Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Can a worker-owned restaurant work?

southseattleemerald.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 472 posts

Re: Can a worker-owned restaurant work?

#51

Post by astrange »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #45
lnxg33k1 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also in Italy there is a region where a lot of "companies" are cooperatives, (Emilia-Romagna), I'd say it's one of the wealthiest regions in Italy, I've lived there and was one of my happiest time in my life. I'd say a restaurant owned by workers can work, but as everything depends who do you work with, more than class, is personalities that make the difference, that's why I don't like these kind of articles, I think…

Switzerland has a retail/grocery chain called co-op, I always wondered if it was an actual coop or not, I’m guessing it is.

It's probably a customer co-op. A funny thing about this is that every kind of alternative ownership structure is considered leftist and somehow "publicly owned".

But in a customer co-op that doesn't include the workers and in a worker co-op that doesn't include you.

Re: Can a worker-owned restaurant work?

#52

Post by mordae »

fallingknife wrote: post #41
tristor wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is generally not how things work. Your same argument could be made if they realized the restaurant was very popular/profitable (with low empoloyee wages). Rents have to be somewhat in line with market. They can't just increase rents ignoring the rest of the market. No, that is actually pretty much exactly how things work. Successful restaurants get higher rents on lease renewal which is why they're incentivize…

How does the landlord know how much money the restaurant is making? All they would know is that the rent is paid on time and the restaurant "looks busy," which really isn't an accurate picture of income at all.

They just keep raising it till the restaurant starts rising the prices, slow down for a bit and then start rising the rent again.

Re: Can a worker-owned restaurant work?

#53

Post by tristor »

fallingknife wrote: post #41
tristor wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is generally not how things work. Your same argument could be made if they realized the restaurant was very popular/profitable (with low empoloyee wages). Rents have to be somewhat in line with market. They can't just increase rents ignoring the rest of the market. No, that is actually pretty much exactly how things work. Successful restaurants get higher rents on lease renewal which is why they're incentivize…

How does the landlord know how much money the restaurant is making? All they would know is that the rent is paid on time and the restaurant "looks busy," which really isn't an accurate picture of income at all.

> How does the landlord know how much money the restaurant is making?

They don't. But when the local newspaper food reviewer gives you a glowing review and there's lines out the door waiting for a table when you have full covers for the night, and they happen to drive by /their/ building and see this, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out you're doing well. The unfortunate reality of restaurant economics means you could have booming business and still making little or no excess profits though, depending on how adept you are at controlling other business costs, but since the landlord can't see your books they use these other indicators to decide to fuck with you instead.

There is neither a legal nor inherent natural requirement that a landlord choose a reasonable or accurate metric to decide to raise your rent. In fact, in most parts of the country (world?) raising your rent is an entirely arbitrary decision in their full discretion. You seem to be under the impression that the just world fallacy is a truth, when in fact it's not only untrue, most landlords are scum who will happily do as much financial harm as possible to you to the very edge of the limit for what it takes for you to go out of business. The landlord doesn't want you to go out of business or move, which is the only incentive tempering their greed at all.

Re: Can a worker-owned restaurant work?

#54

Post by mordae »

astrange wrote: post #44
tracker1 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering a handful of companies already control most rental pricing, and already extract "maximum value" from those properties, I'm not sure it would be any different in any direction. I don't get why there isn't some level of Trust Busting going on regarding the rental property pricing management at all.

Because it's not true. People only think this because of an innumerate article from ProPublica. Almost all landlords are small time, only own one or two buildings, and can't organize a cartel. Except there's one way they can - by changing the law to favor them by banning new construction.

They don't need to collude explicitly. They just watch posted prices in their region and match that. Since the posted prices are always above average (you start higher than the old rent and keep lowering it until somebody takes it), rent keeps going up for everyone.

Re: Can a worker-owned restaurant work?

#55

Post by bluedino »

SenoraRaton wrote: post #5

One thing that I never understood was, if an employees wages are tied to the success of the company, would that not incentivize better work ethic as a whole? That is how it works in the start-up world. You get equity, you have literally invested in the company, and you know that your work should (in theory) directly benefit you financially. Instead we end up in a system where the employee/employer relationship is inh…

>> If you work at McDonalds, in is 100% in your interest to do the absolute bare minimum possible to not be fired

Or:

If it's flipping hamburgers at McDonald's, be the best hamburger flipper in the world

Ice Cube, or Abraham Lincoln, or Dave Ramsey said that. I forgot which one.

Re: Can a worker-owned restaurant work?

#56

Post by username332211 »

SenoraRaton wrote: post #14
deegles wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I (naively) think a restaurant would have an easier time detecting people who are doing the bare minimum. The issue becomes how to "punish" freeloaders who are also owners? Imagine the nightmare scenario of a restaurant where every employee is a part of the LLC that owns it. "Firing" someone becomes an onerous legal process.

Does it? If the rest of the community doesn't want you there, seems pretty cut and dry. There are no "managers" at Valve, yet they fire people all the time. You would simply receive your pay, and whatever your portion of the dividends owed to you up until your date of firing.

Valve is still a corporation with a single majority shareholder.

And I can't imagine a restaurant could work the same way as Valve. In a restaurant, you have to feed people day in day out. You can't deliver a Michelin-quality meal when the inspiration hits you and nothing when it doesn't.

Valve also seems to have a strangely forgiving customer base. I don't think I've ever seen anyone complain about micro-transactions in their games, whereas other publishers seem to get a lot of hate for it. (Then again, ever since I stopped playing games, I've began to notice that each publisher had their own unique method of fleecing their customer base, so it may be that Valve got the players that tolerate micro-transactions, whereas others would have the ones who tolerate endless DLCs.)

Re: Can a worker-owned restaurant work?

#57

Post by vidarh »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #45
lnxg33k1 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also in Italy there is a region where a lot of "companies" are cooperatives, (Emilia-Romagna), I'd say it's one of the wealthiest regions in Italy, I've lived there and was one of my happiest time in my life. I'd say a restaurant owned by workers can work, but as everything depends who do you work with, more than class, is personalities that make the difference, that's why I don't like these kind of articles, I think…

Switzerland has a retail/grocery chain called co-op, I always wondered if it was an actual coop or not, I’m guessing it is.

Many countries have co-op grocery chains or other outcrops of the cooperative movement using that name, but most of them (including in Switzerland) are member (customer) owned rather than worker owned.

Re: Can a worker-owned restaurant work?

#58

Post by raybb »

wcerfgba wrote: post #4

Wonderful story, thanks for sharing. Do you know any worker-owned food businesses? Share in the comments! In Preston, UK, we have The Larder. Not sure about the ownership model but it is a social enterprise working on food justice: https://larder.org.uk/

Since you mentioned social enterprises, I'll share this repo I made where I keep track of resources for learning about social enterprises. https://github.com/RayBB/awesome-social-enterprise

Btw the definition varies a good bit around the world but generally a social enterprise is more about the goal of the organization and a coop (or worker-owned) is about who has power the make decisions in the org.

Re: Can a worker-owned restaurant work?

#59

Post by astrange »

mordae wrote: post #54
astrange wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's not true. People only think this because of an innumerate article from ProPublica. Almost all landlords are small time, only own one or two buildings, and can't organize a cartel. Except there's one way they can - by changing the law to favor them by banning new construction.

They don't need to collude explicitly. They just watch posted prices in their region and match that. Since the posted prices are always above average (you start higher than the old rent and keep lowering it until somebody takes it), rent keeps going up for everyone.

Rents don't always go up even nominally; you've just listed the upward pressures without the downwards ones. I believe they're still down in SF compared to last year.

Posted prices can be misleading because they prefer to give discounts (X months free) rather than lower the sticker price, so it also depends how you count.

Post reply on HN