local and delicious place in a nearby liquor store has 18$ burritos: https://eltacolocoballard.com/seattle-ballard-el-taco-loco-f...
Or a longtime establishment of the area offers 15$ ones - https://www.gorditosmexicanfood.com/menu#menu=burritos Granted these are massive compared to basically anywhere else.
Seattle is truly the worst of all worlds on food. Base price, delivery price, hours, quality, variety, we are omnidirectionally chopped. I'm in Portland often, SF sometimes, LA rarely, and in all of them you can get better variety for less money later at night.
Yeah, Seattle food is a lost cause. There is really no reliable-available-everyday type places here anymore. It's all becoming "super quirky and artisanal-we pretend to grow our own lettuce and provide great vibe" $25(+tip please to support our essential workers) BLT. Then, predictably, the place closes down once their lease is over. Rinse and repeat.
Even the old reliable mom and pop owned places (Tiryaki, Thai, Pho, Sichuanese) have all been hallowed out by what's been happening in the ID and have been transitioning to that "great vibe" model too as a last-ditch effort to survive. There was a bit of a resurgence of food trucks those last couple of years, but laws limit what can be made in a food truck.
Moving from LA to SF will definitely give you a sticker shock. I used to buy nice large burritos in DTLA for $10 flat as recently as 2024. That's with tax. Later that year in SF a nice sandwich in random bodegas would cost well over $20(with tax). SF is probably the most eye wateringly expensive city in all of US. It definitely beats NYC.
Food is so much cheaper (and better) in LA than SF.
SF has such mediocre food for what you pay compared to any other city I’ve lived in*. You either have to fork over a few hundred to experience some of the stellar fine dining options in the city, or end up at some brunch place that’s probably pretty decent but you’re not leaving without at least $100 between two people.
The good food in the Bay Area I’ve always found to be in a shopping center or random places sprinkled all round the south bay and peninsula. Which, may sound similar to how LA is too, but I’d argue LA has overall a healthier food scene and variety of amazing food all within central LA - and most importantly, more affordable.
* besides Seattle
I love Seattle and it’s food but yeah it’s really expensive by default - I haven’t spent enough time in the Bay recently to compare but it feels equally pricy.
There are still reasonable & very good places though you just have to know.
Seattle used to have good food at reasonable prices. The extreme increase in costs, much of which is self-inflicted, has killed any restaurant that didn't both dramatically increase prices and cut corners on quality. Almost all of my favorite restaurants in the city are no longer around.
Seattle had much better food 15 years ago. The average food quality has noticeably deteriorated at the same time as prices skyrocketed. It is a shame really.
> Seattle used to have good food at reasonable prices. The extreme increase in costs, much of which is self-inflicted,
I'm curious about the self-inflicted part. How was it self-inflicted?
Unique to us, we have anomalously high minimum wages and a specific driver fairness pay law that makes for eye-watering delivery costs. This is on top of all of SF's problems w/ density, zoning, pricing out cheap indie spaces and the artist class that would put things in them, etc.
Tarrifs have affected the cost of inputs.
I’ve lived in both and I can say confidently I spent more on groceries, dining out, and drinks overall for me in Seattle…despite not feeling like the care or quality was always there. The hardest thing about Seattle for me was the lack of food variety. I could only eat so much teriyaki and pho..I know these are fighting words..but I actually would rank Portland above Seattle strictly on food alone. Portland has a great food scene, and it’s not obscenely priced.
Locals would (passive aggressively) remind me though how amazing Seattle is, and I should be grateful for no income tax
LA's food scene is unbelievably good. There are individual categories of food that other places have it beat on (for example, if I want a deep dish pizza, I'm probably better off going to Zachary's, or being in Chicago), but on a scale of "I can walk into a random restaurant with no research and expect a good to extremely good meal, with plenty of variety in such restaurants to choose from" to "Evansville, IN", I haven't been anywhere in the world that has LA beat.
> I haven't been anywhere in the world that has LA beat.
I feel the same way about NYC and NOLA. Both have world class cuisine and the sheer diversity of NYC food scene can't be found anywhere in the US. And for whatever reason NYC style pizza is not as ubiquitous outside the NYC-NJ area.You can definitely find such pizza in Boston, but it cannot be found in every little corner in LA for example.
I'm sure plenty of it boils down to matter of priorities (I feel the same way about breakfast burritos as you do about NYC style pizza), but I'd rank cities on my "diverse selection of quality restaurants, weighted for rarely walking into a bad restaurant" scale with LA, NYC, Istanbul, and Edmonton in order at the "I do not need to look up restaurants, I will walk into the next restaurant I see and be pleased" tier.
SF / Bay Area is best for a few specialties such as Super burritos, specialty Thai, & shawarmas. But LA is far better for quality and taste, along with a broader range of options.
$25 dollar cocktails in Washington DC. $16 sandwiches from a gas station in Northern Virginia. It's everywhere.
It is everywhere, but SF really brings it to another level. Its wild.
Last year I attended the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco. This is a global event, in which people coming from different countries gather together to showcase their projects, chasing the dream. Many are independent developers, looking for the opportunity or investment that could change their life.
To me, the fact that crêpes were sold at 20$ and cans of coke at 10$ at the event was a shame. The organizers turned what was once a great event to bring everyone together into a way to scalp even more indie game developers. The price to partecipate as a company was so high that even big names boycott it.
> cans of coke at 10$ at the event
Damn! It's been a couple of decades since I attended the Game Developer conference (thank goodness), but when I used to go, cans of soda were free.
> To me, the fact that crêpes were sold at 20$ and cans of coke at 10$ at the event was a shame...
They can price as such because such purchases tend to be expensable during business travel. Corporate conferences like GDC, RSA, etc aren't targeted at ICs - they're meant to essentially be a "safe space" for vendors to meet with prospective clients.
$3.50 latte at Ritual sounds preposterous looking back...
Burritos are ~$15 in Raleigh NC; feels in line with other non-sitdown restaurant options in most places in the US.
The other thing i've noticed about burritos is that more places take card or apple pay now. When I moved to sf in 2015 many of them were cash only, same with bars. I always assumed some amount of cash was being shuffled under the table.
And when you take cards or things like tap to pay, you pay higher rates as a biz which gets factored into overall prices. But...good luck being cash only in a lot of places.
I still carry cash because services like massage and housecleaning and some restaurants are happy to give good price breaks for cash payment, but I also love Apple Pay as a consumer.
I did something similar with restaurant prices 2 years ago. I would pick a random restaurant, and look at user uploaded photos of the menu. It was wild to see several places raise prices 2-3 times in just one year!
Buenos Aires, I had a $14 burrito yesterday (average mexican restaurant)
Should I blame SF inflation or what?
> San Francisco's Consumer Price Index increased just 2.5% year-over-year, well below the post-pandemic peaks. The Federal Reserve has declared victory. But is the inflation crisis really over?
Monetary policy is months to years ahead of what you see at the counter. See also the great money printing of 2020.
Feels like SF is over-exposed to specifically the OpenAI bubble/valuation popping. Outside of Mission Bay and SoMa, consumer spending and transit activity is still largely below pre-pandemic levels.
People in SF have more money (on average) and so those selling things there price higher. Compare the average salary for $jobdescription in SF vs Minneapolis. The entire (very small) region has been a bubble of higher income and prices for a long time and is getting worse. It feeds on itself like a ratchet.
I'm in the Minneapolis area, and $14 for a burrito seems completely normal. I might look at that price differently if my spacious, modern 2 bed apartment cost more than $2400.
Did you read the article?
I did. Did you notice that in the article they're talking about how the price (89%) spanned a decade at least? This seems to align with what I've said in my above coment.
>That's an 89% increase over a decade, and a 32% jump in just two years. San Francisco has the highest indexed concert ticket prices in the nation, roughly 29% above the norm, according to analysis from Tickethold.
Of course prices are increasing everywhere across the USA. I am just pointing out that San Francisco has always been significantly more expensive than everywhere else even before the last handful of years. And the reason for this is very clear: SF people have been paid more on average. Probably because the demand for the small area (so nice climate wise, job availability wise, etc) exceeds availability for those things and drives up other prices. And then the ratcheting like I said.
It's the cost. The high cost of labor, due to the high cost of real estate, due to the limited availability. This is ultimately the cause of booth what you've pointed out (the average high salaries in the area) AND the high cost of local goods and services. If we had more affordable real estate, the average income of residents wouldn't be so high, and the costs of other things also wouldn't be so high.
I'm not quite sure what official inflation index measures but you can get rough estimate of how much value dollar lost if you compare prices of bitcoin in dollars and euro at the beginning and the end of the year.
More concretely, if you converted 1btc to euro or dollar at the beginning of the year and back to btc at the end, how much fewer btc you'd end up with if you went through dollar as oppossed to euro.
If you shop at tech bro places you will get tech bro prices (I blame Mission Control). For example, Taqueria Cancun on 19th as mentioned versus other options a couple blocks east or south, or in the parts of SF that have remained Latiné.
Furthermore, a lot of these places continue to give an ethnic discount - especially when paying in cash - because someone of the same ethnic group will most likely remain a repeat customer and can induce negative WoM in tightly knit ethnic communities.
> a lot of these places continue to give an ethnic discount - especially when paying in cash
This is _not_ a thing at all. Maybe you observed it once, but this is HIGHLY unusual.
I'm sorry, but I was told "affordability" was a hoax.
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Yes, but I think some of this is also the increase in food worker minimum wage in California.
You might think that, but pretty much all studies show that minimum wage increases do not meaningfully impact prices. If you want you can read more about it at https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/wiki/faq_minwage/ which includes inline references.
Of course that's a factor. The article doesn't get into causes much, but this anecdote provides a bit of color and gives a vague sense of the scale of a few factors:
> Onions that cost $9 a sack before COVID now run $80. Beef is up more than $2 a pound, adding $6,000 to his monthly costs. Labor adds another $3,000.
Which is a good thing!
Minimum wage goes up and buying power goes down as a result. This is the exact spiral that was predicted and dismissed as wrongthink. It has turned into another example of the Law of Salutary Contradiction:
This is false. When making a prediction like "X goes up and thus Y goes down", it matters what the relative changes are. The naysayers of increases in minimum wage say things like "if minimum wage goes up by $2.50, the cost of a fast food burger will become out of reach". In fact, the labor cost component of a fast food burger is minimal, and its price need only go up by a couple of cents in response (if, indeed, given the parent corporation's profits, it needs to go up at all).
Most serious studies of minumum wage effects conclude that while it does create upward price pressure, the results are small changes. It is essentially a redistributive, rather than inflationary, mechanism.
> In fact, the labor cost component of a fast food burger is minimal
Only if you are considering the wages of the employees at the fast food restaurant. But when it extends to employees involved in the logistics, processing, and farming its no longer minimal.
Tangentially, calling the rise in wages a "living wage" in SF/DC/NYC/etc. is folly to begin with and reveals minimum wage laws are based on sloganeering and not an economic analysis.
Employees involved in logistics are already likely earning more than minimum wage. Those involved in processing and farming likely do not live in the same jurisdictions.
Anyway ...
The basic idea is pretty simple: if you work 40 hours a week on minimum wage, you should be able to rent a reasonable condition 1 bedroom, 1 bathroom apartment relatively close to where you work.
That's not a "slogan", it's an idea that's been nominally central to The American Dream for more than a half century (but also largely untrue for the last few decades in many metropolitan areas).
Do you oppose this idea?
The current expert consensus is that minimum wage increases do not meaningfully impact prices. If you want you can read more about it at https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/wiki/faq_minwage/ which includes inline references.
That’s just a way for sulking conspiracy theorists to say “I told you so” after they’ve moved their own goalposts 50 times and have broken-clocked their way into validating their own genius.
P.S. There are way too many variables for you to draw that kind of causation from the correlation, and you’re very naive to think you could.
Inflation is a good thing?
Paying people a livable wage is a good thing.
After inflation, is it a livable wage?
For most poor people, raising the minimum wage doesn't mean increasing their income, but rather reducing it to zero. It literally prohibits workers from working for low wages, effectively putting them out of job.
Just because you like to be trodden on doesn’t mean everyone does.
More unemployment is a bad thing.
Literally no one in the article said it had to do with wages.
It’s this already debunked by the famous Danish McDonald’s example?
This is also debunked simple napkin math, even if the napkin math is generous to skeptics.
Let’s say you buy a product for $100 with these example costs:
$30 of the price goes to labor
$30 of the price goes to rent/utilities/“keeping the lights on”
$30 of the price goes to inputs (materials)
$10 of the price goes to profit.
Let’s say wages go up by 20%.
Labor goes up to $36, now your price is $106.
Wages went up by 20% but your price went up by 6%.
Maybe we have to add the labor of the input materials, but a lot of input materials have low labor costs than finished products in the restaurant industry. E.g., a tortilla from a tortilla factory doesn’t have 30% of its price represented by labor cost, since it’s made on an automated assembly line. Still, for ease, let’s just say our input materials went up by ~6% to $32
At the end of the day your total cost of your product went up 8% but all the employees got a massive 20% raise with net positive income.
This is really disingenuous and doesn't debunk anything. Who claimed that wages going up 20% would raise the overall price of the product 20%? I'm sure you can find someone on Twitter who said that because you can find any dumb thing on Twitter, but it's not a main argument.
It's obvious to everyone that labor is just one cost to the seller. People only care that the price went up $6, not how that $6 happens to break down for the seller.
I disagree with your last paragraph. This math is not obvious to most laypeople.
Many people think that if a McDonald’s worker’s salary goes from $10 to $20 that their Big Mac will go from $4 to $8.
My napkin math is extremely generous to minimum wage haters. It assumes that everyone is getting a raise and therefore all costs of all goods are going up. It also assumes basically a worst case scenario restaurant industry wage breakdown.
For example, the S&P 500’s average labor cost as a percentage of revenue is only 12%.
I haven’t even brought up the fact that people making wages that are too low to survive on already use government benefit programs, like how Walmart is the largest employer consumer of food stamps in the country. Minimum wage could be one mechanism among others to reduce corporate welfare. Walmart doesn’t deserve to have its labor costs be subsidized by the taxpayer.
And what about price increases because people can now afford to pay more for the same product?
Prices don’t just magically go up that way?
If I live in India the PlayStation 5 isn’t magically price reduced to $100 just because my income is lower. Similarly, it doesn’t magically become $5,000 if I live in Monaco.
You can imagine a person who thinks McDonalds' only cost for making a hamburger is the labor and they get the beef and bread for free. But hopefully there aren't many of those people.
And it's a distraction from the main point. Without needing to look at any specific math, higher labor costs will be generally passed onto the customer because profit is not allowed to go down. That's not a defense of low wages, it's just an illustration of where the power lies.
Cost go up, wage go up more.
> A burrito that cost $5.50 in 2014 is now $13.95.
They haven't been that cheap since the 90s. 10 years ago, they were around $10.
> They haven't been that cheap since the 90s. 10 years ago, they were around $10.
You do realise that the article has actual photos of the menus from different years, right?
What's your hypothesis here? They photoshopped the images?
No hypothesis, I didn't read far enough.
They're looking at actual 2014 menus.
But yeah, it's likely an outlier in 2014 to be that cheap. More like $7-8.
Locally (not in SV), one can still find "cheap" burritos at Mexican joints. By cheap I mean $11-12.
In one local restaurant, they bumped up burritos from about $11 to $18 within a year. I stopped going there.
Read TFA. They got the price from the menu they were comparing to in 2014.
Ah, thanks! Looking through the Yelp pics, the price rose to $8 in 2016 and $9.50 by 2019. I expect Mission growth and rent increases have been a big factor.
It seems backed up by a photo of it in 2014? It's unreadable at this scale, but I assume they have a better quality version they got the price from.
So, ehhm, yeah, I sort-of question the data in this article. A US$5.50 burrito in Downtown SF in 2014? Nah... even Taco Bell takeout was already more expensive than that at the time.
Also: sure, some places overdo it on the pricing: I distinctly remember walking out of a Rotterdam (somewhere in The Netherlands) establishment due to them charging 25 Euros for a lunch sandwich, like 2 decades ago, despite this not being a fancy place at all. No inflation in sight, just greed and/or an inability to read the target audience...
They said they used Yelp photos, which seem like you can verify this.
Here's one from 2014, $5.50 https://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/taqueria-canc%C3%BAn-san-fra...
Here's one from 2015, $6.99 https://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/taqueria-canc%C3%BAn-san-fra...
Yeah, I did in fact read the original article, and the glossy (unreadable) and undated photographs did not convince me. Therefore, the Taco Bell comparison, and the rest of my comment.
I used to eat there regularly. It had been $4.99 for years and jumped to to $5.50 in 2014.
$5.50 - dated March 14, 2014: https://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/taqueria-cancun-san-francisc...
$5.50 - dated February 28, 2014: https://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/taqueria-cancun-san-francisc...
Mind, that's a regular burrito and it was one of the cheaper ones in SF. El Farolito was around $6 at the time. La Taqueria started at $8 for people who liked to splurge. El Papolote's yuppie burritos were like $10.
The price at Taqueria Cancun jumped again in 2014 iirc after La Taqueria won best burrito in the US normalized the higher price and got them some press (Taqueria Cancun was in one of the final brackets).