Hawker Thing

Summary

How do our perceptions affect Singapore's hawker culture? While hawkers are known to work long hours for their craft, most of us continue to expect hawker food to be "cheap and good" despite rising costs.

Hawker Thing aims to encourage Singaporeans to reflect on their perception of hawker culture, contrasting the differences in their expectations against reality.

Goals

Source: Channel NewsAsia, 2024

Public debate about hawker culture and food prices has grown more prominent in recent years. However, publicly available quantitative data about these sentiments remains scarce.

We wanted to explore perceptions around the following questions, while also making data around these sentiments more accessible.

• What does hawker culture mean to us?

• How much do we value hawker culture and our favourite dishes?

• Do we know what really goes into sustaining hawker culture?

Research

Approach

Interviews

We wanted to understand hawkers' working hours, salaries, operating costs, and challenges.

To do so, we interviewed hawkers across selected hawker centres in the Central, West, East, North-east and North regions of Singapore.

21 hawkers were interviewed across 4 hawker centres:

• Maxwell Food Centre

• Taman Jurong Market & Food Centre

• Kovan Market & Food Centre

• Haig Road Market & Food Centre

Prices

Average dish prices for 2025 were calculated by averaging across available stalls serving each dish across the surveyed hawker centres.

Prices from 2019 to 2024 were obtained from Singstat, 2025.

Notable findings

• 25% of hawkers cited long working hours as their biggest challenge as a hawker.

• Hawkers worked 13 hours on average.

• Other challenges faced by hawkers:

  • Manpower: "To find part time in hawker centre, even if you give them $15 per hour, a lot of people don't want. It's very hard work."

  • Environment: "Who likes to work in a hawker centre when it's so hot?"

  • Prices and earnings: "Everybody complains about the price. Hawkers don't earn much because they cannot sell very expensive"

Solution

An interactive quiz for Singaporeans to explore how our hawker habits and perceptions measure up against hawker realities and what others think.

Outcomes

As of 12 Feb 2025, there were 108 responses.

Notable findings

• 75.4% of respondents were willing to pay above average prices for their favourite hawker dish.

• The top 3 words that respondents selected to describe what hawker culture means to them were affordability (75%), authenticity (54%) and convenience (50%).