Follow the Plate

Companion volume D. If you are at NEA, an economist or a hawkers' association, start here. It reads on its own and says which other documents to read with it.

This volume at a glance

Read this if you…

• work at NEA, MSE or HDB, or as an economist, and want the stall economics behind every rent and price proposal;
• speak for a hawkers' association, and want to see what each proposal does for a stall;
• want the levers on rent bands, vouchers, relief cooks, learning at the master's side and Buying Circles, or to know what the middlemen take.

The bottom line

1. Ingredients take the most; landlords hold the power. Of each dollar a diner pays, about 45¢ buys ingredients, 3¢ to 26¢ goes to the landlord and 7¢ to 21¢ reaches the hawker's family. The middlemen have not widened their cut: from 2019 to 2025 shop prices for food tracked import prices; the real tolls are delivery platforms, tied suppliers and past cartel conduct. Since 2019 food and wages explain most of the rise in prices, and NEA's rent stood still (D.1–D.3, D.5, D.5.3, D.5.4).
2. The hawker earns less than his assistant. On a 13-hour day, the typical hawker who won his stall at an NEA tender earns $9.69 an hour, against the $11.64 an hour the assistant beside him must be paid under the Progressive Wage (D.4).
3. The hawker is the shock absorber. He keeps only what is left, so a 3% fall in customers cuts his income by 8% to 21% (D.5, D.6).
4. Support attached to a stall leaks. Where a market sets the rent, the landlord takes it back at renewal. Paid to the person, the same money reaches the hawker in full (D.7.2).
5. The package works for most. For a sitting tenant in a tendered NEA stall it raises income from $9.69 to $15.60 an hour, and cuts the share of such stalls below the assistant's wage from 66% to 26% (D.7).

Granted, a model is a structured argument, not a measurement. Where Singapore publishes no figure, this volume says so, and shows how much the answer depends on the guess.

How this connects

Where it comes from. The open Follow-the-Plate model behind the Plan's Part II: who owns a stall (§2.1), rent bands (§2.2), vouchers (§2.5), the Relief-Hawker Corps (§2.7), market transparency (§2.10) and the Buying Circles (§2.12). The Plan prints each as a card; the argument and the evidence for five of them are printed here in full (D.14–D.18).

Read with. Succession Economics, which runs the same model on the hand-over; the Budget Book (B.9), which follows the plan's own money; Method, Levers and Data (F.2, F.3), for its limits and every parameter.

In this volume. D.1 Bottom line · D.2 The money map · D.3 One plate, six landlords · D.4 What the hawker earns per hour, and what a Regulars' List grade means in orders (D.4.2) · D.5 Who holds the power, who takes a cut (D.5.3) and how a stall's costs changed, 2013–2026 (D.5.4) · D.6 The shocks of 2026–27 · D.7 Scoring the proposals · D.8 The Plate Tracker · D.9–D.13 The levers · From the Plan, in full: D.14 Rent bands and ballot · D.15 The Affordability Compact and Makan Vouchers · D.16 Buying Circles · D.17 The Regulars' List, grade by grade · D.18 Learning at the master's side.

Terms used

• Archetype. One of the model's six representative stalls, one for each kind of landlord.
• Squeeze. The share of a hawker's net income lost if a supplier or landlord raises its prices 10%.
• Capture. The share of any help paid to a stall that its landlord takes back by raising the rent at the next renewal.
• Leverage. The gain to hawker households plus the gain to diners, divided by the programme's cost.
• Regular. One named person who says he orders from a stall at least weekly; the Regulars' List counts them, Bronze to Platinum, and D.4.2 turns each grade into a share of the stall's orders.
• Order. One customer's purchase at the counter, of one plate or several: a family's takeaway is one order. Plates an order vary by dish type.
• Plate Ledger. A proposed one-page yearly account of where a typical plate's dollar goes, by type of landlord.