Earlier quoted context omitted.
As crazy as it sounds, there are people who are adamant that In & Out is not just good relative to fast food, but in fact one of the finest places you can eat, at any price. Source: I've spoken with a few.
In the city I live in, a proposal for an In & Out came up. It split down the city in half for reasons; traffic, "In & Out is great", "In & Out is awful", and so forth. Nothing's come of it and as far as I know the lot remains defunct. Elsewise I too encounter people who hold In & Out on a pedestal simply because of their food. Personally, I've tried and honestly but I just can't. McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, Jac…
I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It
401–410 of 410 posts
Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It
#402See "The E-Myth Principle is Still Alive and Flourishing" at https://www.forbes.com/sites/martinzwilling/2013/04/25/the-e...
"The E-Myth ('Entrepreneurial Myth') is the mistaken belief that most businesses are started by people with tangible business skills, when in fact most are started by 'technicians' who know nothing about running a business. Hence most fail...Let me assure you that in my experience, ...I still see too many businesses started by technicians who haven’t acquired the basic skills or knowledge, or still assume that business acumen is a minor part of the new business equation."
Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
>How will you feel if it goes out of business from not enough patronage or if the owner closes it because it's not meeting his financial requirements for retirement? No place I've done this with has gone out of business yet. Keep in mind - I found it. Others will too.
Well, another POV is that some people like to help others. If the owner wants more business then helping them is spreading the word. Yea, it sucks you don't get to keep your special place but I'd rather help my friends achieve their goals than hold them back for my own selfish reasons. If I had a friend running a restaurant or bar and they told me "don't spread the word I want this place to stay cozy" then of course…
>Well, another POV is that some people like to help others.
Is causing my favorite bar to have an increase in customers, to the point that it's unable to deliver the good service I came to enjoy, a good thing? Said bar then starts to tweak things - they hire more staff, raise prices.
Next thing you know, the qualities that made people to flock to said bar are gone, customers die dow, and the owner is forced to lay people off and possibly is stuck with a bill for equipment or refurbishings they can't cover. This kills the bar.
I've seen it happen more than once.
Again, as I said: people before me found the bar, and people after me will too.
Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And then when the next "top N burger joints in America" list comes out that everyone goes crazy for and all the burger-tourists start going somewhere else now you've lost your local customer base and you might go out of business regardless. Then lower your prices again to match demand. It's almost as if prices aren't set in stone.
You're missing the important detail here: you've destroyed the relationship with your local regulars. They aren't going to return just because prices are affordable, they're going to find other places to be their regular burger shop.
> They aren't going to return just because prices are affordable
I seriously doubt it. Do you have any empirical evidence for this?
Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It
#405Way back in the '80s, I worked in the kitchen at a little ice cream and lunch counter place called Great Midwestern. Ronald Reagan visited, and declared the blueberry ice cream "best ice cream in America" (to be fair, it was really excellent). This led to a big boom in business - and more importantly, mandatory visits by GOP presidential candidates in 1987 Iowa, with all the press circus that involved. The owners too…
Which kid were you in the board cast?
You mean broadcast? Oh man, my manager wouldn't allow me out of the kitchen when the press was there, for fear of me shooting my mouth off at a candidate.
Luckily, the best takedown of a candidate was done by a customer - a PhD physics student who was a daily regular. At some point, GOP candidate Jack Kemp came in, with press in tow. He was touting his support for Reagan's "Star Wars" missile defense program. When he found an actual physics doctoral student, he asked what the student thought of it. Without blinking - and on national television - he said "The only physicists who think it will work are the ones getting paid to say it will work". It was beautiful.
Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh GOD, you want to get me pissed bring up that cry baby Chang. I could rant. But I won't. Listen, I get it. I spend 8 hours every few months boiling off a massive pot of bones and feet to make my own ramen broth to store in my freezer. I get that it's easy to dismiss it soup and noodles as just "some soup and noodles". Food is usually about what you know and are familiar with. It's about comfort for most people, but…
I don't really particularly like David Chang, but one thing that I do identify a lot with is that there is a lot of art and expertise in Asian cuisines that have been neglected in the west, precisely because it has been dismissed as simple, as lower class, as cheap.
shrug Has it? I can't speak for "the west" but I live in New Jersey. We have large Asian populations (half of my friends in high school were some sort of East asian) including some towns with the largest concentrations of Indians outside India.
There's plenty of non-asians eating at the most "authentic" places, but when I go into some of them I notice that the populations are still more skewed towards the people of that make up that culture. Why? Because most people tend to gravitate towards food they're familiar with. No matter how much I tell someone that a beef tendon and noodle soup is going to be good, they're going to be hesitant because it's foreign and they're unfamiliar with the ingredients. That's fine. It's ultimately just food, and people don't have to eat anything they don't want to.
To me, David Chang and his constant hemming and hawing about how nobody respects Korean food (specifically Korean food, although he sometimes tries to throw a blanket over the whole of Asian food although he knows he's being disingenuous and his whole tone changes when he does that) is just so annoying. I'm sorry that Koreans haven't done as well marketing their cuisines as Indians, Chinese and Japanese restaurants have. But it's changing. In the mid-90's sushi was still considered exotic and interesting. Now you can buy it at a gas station. He just seems very impatient and indignant that "the masses" take a long time to change what they consider to be part of normal American Cuisine, and he should know better.
TL;dr- getting upset someone doesn't want to eat your food is stupid. Just don't invite them to dinner anymore.
Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This is a terrible term but I'll use it because it works here: the genre of burger we are talking about here is "cheap burger" (I mean that as a quality/experience descriptor, not price). It's a relatively thin, wide ground chuck patty on a good-but-standard bun; the only "interesting" ingredient they use is hamburger relish. So, yeah I am explicitly saying that the price ceiling and the demand for the burger aren't…
> If you charge $30 for that, people will pay (once), and then feel ripped off.
Waiting 5h has EXACTLY the same effect. The difference is that in one situation, he will make 10x more profit out of it and will be able to ride the hard months later on.
Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It
#408Earlier 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.
Lots of bars have "regulars" that they give unadvertised discounts too. This isn't an unsolved problem, you don't even need to go as far as coupons.
Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
There may indeed be a ceiling. It's not even near whatever he's charging that leads to a 5 hour lineup. Similar situation, my mother is a lawyer mostly handling wills/estates and real estate deals. Small town law firm, sole practitioner. She's got too many clients, too much work, and she hates turning people away. She's got a small army of secretaries working their asses off. It's good business, but she wants to do l…
I feel like this should be fairly obvious business economics. If there is too much demand for your product for you to service, you should raise your prices until the demand matches what you can produce. It's basic supply and demand.
The opposite applies as well. If you have excess capacity that's going unused, you should lower your prices (down to the marginal cost anyway).
Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
A simple fix for that is to put up a big sign that says "Tourist tax in effect" and make a $25 rebate for any regular customer or person that can prove a local address; or simply assert with a straight face to the staff they live on this and this street. It's a bit of a hassle for the locals but the place is saved. Sure, the tourists will attack you on Yelp and Instagram and accuse you of price gouging. But to hell w…
> put up a big sign that says "Tourist tax in effect" No need to be that adversarial. Put up a high price and advertise a discount for anyone who can show ID with a local address.
This is already very common in places with lots of rich tourists but low local incomes. Hawaii, for example.