Why is your stadium hot dog so expensive?
Good Food
KCRW
4.6 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 27 March 2026
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on Good Food:
- Alec Opperman of More Perfect Union investigates who's behind the steep price of stadium concessions
- Anissa Helou goes deep into the regional kitchens of Lebanon, revealing a cuisine that's far more diverse and nuanced than most realize
- Naoko Takei Moore had a hand in introducing donabe to the U.S. 25 years ago when it was virtually unknown and she continues to champion the hand-thrown clay pots
- Chris Newens explores the arrondissements of Paris in twenty meals
- The weekly market report features Heather Wong of Flouring and the pavlova she has on the menu
Connect with Good Food host Evan Kleiman on Substack.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From KCRW, I'm Evan Klyman and this is good food. |
| 0:23.3 | Opening day at Dodgers Stadium just happened this week and while Shohei Otani can buy plenty of |
| 0:29.4 | Dodger dogs with his 10-year $700 million contract, what about the rest of us? |
| 0:35.5 | Alec Opperman of more perfect union gets to the bottom of stadium concession pricing and what we can do about it. |
| 0:43.4 | Hi, Alec. |
| 0:44.7 | Hi, thanks for having me. |
| 0:46.5 | Well, welcome to good food. |
| 0:48.6 | Your inquiries into stadium pricing began at Madison Square Garden. |
| 0:53.1 | How much did a game and some concessions cost you? |
| 0:58.6 | I think it was about $630, $650. The tickets themselves were around $5.50 and I spent like $80 on food. |
| 1:07.1 | And that was for me and the camera person. So, you know, food for two, to be fair. |
| 1:12.7 | And you soon developed an obsession with a man called Ron Gordon. Who was he? How did you |
| 1:20.5 | come across this crusade? Where did he live? And what was this one man war that he waged? |
| 1:27.8 | Yeah. So I heard about Ron actually reading a report on a thing called street pricing, |
| 1:33.8 | which we can get to later, but I'm reading this report, and it just references this guy, |
| 1:38.8 | Ron Gordon, who's a high school teacher in the sort of San Francisco Pale Alto area. |
| 1:47.4 | In 1978, Candlestick Park announced that they were raising the cost of a hot dog by a nickel. It was for health code compliance. They needed a machine to |
| 1:52.4 | sort of wrap the hot dogs. And they said the nickel is going to pay for it. And so you have Ron Gordon, |
| 1:57.9 | who is this high school teacher with an economics degree. And he does the math and says, you know, basically they're full of it. |
| 2:05.0 | They're going to get, I believe it was about $90,000 a year, and maybe the cost was $20,000. |
| 2:11.3 | So it was just kind of a way to pat their bottom line. |
| 2:13.7 | So, you know, he writes and calls all the suppliers and distributors to figure out |
... |
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