The Big Read in short: The tension between hawkers’ livelihoods and the public’s desire for cheap meals

SINGAPORE — Hawker Jason Ng received an earful from an irate customer recently after he raised his food prices following the staggered Goods and Services Tax (GST) hike in the last two years.
“I had one customer who scolded me (quite severely). He said the Government raised the GST by 1 percentage point, but how come your food price went up by more than that?” recounted the 31-year-old who owns six hawker and coffee shop stalls selling fish and seafood soup. 
Mr Ng noted that the GST hike in the past two years — it rose from 7 to 8 per cent in January 2023 and to 9 per cent in January this year — came on top of other rising costs for hawkers, such as that of manpower, ingredients, and stall rentals.
Despite the increasing overheads, he had adjusted his food prices thrice by just a combined total of S$1 in the nine years since he opened his first stall. 
Nevertheless, each time he introduces a slight price adjustment, Mr Ng finds himself having to justify it.
Referring to the recent scolding incident by the customer, Mr Ng said: “He told me… it’s like daylight robbery. But it’s not true…because suppliers also increase (their prices) and it’s not just by one percentage point.” 
The same goes for his rental.
“When they renew the contract, they (raise rental prices) by about S$300 or S$400. Can I absorb it all? I cannot,” said Mr Ng, who declined to say how much he pays for rental.
Mr Ng is among Singapore’s ubiquitous hawkers who have had to strike a difficult balance between managing rising overheads and catering to customers’ longstanding expectations of “cheap” hawker fare.
With generations of Singaporeans having grown up with the notion that hawker centres and coffee shops are the go-to places for affordable food, it is perhaps not surprising that they will chafe at price hikes or what they deem to be high prices for food at such stalls.
A regular hawker centre patron, Ms Lynette Teo, 31, noted that while most hawker food is still priced below S$10, it is increasingly common to see more food items costing more than S$5. 
“I think Singaporeans understand that it’s tough (for hawkers) and we are willing to pay a certain price. If it’s below S$10, it’s fine, but we have definitely started seeing (double-digit prices) and hawkers start to charge for small things like extra soup,” said the senior account manager at a technology company.
Hawker food and coffee shop fare have long been regarded as one of Singapore’s safety nets — providing accessible and affordable food options to all Singaporeans, regardless of their socio-economic status.
For some, the dependence on affordable hawker fare has become even more critical amid inflationary pressures in recent years, given that food expenditure can constitute a significant portion of household spending.
Figures published by the Singapore Department of Statistics (SingStat) in May this year showed that hawker food prices had risen by 6.1 per cent in 2023 — the highest since 2008.
At the same time, hawkers in seven hawker centres and eight coffee shops told TODAY that rentals and the costs of ingredients and manpower — which form the bulk of their costs of running their business — have been on the rise.
With higher costs, they said they are left with little choice but to raise the price of their food items to ensure their stalls remain profitable. 
Still, the hawkers interviewed are hesitant to increase their prices too much, lest they lose customers in the process.
“I’d rather lose quantity (of profits), than to lose these customers,” said Ms Sng Yu Jie, 30, who co-owns hawker stall Craft’B. It sells rice bowls and drinks at Amoy Street Food Centre.
With price increments of their products not in tandem with their rising operating costs, several hawkers told TODAY they have to settle for taking home less profits.
For some, the drop could be as severe as a 40 per cent reduction in profits today, compared to five years ago.
With Singaporeans by and large expecting food at coffee shops and hawker centres to be affordable, this raises questions of how this squares off with the need for hawkers to make a living amid rising costs.
If this tension between between sustaining the hawker trade and providing affordable food it not managed well, there could be implications for Singapore’s hawker ecosystem.
A common refrain among Singaporeans interviewed by TODAY is that hawker fare should remain affordable.
“The alternative to (hawker and coffee shop food) would be restaurants and food delivery. But if we take away our cheap food in Singapore, we’re basically like every other developed country that starts from a high or medium price point,” said Ms Teo, the senior account manager.
“The cheap hawker food is what makes Singapore, Singapore.”
Research officer Jackie Chu, 30, believes that hawker food should be affordably priced as it caters to a wide demographic of customers across different socioeconomic statuses.
At the same time, Mr Chu said it should not be too cheap such that it drives hawkers out of business.
Yet, while most hawkers and consumers alike understand the rationale behind affordably-priced hawker food in the Singaporean context, the big question remains: Who will be left to foot the bill?
Hawkers are after all also running a business, and should not be expected to prioritise “altruistic outcomes” over their business outcomes, said Dr Teo Kay Key, a research fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies’ Social Lab.
On its part, the Government has repeatedly stated its commitment to ensuring that residents have access to affordable cooked food options within the heartlands.
It has also introduced a variety of measures over the years to back that commitment, such as increasing the supply of hawker centres and coffee shops, keeping rents affordable, providing eligible aspiring hawkers with opportunities to take up incubation stalls to start their hawker business at reduced rental rates and launching budget meal initiatives. 
Hawker fare has been so deeply embedded in Singapore culture that it was successfully inscribed onto the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity list under the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation in 2020.
But if hawkers’ livelihoods are not safeguarded, and if the hawker trade is not seen as a financially viable alternative to other opportunities in the labour market, it could ultimately deter newcomers from considering it as a career — and possibly threaten the long-term survival of the hawker trade.
Existing hawkers told TODAY that they have resorted to various means to keep their businesses profitable while minimising increases to their food prices.
These include staggering the rate and frequency of price increases, and providing advanced notice of price changes to their regular customers.
Some who are reluctant to adjust their food prices upwards, for fear of losing customers, said they have had to decrease food portion sizes to keep prices unchanged.
To mitigate rising business costs without passing on too much of these increases to their customers, some hawkers also choose to open more hawker stalls so they can enjoy economies of scale.
Mr Ng, who has five other outlets in hawker centres and coffee shops apart from the one in Pasir Ris under the Jun Yuan House of Fish brand, said his strategy has been to expand the number of outlets he owns: “With the higher volume, you are able to push down the supplier costs.”
Similarly, 32-year-old Marcus Tan, who owns five chicken rice outlets under the brand name Feng Ji Hainanese Boneless Chicken Rice, told TODAY that he tries to aim for a higher volume of sales across his stalls, to combat rising business costs while keeping food prices low.
Notwithstanding its benefits, such an approach could nevertheless have knock-on effects for customers and the wider hawker ecosystem in the long term.
After all, if there is an unspoken price ceiling or a limit on how much customers are willing to pay for hawker fare, more businesses might look for ways to enjoy economies of scale — leading to bigger food outlets and hawker chains possibly benefitting over smaller, individual stallholders in the long run.
From the customers’ point of view, they may also lose out on a diversity of offerings if the market were to be monopolised by hawker chains.
Ultimately, the lines between winners and losers of what Associate Professor Walter Theseira called the “MacDonalisation” of the hawker system are blurred.
The labour economist from the Singapore University of Social Sciences said that the increasing commodification of hawker food — marked by the growing presence of chains and franchises offering “hawker-like food” — could reduce the risks faced by individual hawkers.
On the one hand, such a system could allow hawkers’ wages to be roughly fixed to a certain industry benchmark. On the other hand, it could effectively eliminate a large part of Singapore’s hawker culture.
If the chains eventually “swallow up the space”, this could reduce opportunities for new and non-franchised hawkers to emerge.
“And that’s what we worry about. We worry that the next generation of hawkers offering their own touches on local hawker culture and food may not enter the market or flourish, if the space is taken up too much by chains.”
At the end of the day, experts said that customers will decide what they value, and what food and dining services they choose to pay for — which will then have further ripple effects.
Writer and cook Lim Tse Wei said: “It’s a values-based question. Do we value efficiency? Do we value low prices? Do we value giving people steady paychecks in exchange for generating profits for business-owners? Or do we value a diversity of products…and people being able to work for themselves rather than an employer?
“I think people don’t necessarily realise that all of these choices are embedded in how we eat hawker food.”