461–470 of 498 posts
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Now that just makes me wonder how the economics pans out in an Islamic country.
There's always a way to make healthy profits without dealing in immoral and despicable practices.
I'll make another observation about the landscape of restaurants. You may notice that in Europe, Asia, the demographics of restaurants are noticeably different from the US. There are far more hole-in-the-wall mom-and-pop restaurants in those places compared to the US, running a small and seemingly profit-thin but subsistence restaurant for the neighborhood. Think of a suburban neighborhood in Madrid or Rome, where a…
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Both statements are true at the same time. So my answer to HR's answer is: If we offer industry standard pay for games companies, we get industry standard hiring crisis and candidate quality, as seen at other games companies. Have you researched hiring success at other companies and not just salaries? Experience suggests the answer to that from HR would be cultural inertia though, so it's not really them you'd need t…
Right, HRs exist to do the bidding of the execs, not be independent critical thinkers. They couldn't personally care less how much people are paid, they only need to be seen as doing broadly what the execs have approved.
Individual HR people may not all be critical thinkers, but HR people do salary research and keep up with trends in hiring. They have their own professional communities where they discuss this stuff. Even if they aren't all individually doing it, some within the HR communities look at such things and talk about it with others. They use this to advise each other and their execs if nothing else.
HR industry groups could, as a body, look into whether "the industry standard" is getting hiring results as well as employee churn, satisfaction, and company-reported satisfaction with their hiring outcomes and make that information available to HR people and then to whomever needs to take it into account in strategic decisions.
> Drinks for instance cost us more than at the grocery store — but we can’t exactly go get 20 cases of pop per day, so we don’t have much choice. I didn't understand this. It may not be feasible to buy 100 cases of pop at a regular grocery store, but isn't Costco/Sam's Club set up for that? I do think it comes down ultimately to real estate prices. Major metros in North America have gradually become unaffordable for…
> All that profit margin is ending up in landlords' pockets. The landlord's costs go up, too.
Not if you've owned the place for a long time and seen rent and value appreciation.
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0) I kind of wonder how anything that reads as a typical piece from a certain culture could not be criticized for massively ignoring the rest of the world. 1) In France most restaurants sell the same desserts that they buy from the same wholesale Metro that's open only to food professionals. They buy it less than a euro and sell it more than five, with a bit of an english cream they buy by liters. 2) Not sure what's…
> But maybe Simone is right: if COVID killed your business then it's because you're not "good enough". Individuals are supposed to save at least 6 months expenses in case they lose their job or there's an unexpected large expense. But for restaurants it's fine to have so little money that you go bankrupt with a month or two of no business? We're not talking about multinationals, there are lots of reasons why you migh…
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>> [Cost have not risen] nearly as much. If at all. Your counterargument: > Have you looked over their books? > Landlords have to pay: > 1. taxes 2. maintenance 3. insurance 4. mortgage costs (they're usually leveraged) 5. legal and lawyer fees for contracts and disputes 6. costs of unrented space 7. accounting costs 8. costs of just keeping track of all the changing laws 9. depreciation I think your argument is "the…
You can't know these costs have not risen by guesswork. You have to actually look into the business and their P&L statements. And I was responding to a line of "if at all". Dismissing depreciation is a serious mistake. All buildings deteriorate, become obsolete, become inefficient and maladapted to modern conditions, and simply "wear out" over time. It's pretty obvious if you look at a city and notice that there aren…
I think you are saying "there are substantial costs" again.
It only works as an argument about rising costs if backed up by "and the real costs to the landlord caused by depreciation have actually risen".
Do you have anything to back that up?
I think most people take the view that landlords have generally benefitted, until recently, from steadily rising property prices, and this nearly always greatly outweighs depreciation over 30 years. I.e. the cost of property doubles more often than every 30 years, so you can use the bonanza to buy replacement buildings which offsets the cost of old buildings being taken down.
And that doesn't even consider cost of the land, which does not suffer depreciation even if a building has to be replaced, and is often the majority of the cost of purchase.
> There's nothing about property management that suggests it is immune from these forces.
But there is a very significant obstacle to these forces acting fluidly according to the ebb and flow of commercial forces! I would happily be a landlord (until recently and maybe even then) on the basis of commercial thinking, but the avenue is not open to me because I don't have access to capital. Capital is around, but it will tend to be allocated first to an entity with an existing portfolio.
Also, in the town where I live, even if I had a few million, I would struggle to become a landlord of commercial property larger than a tiny corner shop, because very few units are for sale. When one comes up, which is not often, there's a secret bidding war because pent up demand exists as does the money behind it, and buyers simply cannot find something. This is despite a very large number of empty units, with owners who seem to be happy keeping them empty (I know several companies that have tried renting be turned away on various grounds, sometimes "we are not interested in renting it at all, we have plans for it in 10 years", others "we want personal rent guarantees from all the directors as well as a large deposit".) Heck, even renting is subject to bidding wars and personal interviews to decide which company should be allowed to rent among several candidates (I've been involved in this twice as a business tenant, and several times for residential, so I'm not speculating.)
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> Let's just kill all community space. It might be helpful to differentiate "community space" from "restaurant". Or perhaps to differentiate "restaurant that is primarily selling convenience", which is the kind the article seems to be describing, from "restaurant that is primarily selling a dining experience in a community space". I would expect margins on the latter type of restaurant to be significantly higher.
all restaurants want to be a 'dining experience'. But only restaurants that can be this are famous ones which have a lot of celebrity pull. So the remaining ones that don't have such pull will need to adapt, or die. It's not that all restaurants will die - just the ones who aren't celebrity/famous and can sell an experience.
Wanting to be a dining experience, and having "be a dining experience" be your primary business model, are two different things.
I'm sure the author of the article would like his restaurant to be a "dining experience", but that's not his primary business model. His primary business model is selling convenience. His customers buy his food because it's more convenient than preparing it themselves, not because they need to have the "experience" of dining in his restaurant. His restaurant could just as easily be a truck parked at the curb--as many sellers of food actually do in large cities--and his customers probably wouldn't care as long as the food was the same and was available as quickly.
Sure, if you ask the customers, they'll say they prefer the restaurant space to a truck at the curb, but unless they're willing to pay more for the former than they would for the latter, there's no business value in the former. And the fact that customers aren't willing to pay enough to support a restaurant space, but what they're willing to pay probably would be enough to support a truck at the curb, is precisely why the author is struggling to find ways to cut costs--because he mistakenly thinks the space itself is part of his business model, when it actually isn't. He'd like it to be, but it isn't, because his customers aren't willing to pay extra to support it.
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…
A "bro culture" article written by a female entrepreneur who isn't from Silicon Valley… right. I think you need to check your prejudices. 1) plenty of restaurants don't sell alcohol, including it seems this one. she also had a point about how drinks aren't a great revenue generator given the price you can expect to charge in a fast-casual setting vs. the costs (higher than grocery stores) 2) how is the restauranteur'…
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> it reads as the typical piece from the "bro culture" that massively ignores the rest of the world. Why should articles need to be generalized to the world? It certainly fits the Canadian and US markets. You can't have comprehensive coverage of everything and everyone in an article.
Maybe just adjust to title to avoid generalization. "Why Restaurants Are So Fucked in the US". Showing awareness goes a long way.
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And yet this is not (so) true in Europe, where (1) people eat out less but (2) people pay more for restaurant food. What's the difference? Is it really just too many food vendors thinking that the $1 happy meal is their competition? Or what? EDIT: a better formulation, from a reply I wrote below: I'll restate it somewhat differently: eating out in Europe more accurately reflects the full cost of everyone involved mak…
Is restaurant food really more expensive in Europe? I only ate in San Francisco, so my perception is probably warped, but there at least eating out is significantly more expensive than in Germany. The prices on the menu are maybe comparable, but they don't include tax and tip.