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I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It

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Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It

#221

Post by joezydeco »

Let's hear from a local about what really happened to Stanich's:

https://www.metafilter.com/177718/Sometimes-its-better-not-t...

"Anecdotally, I went to Stanich's a few weeks before the shutdown. They certainly weren't getting overrun with customers at that point. The place was maybe a quarter full on a Friday night, and it was filthy. Dust everywhere, dishes left on tables, stains on the floor, the crust on the ketchup bottles indicating it had been at least a week since anyone bothered wiping them. We watched our food sit at the pass for five minutes before a waitress could be bothered to serve us. The place had all of the hallmark signs of a restaurant going under."

"Did Kevin Alexander hurt Stanich's business by giving them the press? Maybe. But Kevin Alexander isn't responsible for running the restaurant. It isn't Kevin Alexander's job to clean the tables or the floor or the dishes or the ketchup bottles. Stanich killed Stanich's."

Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It

#222

Post by blt »

afterburner wrote: post #191
munificent wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a classic humans are rational actors and spherical volumes in empty space economic answer, which entirely misses the point. The restaurants we love, we love for the entire experience, and price is part of that experience. Even for people who can happily afford the higher price, it still results in a different experience. The people around you in the restaurant will be different. Your perception of the value o…

The customers you made money from when you're starting out don't have to be the same customers you make money from when your restaurant hits the big time.

some people start a business for reasons more complicated than making the maximum amount of dollars.

Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It

#224

Post by kibwen »

masklinn wrote: post #208
radlad wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's risk associated in shunning your existing clientele in hopes of attracting a newer, more premium clientele.

If clients have to wait hours for a burger, the existing clientele is gone either way. If you end up folding, the existing clientele is hosed anyway. And as the original commenter noted, you could put coupons in the local newspaper and the library and whatever else, so the locals have access to burgers at the old price.

Or you have someone whose job it is to stand outside and memorize the names and faces of local patrons and turn away any newcomer who can't present an ID with a local address. You can have a second entrance for everyone else, takeout-only, with an hours-long wait, which plenty of food tourists will happily endure.

Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It

#225

Post by yesenadam »

skrebbel wrote: post #217
tanderson92 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for this comment thread, I found it really insightful. Nuance on HN?!

> Nuance on HN?! Where else‽

OMG an interrobang, my eyes can hardly believe it. Haha. I love the idea (I constantly use '?!' in online chat) but they don't look so great. Also, in chess, !? and ?! have different meanings..

Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It

#226

Post by notyourday »

tptacek wrote: post #135

It's hard to blame Kevin Alexander for this, because Steve Stanich played ball with the review, like most restaurants would. If he wanted to, he could have asked not to be featured in the list, and Alexander probably would have complied; otherwise, he could have done other things to make it clear to his customers that he wasn't interested in fulfilling the role the ranking carved out for him. We see this effect in Ch…

> To the commenters saying Stanich should simply raise its prices: there's a price ceiling for that burger. It's not a fancy chef burger; it's a standard burger shop burger executed well.

That's incorrect. Chef driven burgers are no different from the other burgers - the prices are raised until the price no longer can be raised. As long as Suzi from Chicago is willing to make a trip to Portland and she does not balk at $14 burger, the burger should go up from $13 to $14.

Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It

#227

Post by TeMPOraL »

blt wrote: post #222
afterburner wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The customers you made money from when you're starting out don't have to be the same customers you make money from when your restaurant hits the big time.

some people start a business for reasons more complicated than making the maximum amount of dollars.

At this point it's not about earning money, it's about not getting overworked to death.

Raising prices sounds like the best strategy. You keep raising until the workload returns to normal. If you feel you're serving the wrong customers, you now have time to figure out how to fix that. Otherwise, if people eventually get turned off by the price and your workload goes down, you drop the price, and keep dropping it until you reach a stable point with just the right amount of orders.

Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It

#228

Post by gkoberger »

goshx wrote: post #3

This reminds me of Anthony Bourdain's visit to Venice and a local restaurant that only accepted being filmed if he didn't tell anyone the name or location of the place. It can definitely kill the business. Off-topic question: how does a submission gets front page with just 3 points?

He did this quite often!

"But on the other hand, that's kind of a destructive process because if I name the place - and I don't always when it's a place like that - I've changed it. The next time I go back, there's tourists. There's people who've seen it on the show. And then I might hear from the same person from that neighborhood say, you ruined my favorite bar, (laughter) you know? All the regular customers have run away and it's filled with, you know, tourists in ugly T-shirts and flip-flops. There are times that I have looked at the camera and said, look, I'm just not going to tell you where this place is. I don't want to change it. It should stay like this forever. I do do that now and again."

https://www.npr.org/2017/10/20/558792269/anthony-bourdain-on...

Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It

#229

Post by ryanwaggoner »

tptacek wrote: post #189
mabbo wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To the commenters saying Stanich should simply raise its prices: there's a price ceiling for that burger. It's not a fancy chef burger; If you have a five hour lineup for a burger, you need to raise your prices at least a little bit. You'll make more money overall, and your customers will be happy.

You can do that to a point, but if what you're serving is simply a well-executed diner burger, then, like I said, there's a ceiling. You can't charge $30 for that. Or, you can, but you'll create more problems than you'll solve. This guy ate at 330 different burger restaurants. He has a finely-tuned metric for what a good burger is (his #3 is also a neighborhood place he grew up with). He's set up to appreciate what S…

Of course there's a ceiling, but you're assuming the ceiling is based on the burger. It's not. It's based on the demand for the burger, and that demand is way, way higher than the supply, so the ceiling is higher than the current price. Pretty simple.

And yes, you can only raise it to a certain point, but you only need to raise it to a certain point: that certain point is the ceiling.

And you don't need to jump from $10 to $30 all at once. You just need to keep raising the price until you find the ceiling where your demand is more reasonable. It's probably more like 30-50% more, rather than 200% more, but who knows. Or better yet, charge more for peak times (like by offering a killer happy hour special during the slow times) to smooth out demand and also serve people who don't want to pay $30 for a burger.

Pricing that is based on cost plus some margin for overhead is so dumb. Price based on demand!

Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It

#230

Post by dta5003 »

theseatoms wrote: post #177
tptacek wrote: post #135

It's hard to blame Kevin Alexander for this, because Steve Stanich played ball with the review, like most restaurants would. If he wanted to, he could have asked not to be featured in the list, and Alexander probably would have complied; otherwise, he could have done other things to make it clear to his customers that he wasn't interested in fulfilling the role the ranking carved out for him. We see this effect in Ch…

tldr; Eternal September: Restaurant Edition

Or, How to DDOS a Restaurant
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