OK you can still find 100 nt lunch meals fairly easily I guess in office areas.
Chain store prices seem to average 150 . Formosa Chang, San niu you mian… Only cheap chains are those dumpling places which explains why they are everywhere maybe.
Coffeeshops expensive.
I think places in malls have become expensive though. And tourist areas prices are pretty high . Seafood. It’s all pretty expensive and quality and environment not improved on the old days.
Any kind of western food seems to hit 300 ntd
You can still find cheap Chinese places but it’s getting more difficult.
Grocery price are high in Taiwan is the other factor .
Drink prices have most certainly gone up. A coffee shop that I’d been frequenting raised their cost of a latte from NT65 (before CNY) to NT70. We can say that’s only a 5 NT price hike, bit it adds up quickly when you drink it almost every day (which I don’t now. I got a drip pot from someone who didn’t want it and make my own coffee).
I never kept really close track of my spending, but I seem to remember NT150 for lunch being “a bit expensive” three years ago. Now it’s the norm if you’re not getting a bowl of soup noodles or a really cheap lunchbox
I think it really depends on how much you care about the quality of food you are eating and how much variety you want and how much you eat. You can easily find breakfast for well under 100 NTD. Lunchbox can be found for 80-120 in a lot of places. Dinner can be under 150. Buying a cup of coffee at any coffee shop regularly can almost count as another meal.
Tourist areas all seem to charge 300 ntd for a meal these days .It’s pretty annoying. I was out on the north coast and I think it’s just a captive market here, and quality of the eating environment is quite poor.
300-400 nt isn’t really much different than what you might pay in the West .
That coast bewilders me - I guess there just isn’t enough demand to build a nice environment? I cycle along that sometimes between Jinshan and Danshui, and I’m desperate to stop somewhere just for a coffee and a biscuit or something. But I never have: “Nope, looks like crap.” “Ugh, that looks awful.” “Long closed public health menace - wait, that place is actually open?!”
Those numbers don’t particularly surprise me, but have you got a source for that? Now that I think about the statistics … would the family size have gone down?
I’ve gone through the same ratcheting up of price, but I’m uncertain how much prices are actually going up, or if it’s just my willingness to eat crap that has gone down. Sort of like how when I travel (er, pre-Covid), I just don’t see all the dorm room beds that I used to - oh, right, that’s because I’m not looking for them.
I also have the same thoughts.
Is it my standards have gone up or what ? Definitely part of it.
It’s like in the old days here people would basically eat fake milk and butter and cheese but these days a lot more people insist on buying the real stuff.
Seafood prices have rocketed up.
I think cookies and crackers probably haven’t increased in cost but the amount of food in the same package has decreased.
