D.1Bottom Line

Of each dollar a diner pays at a cooked-food stall, about 45¢ buys ingredients, 3¢ to 26¢ goes to the landlord, and 7¢ to 21¢ reaches the hawker's family. On a 13-hour day, the typical hawker who won an NEA (National Environment Agency, which runs the public hawker centres) stall at tender earns $9.69 an hour. The assistant beside them must be paid at least $11.64 an hour under the Progressive Wage (the pay ladder the Government sets for lower-wage jobs).

Cooked-food sales a year, 14,200 stalls (model)

$3.5bn

Of each dollar on ingredients

45¢

To the landlord, by type of stall

3¢–26¢3¢–26¢: To the landlord, by type of stall, on the figures page

Tendered NEA hawkers earning less per hour than their assistant

66%66%: Tendered NEA hawkers earning less per hour than their assistant, on the figures page

1. 1
   Ingredients cost the most; landlords hold the powerIngredient costs pass through to diners; rent costs stay with the hawker. A 10% rise in rent and fees costs a private-coffeeshop hawker 25% of income, against 6% for a 10% rise in ingredient prices. The landlord's squeeze is the larger in five of six kinds of stall; only subsidised stalls are spared.
2. 2
   The hawker is the shock absorberThe hawker keeps only what is left, so a 3% fall in custom cuts a hawker's income by 8% to 21%; a 30% rent rise at renewal cuts it by up to 76%.
3. 3
   Support attached to a stall leaksIf $200 a month were paid to all 14,200 cooked-food stalls for good, it would cost $34.1M a year. At lease renewal the landlords would raise rents and take back $12.6M of it; $10.3M of that would go to centre operators and private owners. Paid to the person, the same money reaches the hawker in full.
4. 4
   The package lifts most hawkers past the assistant's benchmarkFor a sitting tenant in a tendered NEA stall (won at NEA's open tender, usually by the highest bid), the plan's package 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%.
5. 5
   The succession payment works for a stall with a long queue, not for a typical stallUnder the Succession Mortgage the successor pays 8% of takings. At a busy stall that pays off the cook's goodwill – the name and the regulars – in 3.5 to 5.3 years. At a typical stall it would leave the successor $1,756 a month, before the Family Name Royalty. The plan now caps the payment at 30% of verified profit and never lets it take the successor below $1,500 a month (Succession Economics, E.4, E.1).