171–180 of 259 posts
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Ah, but a pastry chef can only disappoint so many customers at once. A single stupid mistake by a software developer can impact millions . The Yahoo leak alone was half a billion users . That's a lot of dough!
Are you familiar with Amy's Baking Company? Sometimes disappointing one customer can have catastrophic consequences. http://www.azcentral.com/story/entertainment/dining/2015/12/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy%27s_Baking_Company
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The business of pastry sales saturates pretty quickly relative to other products. So "better pastries" can keep on scaling but you can't keep charging more for them. The regional food/dining marketplace can only bear so much, so "better pastries" can't draw from a much larger group of customers.
There's nothing inherent in software that makes it so that can't be the case for software products either. I anticipate the response here is that some products are more complex than others -- true enough, but how many people buy a wedding cake at the grocery store?
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I worked in kitchens for 10 years. It's not that the task of making anything is all that difficult. It's that it takes practice to do able to bake 120 loaves of bread the same way, every night, getting it right the first time.
I worked it a fancy bakery for a couple of months when I was 18. The place supplied smaller hotels and an upmarket high-street café. The finished cakes sell to retailers for about £20. I was just a temp worker, but the chef who supervised me clearly understood where quality ingredients were necessary, and where they could take shortcuts. For example, some recipes called for a branded liqueur to be used, whilst others…
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Ah, but a pastry chef can only disappoint so many customers at once. A single stupid mistake by a software developer can impact millions . The Yahoo leak alone was half a billion users . That's a lot of dough!
Slightly harder to kill or physically harm someone with a software bug though. Bad food can be catastrophic, although fatal results are rare.
If my circumstances had been different, that update could have killed me!
Maybe because they are only in demand at the current price point, but as soon as the price goes up, people switch to 'substitute goods'?
Not only for the labor, but for the product as well. I know few people that dislike pastries... ok maybe they like some kinds more than others, but still... But I know few people that like pastries at any price; at least not with any frequency. Once that price goes up too much they do look for substitute goods. Maybe mass-produces Hostess-style stuff: not great, but sufficient and cheap. At some point, this too will…
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Are tips required by law to go to the FOH staff or could a restaurant split the tips between the FOH and BOH staff (assuming the staff agrees to it)?
Nope. It's called tip out, and in my experience it's been 3-4% of my total sales going to the other staff (sometimes 4% of only the liquor sales to the bar). Othertimes, it has been a percentage of my tips themselves (~30%: 10 bar, 10 runner, 10 bussers, I think.. been years).
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There's definitely something to this: I spent most of the last 15 years in Italy, where people care about their food. They care a lot , and will absolutely discriminate between various tomatoes based on where they're grown, different kinds of pasta, and many other things to boot. In the US, I think we tend to just look at the price and mostly go by that if the product is not clearly awful. It is changing though: it's…
I find higher quality food to be a case of rapidly diminishing returns. When I'm cooking for myself, occasionally I'll take the time to make everything from scratch with fresh ingredients and it will be nicer, but it's only 10-20% nicer (if that can be quantified) for several times more effort.
Neither one of us is inherently right or wrong. It's a matter of personal opinion, and even though we try to, it is not really possible to quantify the difference as a percentage in any meaningful way.
I think the discussion here is trying to highlight that many people in the US value better food less than many people in some countries on the old continent. For a given choice, an American will not think that the difference is worth the price (or effort) while a Frenchman or an Italian (I'm trying to use example s from this thread) will not even consider eating the lesser version.
I speak from personal experience. I've spent most of my life in the US and six years ago moved to Europe. My tastes have changed, and whereas before I like American food, now my tastes have shifted and a lot of American food does not taste good to me. Now, when I go to the US, a lot of food is at best flavorless and at worst disgusting. Most glaring examples are breads, cold cuts (a.k.a sandwich meats) and tomatoes.
BTW, this is not universal across all foods. I still find American hamburgers (not fast food) to be better than their European alternatives.
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Cheap, inexperienced pastry chefs can also ruin a restaurants reputation if they screw up too badly. You get the quality you pay for.
I'm not so sure. I'm the sort of person that quite enjoys going to expensive restaurants and tries to keep up with what's happening in that world. And I've never heard anyone say "don't go to restaurant X, they might have a good wine list and the starters and main courses was great, but their deserts are terrible". At worst they'll say "when you go to X, don't bother ordering deserts". The truth is that while having…
Part of the reason could be the tipping system. It is impossible to raise the price of the food in your restaurant without giving a raise to your waitstaff, since almost everyone tips a fixed percentage. So if you want to give a raise to your chef, you want to fund it with a price increase, but you can't do that without giving a raise to your waiters.
There is definitely some evidence for this hypothesis. If you read about the restaurant industry you'll see a lot of comments from restauranteurs that seem to indicate that they think the salary ratios between FOH and BOH staff are off. We've had a couple of restaurants in NYC go tip free, instead building the cost of service into the base cost of menu items. Unfortunately it appears that this can be a challenge beca…
I bet this is due to the same effect that leads to .99 pricing. People concentrate the most on the first digit of a dollar amount. So if all your first digits go one number up, the consumer is going to feel the mental pinch and consume less.
One solution would be to restructure no-tip pricing in a way that causes the minimum number of first-digit changes (i.e go ahead and make that $12 entree $17, but make the $25 one only $27).
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No it really doesn't. It probably take all of 90 minutes to learn everything there is to know about making the pastries which are on the menu. Pastry-making is glorified robotics (but it's very exacting, baking is rather unforgiving compared to other forms of cooking.) Software development consists of creating a new recipe every day: you are NOT following well-defined steps.
> Software development consists of creating a new recipe every day: you are NOT following well-defined steps. If your job is customizing CRM installations maybe not so much.