261–270 of 498 posts
It's not like the industry as whole could decide to not compete on price, and enforce that somehow. There are regulations against this kind of behavior.
Whenever margins are high and competition is tough, somebody will try to compete on price, because it's the profitable thing to do.
Gabrielle Hamilton had a good op-ed about this topic as well: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/magazine/closing-prune-re... As Hamilton notes, even before coronavirus restaurants were facing increasingly tough financial situations. I agree in principle that restaurants should raise their prices. There's really no other option. But it's a tough pill to swallow. Especially with the stagnation of wages. People aren't…
Not with the current fee structure. Delivery costs the restaurant 30% through the apps. And even then, the delivery service is not profitable.
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Everybody keeps repeating that landlords can write off rent not received as a tax deduction. You can’t, and if you think about it for a minute, you’ll see it doesn’t make any sense. Imagine a landlord with 10 properties that rent for $100 per month. That’s $1,000 per month rental income, or $12,000 per year. Assume 10% tax rate, the landlord clears $11,000 after tax. Imagine now that half of them are vacant. The land…
if the properties weren't leveraged, then yes. But if you leveraged to buy the property, then you deduct the interest payment from the rental income. In the case of a vacant property, the interest cost will get deducted from another source (other rental income perhaps). Then, come tax time, you net out the rental income. If they do it exactly right, it could net out to zero. And so pay no taxes since they did not mak…
Something's up. In Germany in a normal city I can get a döner the same size as the one in the photo for €3 ($3.50?). It's not sourdough nor high quality protein but that can't explain the $7.50 difference. Edit: as the commenter below reminded me, it's actually more like €4-5 but my point stands.
I've never been to Germany, but many of my favourite bars and restaurants in France wouldn't even be able to exist in Canada, they would run afoul of all our regulations.
I really dislike the way in which this article has been written - it reads as the typical piece from the "bro culture" that massively ignores the rest of the world. Besides this, which is not the point... 1) most restaurants in US and high-end Europe that survive and thrive do so by having big margins on alcohol. Their margins are not single-digits. (edit: just saw other comments mentioning this). 2) Many restaurateu…
The example in the article has many, many things wrong with it.
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It used to be 3-5x more than fast food. A burger with a meal + a drink @ Wendys is like $8+. The price of fast food has risen quite a bit over the years. I can get a burger and fries that's 10x better at Friendly's, Ruby Tuesday's or a half a dozen other franchises for about $10-12 and the only sacrifice I have to make is that I'll have to drink water instead of soda.
I don't buy this. At a fast food chain, drinks are $1 with free refills. A burger is $3 for the fancy ones, $1 for the dollar menu ones. The windows also have all sorts of 4 for $4 or $5 value meal deals. So $5 without any coupons at Wendy's. Two people can eat for $6 if you use a coupon. Ruby Tuesday burgers are $9.50 with fries. Add a soda, tip, tax, and it's $16. The multiple is still 3-4x.
Also if you're talking about dollar menu stuff or the stuff close to it, its about 1/3 the size of the burgers included in fast food meals. The burgers in the meals are comparable in size to what you would get at a sit down restaurant.
Gabrielle Hamilton had a good op-ed about this topic as well: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/magazine/closing-prune-re... As Hamilton notes, even before coronavirus restaurants were facing increasingly tough financial situations. I agree in principle that restaurants should raise their prices. There's really no other option. But it's a tough pill to swallow. Especially with the stagnation of wages. People aren't…
> Unfortunately it appears that delivery is part of the solution. Not with the current fee structure. Delivery costs the restaurant 30% through the apps. And even then, the delivery service is not profitable.
I suspect some of these prices are generously rounded up. I think there is a very good possibility that the author doesn't actually track costs down to that level. They are probably looking at their overall costs and extrapolating downwards to the one item. Possibly a good review of their spending could save them a lot of money. Yes, I realise it is Ottawa and CDN, but I lived in Ottawa for over 10 years and these pr…
That's pretty much the most important job of a restaurateur, especially one trying to figure out how to keep the lights on. I would be very surprised if they didn't have extremely accurate figures here.
Do you have knowledge of restaurant economics that this piece is missing? The article specifically calls out that restaurant supplies and home cooking supplies don't work the same way (with the example about buying cases of pop).
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Maybe food trucks will just become more pervasive. They _were_ pretty common in portland for a while, but not sure how many of them will survive. ;_;
This will no doubt be an unpopular opinion, but I’m not a fan of food trucks as an everyday dining experience. Not super impressed with the average food quality, and the “stand around waiting for 20 minutes” experience is also not ideal. Crowded food truck clusters are super annoying to me. For the odd meal at a festival or park or whatnot - sure. But every day? not so much.
Food trucks were really meant to make use of an empty lot while the owner waited for development opportunities but they took on a life of their own. Here in Portland people are very attached to them, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.
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> Unfortunately it appears that delivery is part of the solution. Not with the current fee structure. Delivery costs the restaurant 30% through the apps. And even then, the delivery service is not profitable.
https://www.facebook.com/100001668520076/posts/2990762630989...