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The story
Nakayama Kinnikun toured supermarkets in Los Angeles on his YouTube channel to check out local prices. He found six pieces of salmon sushi going for about ¥2,000, a carton of 10 eggs for ¥450, and two liters of milk for about ¥1,000, and concluded that “it’s not as expensive as people make it out to be.” When word of this spread to 5channel’s Entertainment/Sports News+ board, reactions to the cost of living in LA were split. Many pushed back that groceries alone aren’t enough to judge by, with commenters especially pointing to sky-high rent.
Comedian and bodybuilder Nakayama Kinnikun updated his YouTube channel ‘The Muscle TV’ on the 8th, talking about the economic situation in Los Angeles, USA.
Currently in LA, Kinnikun set out that day on what he called a “muscle survey,” heading to a supermarket in the city. To answer the question “just how crazy are prices in America?”, he decided to check grocery prices at what he called “a totally ordinary supermarket.”
For instance, sushi topped with salmon ran about ¥2,000 in Japanese yen for six pieces. Sushi counts as a pricier item even in Japan, but even everyday staples came out pricey too — eggs were ¥450 for a carton of 10, and milk was about ¥1,000 for two liters. Organic products cost 1.5 to 2 times that, leaving the impression that yes, prices are higher than in Japan after all.
Source: sirabee.com / Read the original article here
What people said
New York's the crazy one
$2,500 for a studio, like ¥400,000
Wait, seriously?!?!?!
That's nuts
Just live in some backwater town inland then
Not like those idiots who just go "ramen in America costs ¥3,000!"
I mean, if your monthly salary is several times higher, of course ramen's gonna cost more too
He's conveniently leaving out rent because it's inconvenient
LA's probably on the pricier side
Somewhere rural like Utah would probably be cheaper
I thought wages there were even higher
The store he thinks is "totally ordinary" might actually be the equivalent of a Japanese discount chain like Super Tamade or La Muu
You can't tell how upscale a store really is without seeing the customer base
In America it's pretty easy to tell since people of different races often shop at different stores too
So even making ¥900,000 a month, nothing would actually change
That's just how it works
If someone making ¥300,000 a month was spending ¥100,000 on food, and food costs tripled to ¥300,000, but their salary is ¥900,000, they'd still have ¥600,000 left over
So basically!
That means Americans visiting Japan must feel like kings!!!
To them it feels like dirt-cheap food, top-notch service, and no tipping on top of it
Shopping, eating great food, living it up like a millionaire
It's on the literal other side of the planet, hopelessly far
Only the middle class and up actually make the trip
If it were cheap there wouldn't be 500,000 homeless people
Japan's seriously blessed when it comes to housing
Though it's rough for landlords here
Isn't the point that it's fine because wages are high too?
Not clear what kind of job pays ¥2,600/hour though
Supermarket cashier?
Also even when hourly wages go up, job quality doesn't improve — if anything it gets worse
Annual salary ¥4 million → ¥2,000/hour
Annual salary ¥5 million → ¥2,500/hour
Annual salary ¥6 million → ¥3,000/hour
McDonald's bans tipping, and of course teachers, factory workers, and the like don't get tips either
Back in the day America had no concept of a minimum wage, so some jobs paid very little
Tipping was there to make up for that, but now that minimum wage exists
they should just scrap tipping, the root of all this mess
Huh — but tips aren't subject to income tax, so that's lucky, right?
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
This video isn’t a statistical price comparison — it’s Kinnikun’s first-hand report based on grocery prices he personally observed at a supermarket. What split opinion in the thread was whether it’s fair to judge “prices aren’t high” based on groceries alone, with many commenters pointing to the high cost of non-grocery items like rent, eating out, and tipping culture. In fact, even a studio apartment in LA commonly runs close to ¥400,000 a month in rent, and high housing costs are well known across the US. Also, the “¥2,600 an hour” figure wasn’t Kinnikun’s own income but was cited as a reference point for local wage levels — context that didn’t fully come through in the thread and seems to have led to some misunderstanding.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5channel (Entertainment/Sports News+) thread “Nakayama Kinnikun says LA’s “hourly wage” comes to “¥2,600 for an hour of work” in Japanese yen — “They say prices are high, but not really”.”
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