On the cost of food in Sengkang, my take is, the cost of providing cooked food is never cheap. However, I know many stallholders in the mature estates have resisted from raising their prices because the people they are serving are only getting older, and they would rather earn less from each and try to improve sales. They have also said, as the folks leave the world one by one, business is getting harder and young people do not eat their kind of food (can be as simple as wanton mee) anymore, but they are putting up the stall just so that they can still eat. People always complain, why the portions from that stall keeps getting lesser, we should not eat there anymore. I'm not the old generation yet, I grew up eating it, so I will go buy and say, I'll pay you $5 for the large one, which could be just the normal size elsewhere. The observation that food is cheaper in mature estates is more than meets the eye.
And then there is the problem of moving to a new estate or area, where demand is not high enough to sustain costs at the same level, unlike mature areas. Every developing town has this problem. The only way to solve it is to increase the supply of eateries to force prices down, but after a few years, many stallholders will just give up as they cannot afford to compete on price. Some stallowners might innovate to justify selling higher-priced items and get business, this raises the average price of food in the area, but is this considered bad? And young people these days, they get bored of food easily. Even with a coffeeshop underneath, they will travel far out to eat something nice, cos the best stalls won't set up in Sengkang when you can have a ready base of customers elsewhere. And how can the typical Sengkang coffeeshop survive? In the mature estates, the uncles will still come down to have a coffee to contribute some business. It is a vicious cycle.
