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Memo To Public Health England – Fast Food Is A Competitive, Low Margin, Business

We’ve all long known that Public Health England is one of those groupuscules that needs a good sharp smack. Some old school Nanny perhaps to give them a clip around the ear and insist that they stop being stupid. Quite how such an assortment of ignorants and prodnoses ever managed to gain access to our wallets through the public purse is just one of those mysteries. The lesson presumably being to have rather less government given the example of PHE as they bathe in our taxes.

Take this as an example:

Almost half of the fast-food outlets in England are in the most deprived parts of the country, figures show, raising fresh concerns about child obesity in poorer areas.

The most affluent 10% of England is home to just 3% of fast-food restaurants, chip shops and burger bars, and the poorest decile has 17%, according to the data from Public Health England (PHE).

Of the 51,460 fast-food outlets in England, 24,072 (47%) are in the poorest 30% of the country.

Well, yes, OK. I have worked in central London myself and I’ve got to tell you that Lord North Street – where Jacob Rees Mogg just dropped £5 million on a house apparently – is remarkably free of burger joints. On the grounds that the grounds for a house cost £5 million presumably. Mayfair and St James’ are equally free of chicken shacks. Piccadilly might support many more as a result of the vast footfall. But there’s an important piece of information here:

Around a quarter of the 207,617 eateries in England are fast-food outlets, the majority of which are run by independent companies that own one or two outlets.

Flogging food is a low margin business. Most of the fast food outlets are small businesses. Where do we expect small, low margin businesses to be? Where rent’s cheap, that’s where? Where is rent cheap? In the poor areas of town, in what we might even call areas of deprivation.

Sure, we could start insisting that the British poor are so deprived as to not have access to kitchens but that’s something we really did solve 50 to 80 years back. We might even start shouting about the decline of domestic science classes and they don’t know how to use the ones they’ve got but good luck with that insistence. Poverty and stupidity aren’t the same thing at all.

It’s also true that as people interested in economics we’re always going to find an economic explanation no matter what the truth. But places which need cheap rents are in places with cheap rents? Cry me a river, eh? And our economic explanation does seem rather better than the Public Health one, doesn’t it?

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Rhoda Klapp
Rhoda Klapp
5 years ago

” Poverty and stupidity aren’t the same thing at all.” Not at all? You sure?

Spike
Spike
5 years ago
Reply to  Rhoda Klapp

Poverty and stupidity are correlated, at least because the smart person has a higher-quality work product to sell. Nevertheless, Tim’s point is valid: That Joe is poor does not mean he is too stupid to learn to cook. But he goes to the chippie instead, whether or not he can cook, because he prefers it.

TD
TD
5 years ago

Are we concerned that the rich don’t have ready access to burger joints? Has anyone checked whether delivery services such as DoorDash are helping to alleviate that problem?

Spike
Spike
5 years ago

Hooray for the assertion that there is more going on here than McDonald’s setting out to victimize The Poor. However, no restauranteur looks primarily at cheap rents. He tries to figure out whether the people in that neighborhood want his product (in sufficient numbers to enable him to pay whatever the rent is). Rents most places are fair; no one wants to live in the parts of Detroit where houses sell for $1, because if you fix it up, things get even worse for you. The bottom line is that poor people like Big Macs. And Public Health England and… Read more »

jgh
jgh
5 years ago

Big Mac? Vom! Much prefer Burger King for my motorway cholestoral hit.

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