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Nearly 80% of Americans say fast food is now a luxury because it’s become so expensive
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- Fast Food Now a Luxury, Says 78% of Americans | LendingTree
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- 2211 words
I'm surprised that it took this long for people to realize this. Maybe I'm a little jaded as a millennial because growing up, eating out was always a luxury. Didn't matter where we were going - McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Hometown Buffet... it was always a special occasion and one that my parents had to choose carefully based on their budget. Cooking at home will always come out ahead from a cost and health perspective.
May I ask what age group and economic tier you fall under? Just curious if eating at home itself is a class luxury locked in time.
I'm a millennial from an immigrant family so yes, my experience was the same as yours: eating out includes fast food and is a once every few months luxury. We have meat and bread at home. (It's not a burger bun, yeah, it's steamed bao. We also don't do ground meat, this is a freshly killed chicken eat up. And what is this nonsense about ice burg lettuce? Eat your Yu Choi. You said you wanted cheese so finish the pack of weird american glowing orange plastic you got me to buy for you.)
BUT --- growing up in HK we did do a kind of eating out that WAS super cheap: the daai paai dong downstairs have freshly made congee or rice rolls or quick noodle bowl with fresh sliced beef or fish fillet for next to no money. They were economy of scale productions meant to serve many many many people super quick which makes them even cheaper than cooking at home. There were also independent street vendors pushing carts of snacks and quick lunches that, again, are cheaper than cooking at home. We didn't regard this as eating out, not like when we go for DimSum (once a week as respect for the elderly grandparents) or for dinner (rare: handful of times a year for special guests/events or banquets), it was just "eating".
Perhaps American fast food used to be this way? That they were made with regular human ingredients and were filling and healthy, cheaper than home cooking due only to economy of scale instead of compromise in quality?
And for a lot of families with two jobs plus kids' extracurricular on the go, this IS cheaper than finding the time to shop - prep - cook - eat at home.
Not really. The main difference was that people ate out less. There's some discourse about high fructose corn syrup but the net amount of calories didn't change all that much. Additionally, I wouldn't say any ingredients aren't "human", they just have copious amounts of oil and sugar to compensate for the lack of quality. But that's not new, humans have added sweeteners and oil forever. All that is to say, it's not mystery chemical X that's the problem.
Additionally, I spent much of my childhood in taiwan, and there's also competitively priced street food, but I wouldn't call it healthy either. It's not a mcflurry, but they're pretty bad for you.
In general, America doesn't really have the population density now, and certainly not in the past, for that kind of model. The biggest expenses for a restaurant in the states are employee wages, and then rent. For your random east asian street vendor, 1) they have no employees 2) they don't pay rent, or barely pay rent.
It wasn’t that long ago (5 years maybe) you could buy a McDouble for $1.29 plus tax. At that price, it was actually a good value because the protein/fat/carb macros were satiating.
I don’t know if there’s a modern fast food equivalent item that is adequately filling if you only have a few dollars in your pocket.
Looks like a McDouble costs over $3.00 now. Not worth it anymore.
A lot of fast food places have deals in their app that yes entice you to purchase but also hit some of those reasonable prices again. Such as buy 1 sandwich get one for 29 cents, or free nuggets because your local sports team won. Or a five dollar combo meal deal or whatever. I know a lot of college students rely on the apps for a cheap fast food hit. I absolutely use them too when I'm traveling or whatever. Same with gas station chain apps. I know I'm trading my shopping date but I only care so much.
I'm also a millennial and grew up solidly middle class, maybe on the lower end. We lived in a 70's raised ranch house in the northeast, and my parents clipped coupons and put them into a little sorter before going to the grocery store.
We didn't have that, at least where I lived. Restaurants, including street carts, have a lot of overhead costs including labor (one of the biggest costs), licensing, taxes, rent, and everything else needed to meet health and safety laws, etc. We don't really have the "do whatever you want" street vendor culture that other countries have.
Cheaper how? Time-wise, yes. But not cost wise. Eating out is trading money for time. You're not only paying for the ingredients, but the labor to prepare them for you and all of the capital costs required to do so.
edit: spelling mistake
Exactly, trading money for time. For a lot of two income households they probably have mortgage or rent that demand they work a certain number of hours. Then a long commute which cuts into food prep options or time. And then maybe they didn't grow up knowing how to shop - store - prep - cook efficiently, they end up buying expensive food items like frozen dinners, frozen pizzas, already cooked meat and packaged salads etc. And a lot of them go into a sort of chicken/egg dilemma of "if I buy healthy foods it doesn't get eaten" vs "nobody eats healthy foods because it's too strange", in the end it means they're paying nearly the same money for frozen dinners + time vs getting it "fresh" on the way home.
They might fall into a cycle of shame - guilt - spend - passively watch expensive healthy ingredients rot in the fridge.
A lot of kids were shut up in their rooms doing homework, then shipped off to college eating expensive prepped canteen foods. They didn't participate in cooking at home and don't know how to do it as young adults. There's probably a generational component to this collective inability to cook cheap healthy foods at home
Totally agree. I actually mentioned much of this in my other comment here. It does seem to be a generational thing, and I'm thankful to both my mom and one of my aunts for both teaching me how to grocery shop and cook.
Teach a man to fish etc etc.
Yeah, that's generational wealth right there. What a wonderful legacy and gift they prepped for you. You probably could have "side hustled" money from fellow college kids by providing basic sandwiches or hot rice + fried egg + furikake.
My buddy who moved from HK to London told me a ridiculous thing recently: someone apparently wrote to the local supermarket complaining about the lack of hot-pot style sliced meats, and how it was borderline discrimination when halal / kosher food options are present but not thinly sliced meats that apparently his group relies on..... Presumably because they doesn't know how to cook anything else. Now, it was a storm in a tea cup and the one guy got shouted down hard, but yeah, kinda funny what happens when grown up adults don't know how to cook due to different environmental factors + slight moment of insanity.
I actually had a coworker offer to pay for me to cook for him. He was apparently jealous that my lunch (reheated dinner) always looked delicious compared to whatever takeout he had. I gently turned him down because I didn't want that kind of obligation to someone else. I enjoy cooking for other people, but as soon as money is exchanged then the dynamics change.
Funny story about the supermarket complaint. Food culture is always very interesting in terms of what people are willing to eat/try. I work with a lot of Indians, and chuckle when they come here to the US and just order Indian food, which is pretty mediocre compared to what you can actually get in India.
Hmmm that's true, money makes things complicated.
I wonder if they're also unhappy with the mediocre Indian food the same way I feel about "kung Pao chicken" style American Chinese..... real Indian food is super super delicious, and I was fortunate enough to live near some genuinely good options when I moved to Canada. (Joke: what's the quickest way to get from China to India? The Alex Fraser Bridge.)
I don't know about "unhappy", but having traveled to both India and China, I'll say that US Indian food is closer to India's food (similar palate, but not as spicy and more focused on naan and butter chicken) than US Chinese takeout food is compared to China's domestic food. That's not across the board, of course - both India and China have significant regional variations, and I certainly haven't tried them all.
When you're being paid by the hour, with 2 part-time jobs (because neither job wants to pay the premium of you as full time), and riding public transport, every minute counts. There's a reason there's an immense overlap between 'poverty' and 'obesity.'
Circa 2001 a quarter-pounder with cheese cost about $2.25, which was about half of minimum wage.
For reference, a Quarter Pounder with Cheese is now $6.99, despite median wages increasing by only 1.7x, US minimum wage increasing by only 1.4x, although 1% of the work force actually earns the federal minimum wage (mostly tipped employees). It would be difficult to conduct a comparison of what state minimum wage earners actually earn in 2001 vs 2024.
Either way, the price increase is bullshit...although from an economic perspective, they are just correcting their past stupidly low prices.
Which were still incredibily profitable. It's mostly just price gouging for the sake of price gouging. Yea, I didn't earn minimum wage in 2001 either, they were kind enough to tack on like $0.10/hr for grueling work. I'd like to see the % of workforce that is within $1/hr of local minimum wage.
I have one last tangent for this topic which I'll tack on here, as I'm specifically avoiding engaging further on this topic to avoid it eating my day. Sadly a market-based economy is not an amoral thing.
Even if we take all the supposed merits at face value, the foundation of capitalism as a whole fuels itself on greed, which is one of the seven deadly
simssins for a reason.Greed begets greed, and rewarding it with further material wealth is like handing an addict a crack pipe. And we wonder why people consider greed an innate human trait and why cooperative efforts are seen as futile.
Full off topic, but "Seven Deadly Sims" has got to be a game right?
Pretty sure that's just The Sims. :)
Also great old movie Se7en in that vein.
Ow my back.
Now, a quarter pounder with cheese is somewhere around $5.19 in my area while our effective minimum wage is $11 (nobody around here pays federal minimum wage so that stat is meaningless). So still about half.
The point is, you're still trading money for time. You're taking something that you could be doing yourself, and your paying somebody else to do it instead. That generally comes at a premium regardless of your circumstances.
Grew up the same. 29, almost 30. I grew up upper middle class but it was still a treat, maybe once a week when going to boy scouts we would get a chicken sandwich at Wendy's. Now I'm middle lower class and can hardly afford my medication sometimes let alone fast food
Not fast food exactly. Before the rise of modern fast food like mcdonalds we did have similar things like automats, but mcdonalds and co killed them.
Oh.....what is a ...what is an automat? Like, laundromat I have heard of. Like, a road side diner kind of thing?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat
Oh!!! Have you ever been to one? Do they have hot food? Who stocks them and are they mainly in downtown areas? Was that before gas station convenient stores or concurrent?
Apologies for the low effort comment but I had to do a double take at this as I mentally added a comma:
Soylent green is people!
I'm not from the US, but if that's true, why do people believe otherwise? Also, what's the pricing like right now for fast food, compared to (I'm assuming) pre-COVID?
If we're talking just ingredients, cost per dish will most often be cheaper than fast food.
If you just want simple pasta with marinara, dry pasta per lb (8servings) is $1-2 and a jar of marinara maybe $3-5. Let's say 2 servings per person for a meal and it rounds out to <$1-2 per person.
You won't find that pricing in any restaurant or take out place, I live in a city so a plate of pasta would be >$10-15.
That's a very simple example.
Cooking at home usually have higher upfront costs-- you have to pay for all your groceries at once. And you have to often buy more than you need. You might only need 1 carrot, but you buy them in a bag of 5, etc. And if you want more complicated cuisine like chinese or thai, making that at home will have even higher upfront ingredient and equipment costs. Home cooking also adds time costs, you'll spend 1hr cooking vs just 10min to pick up food.
If you're smart about cooking and meal planning, cooking in larger portions essentially will lead to lower costs per dish per person. The thing is, cooking is a skill that you learn. If you didn't grow up learning how to cook or with parents who cooked, it's harder for an individual to pick up those skills. There's the learning curve that can often be barriers to cooking effectively. Because one doesn't know how to cook, they take more time and effort to cook, which makes it inefficient to cook at home and more efficient to just order out.
I'm not 100% sure, but my guess would be that many people either don't know how to cook (more on this later) or don't like doing it, so they've leaned on fast food. Fast food prices have outpaced other areas of inflation due to multiple factors (labor costs increasing by 2-3x, food costs increasing, capital equipment costs increasing, higher corporate profit margins, etc). So where it was more affordable previously (though still more expensive than cooking at home), the cost difference between cooking and going out has widened to the point where people are re-evaluating their decisions.
I do think the tenancy to eat out more is also somewhat generational. My parents and other boomers that I've talked to rarely at out. It was a treat, or something they did on special occasions. Often, the woman would stay home and take care of the kids and cook dinner. That has obviously gone by the wayside as women were forced to enter the workforce in order for a household to pay its bills. But it is surprising to me how many people my age and younger don't know how to cook. My mom taught me at a young age, but most parents don't seem to have passed down that skill to their kids. I taught my college roommates as well, and we each saved thousands of dollars on an expensive meal plan (and likely many pounds of weight) by rotating cooking duties.
When I was dating in my 20's, I was shocked at how many women didn't know how to cook. I was also surprised at how many of my similarly-aged coworkers ate out for every meal while I cooked dinner and brought leftovers for lunch every day. It's a running joke that my wife married me for my cooking (seriously, it was a great asset to have when dating). Now in my mid-30's, more of my friends have picked up the skill to varying degrees, but many of them aren't very good at it and therefore don't really like the results.
Learning how to cook will save you fucktons of money, impress girls, is relaxing hobby and activity, and will guarantee you eat like a king the rest of your days.
Up through the boomer generation, cooking was seen as a woman's role, which led to a feminist backlash against teaching girls how to cook. Thankfully, that stigma seems to be gone with Gen-x and Millenial generation.
The other night, I was tasked to make dinner for the family since my wife was in work meetings late. Using a previously cooked t-bone steak, a half pint of half-and-half, a half a box of penne rigatoni, an onion and some mushrooms, I made a whole skillet full of steak pasta that would have cost twenty bucks at an Olive Garden and turned it into a scrumptious meal for three for half the cost of a single Big Mac value meal at McDonald's using cast-off ingredients. And we have leftovers that we can use for another meal, further lowering our food costs.
The more knowledge of food you have, the less you will waste. Remember, most of those skills used to create scrumputous food were originally peasant techniques, used to stretch whatever was available to make it taste delicious. Once you've mastered those techniques, you can eat cheap, badass meals whenever you want. McDonald's won't move the needle for you anymore.
Fast food prices, particularly at national chains, have gone up way faster than inflation.
The only reason for that is that these companies are run by greedy assholes. They turn around and blame "inflation" even though we all know that inflation hasn't totaled 70% in the last 4 years.
That's just saying, "that car is going way faster than velocity". Inflation is the measure of the increase in prices. It's not some inherent force like a tsunami.
If fast food prices are going up faster then everything else, then something is wrong with the fast food industry.
I'm convinced most inflation is just powered by greed. Prices at my local Kroger also went up a lot more than they should have, but prices at my locally owned grocery store have stayed in line with the actual rate of inflation. I know for a fact that bottlers aren't charging twice as much for a 12 pack of soda as they were in 2020, so why has Kroger marked the price up to $10 from $5 when my local grocer has only gone up to $6?
I'm lucky, I can just tell Kroger to fuck off. Not everybody has that option though, and Kroger realized this. That is why they are using inflation as an excuse to be greedy fucksticks. Maybe it's time for some heads to roll.
Or that they just have different dynamics in their supply and demand curves that react differently to market forces than other industries.
In a way, that's not wrong, but also wrong. There's a famous economic quote on that "blaming greed for inflation is like blaming gravity for a plane crashing". All parties in a market economy are incentivized to maximize their own return, and that is how they are intended to act.
Prices aren't set like a child's lemonade stand, firms don't set prices based off of "cost + set margin". There is no such thing as an amount prices "should" go up by.
Because it's likely Kroger has more aggressive demand-curve analytics and has more inelastic demand.
This assumes a free market is actually at play and not algorithmic price-fixing.
Sure, that does. Is there evidence that there is algorithmic price fixing in fast food or groceries?
Like in the airplane analogy, the issue is the engine failing (price fixing), not gravity. Or at least you can't call it the delta between "plane flying normally" and "plane crashing" - gravity was always there. We weren't socialist pre-covid.
Maybe not like that, but in Canada, our biggest (read: in many communities the only) grocery chains engaged in price hike scheme
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_price-fixing_in_Canada
39 million people, a loaf a week, over 16 years at $1.50 each.
They were caught, fined $50m, and gave us $25 gift cards each. Which is still better then the time LifeLab lost my private health data and gave me $7 for it.
I'm sure we're being fleeced for other basic food items as well.
They're two similar grocery stores within 5 minutes of eachother, getting their soda from the same bottlers. And the locally owned store is also more well maintained and consistently better staffed, while continuing to be profitable.
So either Kroger is really bad at running their business, or they're taking the same enshittification route as all the other giant corporations and squeezing as much profit as they can out of their stores today even if it means hamstringing future growth.
Or maybe they're very good at running their business, and are making the most of shifting market dynamics while they can to capture as much of the DWL that was previously underneath the demand curve. By all accounts, it seems like they're doing well for themselves, business-wise. As to future growth, generally supermarkets sell inferior goods (as economically defined), so it shouldn't be much of an issue.
Again, prices are never set by benevolence. All prices are set by maximally greedy actors, at least on a macro scale. Of course, sales between friends are not necessarily subject to this. But you can't use "greed" to explain a change in inflation when companies are equally greedy when inflation was at 0.02% and when inflation was at 10%; in both cases they were 100% greedy.
Considering that Kroger's net profit margin is about 2%, I'm curious what your local store's margins are? Your store is either making up that profit in other products/services (or lack thereof), or Kroger is losing money in one of their areas.
It's hard to know, because they are a 100% family-owned local chain with only 20 locations.
However, they've always had a reputation for being a bit more "bougie" than the national chains, despite the pricing for produce, staples, and packaged foods being largely the same. They're kind of like a cross between an Associated Foods and a Whole Foods; You can buy cheap Tyson chicken nuggets, or the fancy private label free range organic chicken nuggets that cost 60% more. This dynamic plays out for just about every product category from meat to cold cereal. Maybe simply having higher margin items that some people buy helps make lower margins on staples remain viable?
Whatever their secret is, it seems to work. The stores are well staffed, well maintained, and always packed with customers. I've grown fed up with my Kroger, not just because of pricing, but also just because of the poor customer experience (they aggressively push digital coupons, requiring me to scan codes on the shelf with their app to get the "real price" at checkout, but it only works 50% of the time). I now drive an extra few miles just to go to the locally owned store.
Ah that makes sense - it's kinda like the Wegman's model where they have affordable staples and lots of bougie value-added other things that they sell at a premium (like $15 tubs of cookies). I wish we had a local place near that around us. The only local grocers we have near us are either extremely low-end (dirty, dingy and in bad parts of town) or super expensive (like our co-op whose prices are 50% higher than Kroger's).
We don't have Kroger around here anymore, but we have Harris Teeter which was bought my Kroger. Ever since they merged, quality has gone down significantly to where I hardly go there anymore. I just go to a lower-end store since the quality is about the same but the price is better.
Sometime in the past year the Pepsi CEO said they had expected sales to slow down when they had to increase prices but they didn't so they increased them more and planned to do it again since it didn't really slow down sales. So yes, greed is part of it. They can charge it, so they will.
That’s exactly how they’re supposed to set prices.
Yeah, the real problem is that our appetites for consumption haven't decreased and everything is inelastic these days. They can charge whatever they want because we keep spending insane amounts of money on shit we don't need.
From a business point of view, yes. But when it comes to stuff people need like food (pepsi is not needed), I do think there should be regulations on shit like that. Of course people are going to buy it, what else are they going to do?! It's why unregulated capitalism is a bad idea, at least for stuff people can't just not buy and live.
The rise in US interest rates by the Federal Reserve was, in a way, powered by greed. Suppressing wages was a stated goal of the Fed with the interest rate spike.
Industry-specific inflation & overall net inflation may not be tightly correlated.
That's not the only reason. Increased profits is certainly a contributing factor, but fast food labor (not just at restaurants, but through the entire supply chain) has increased faster than labor in other industries. Minimum wage jobs basically don't exist anymore (this is a good thing for the people who work them). Fast food restaurants are generally paying $12-20/hour which is 2-3x what they were paying just 5 years ago. Most other industries did not have that level of wage increase over that time (I know I certainly didn't).
If fast food is not a viable business while paying people fair livable wages, then maybe it shouldn't exist.
Maybe it'll work out that way! Either way, for the consumer, expensive > non-existent. Maybe fast food will have to raise prices so much they're no longer cost competitive, at which point they're no longer viable business. That'll happen on its own, though, so no need to wring hands about it.
This is what I've noticed. McDonald's used to be the "cheap" option, but now the price is close enough to something nicer like Five Guys or Habit Burger that I just choose one of them instead. With labor costs being a much bigger part of their budget, there is less room for simpler/lower quality menu items to actually drive prices down.
I don't disagree, and that's where things seem to be going. Fast food's low costs were subsidized by low wages. This is no longer the case, and as a result, fewer people will buy it and many of these business will become non-viable as a result. IMO, not really a huge loss for society other than the fact that there will be less competition in the restaurant industry as a result. I think we would expect that all restaurant prices would rise if they are no longer pressured by low-priced competition.
I used to eat Subway sandwiches whenever I had to get fast food. CA$8 for a foot-long sandwich (in the late 2010s)? Fine. It used to be CA$5 but that was back in the late 2000's. It wasn't something I really loved doing, as Subway always left me feeling somewhat dissatisfied even if I felt physically sated. The super low quality ingredients only go so far. But as far as fast food goes, it's fine.
Now that same sandwich costs CA$14. Meanwhile, two minutes away, there is an Italian bakery that makes everything in-house and uses quality (i.e. real) Italian cold cuts and meats and actual cheese. It's not a foot-long sandwich but it fills me up just as much and leaves me satisfied in a way Subway never has. They also charge CA$14 for their sandwich. So why the hell would I ever buy that Subway sandwich now?
I think the key point of this article is specifically that 78% of people now say that fast food is a luxury item. As the article notes:
This should be a crisis point for the fast food industry. The gap between "make food at home" and "luxury food" was supposed to be where fast food neatly slotted in. It should not be in luxury territory because the luxury food market is something else entirely and they cannot compete with it by nature of being fast food. I consider that Italian bakery sandwich to be a luxury (it's a $14 sandwich!). But I get top quality ingredients and assembly for that price. Fast food is the antithesis of luxury food, and many won't stomach paying luxury prices for it when they could get a better, healthier meal for the same price from better places.
Bingo. ~$15 seems to be the regular pricing for "fast food" these days: A&W teen burger combo $13. That's one beef patty most basic burger. If I'm going with two people that's minimal $26 assuming we both only want the cheapest possible burger.
OR I go to authentic Hokkaido ramen across the street, made with with actual thick milky bone broth for $16.25. I've gone with two people and both are stuff by a large bowl by adding $1.50 for big bowl extra noodles, and extra cha siu $3 -- we're still coming out ahead of fast food for two after 15% tip.
OR I have $13 bowl pho. Or for $13 I have a ton of choices at the local congee / noodle / rice dish place.
It just doesn't make any sense anymore to each fast food that's been prepped and sent days ago from a warehouse hundreds of km away, where the ingredients have to be price adjusted for marketing and royalty first.
This change is good for you, then, no? You're consuming more food you like, and it's probably healthier. Great.
If market forces are causing fast food to be price uncompetitive against local shops, isn't that what everyone wanted? McDonalds killing the local mom and pop restaurant is a classic horror story, after all. If the reverse is happening, seems fine.
For folks living where these options exist, and for folks who can just say forget it we have cooked food at home, it's fantastic: remove the temptation and just save money and eat better. So yeah, much like reading terrible news about housing affordability, that's great news for me personally. But.
As a bellwether for overall economy, consumer confidence, and what this means for food deserts, the elderly, and those who don't have kitchens or those whose "hustle" hours make it impossible to cook? Probably not so good.
That works out fine in dense urban areas where there are eateries everywhere you look. In small towns (which is the vast majority of Canada, geographically), the fast food places are often still the only places around or open at certain times of day. For example, here in Ontario, we have a series of highway rest stops called "ONroutes" and the only options they have are fast food chains.
When I drove through upstate NY a couple of years ago, every rest stop was literally a McDonalds. As Canadians, we were hoping to stop for lunch at a roadside diner but there wasn't a single one in that 8 hour drive. Only McDonalds, much to our surprise. And the cost of the meal (especially after the CAD to USD conversion) was more than we'd pay for a sit-down meal at a quality restaurant back in Canada.
Fast food has a firm grasp on prime locations all around the continent unfortunately. Even with the high prices, they'll still see a lot of business simply because they're the only option in many circumstances.
I paid $13 for a burrito at Chipolte last week.
That is $2 short what I used to pay (without a tip) for an entree in a full service restaurant I used to like.
Even in my expensive town we’ve got tons of cheaper better and bigger burrito options.
Not great with titles and tags please help :)
I wanted to include some quick methodology and seek feedback on "is this a good survey" and what does a nonprobability-based sample mean?
Closely related to recent topic posted by @moocow1452 , on "Fast-food owners, squeezed customers test limit of value meal economy"
It's high time we regard and promote economists instead of politicians!
John Maynard Keynes single handedly solved the great depression of 30s with his theories. And though Adam Smith was highly criticized for his "Wealth of Nations", he was also held in great regard by everyone.
Don't such folks exist in today's world? Or the politics of the world doesn't let them rise in power and position?
Pretty much.
There's a MAJOR reason why only folks generally born and bred into politics can rise high. The first one is, usually connections and wealth (I'll spare you my US-is-an-oligarchy rant)
The second one, however... is ultimately charisma. This is all typed out in text, and there were studies done on how much is lost when just using text. Politicians have to know how to manipulate peoples' emotions, to be likeable and charismatic. The people that do all the other lifting in society- scientists, economists, you name it... are very rarely charismatic.