151–160 of 280 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't tell if this is sarcasm, because it sounds almost exactly like how a horse rider would have described new-fangled automobiles.
Well were their wrong? Car-centric development has been an absolute disaster in dozens of different ways.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh god we're going to get a new hellscape of drone noise which we won't be able to get rid of on account of the personal freedom granted by having second rate food delivered five minutes faster.
> hellscape of drone noise on the other hand, if it removed some traffic noise which is equal or worse than drone noises...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I'd like to know are the demographics of the people using the delivery apps. Everyone I know refuses to touch them due to the massive extra costs piled on top, but whenever I swing by somewhere in-person to get takeout, I have the same experience as you - there's always at least a few bags on the "Doordash shelf" or equivalent. Who's burning all this money?!
I'm a retiree. I don't have much time left to spend it on cooking. Going to a restaurant takes even more time than cooking. Ordering and opening the door is much faster. Anyway, my assistant does that. I do cook meals that take no more than 5 minutes of my time, like boiled eggs, rice, grilled meat or quick salad.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And they can't press buttons in the elevator. I don't think any delivery service will take off in a city if people have to leave their apartments.
Chinese delivery robots have been using elevators for years. I believe they wirelessly communicate with the elevator control system.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The convenience of digital simply made cash useless (mostly). Useless? Wait until your digital transactions fail or your bank or your state decides to block your access to your payment system. And believe me, it's not a "if", this is a real threat that will be waged against people. When it's technically possible, it always ends up becoming a reality. And by that time, "going back to cash" may not be an option in ce…
I don't see the relevance in your comment. I'm saying it's useless in the sense that I haven't paid for nearly a single thing in cash in a year or two, and this is because of convenience and not because of COVID.
The overhead on takeout is far less than dine-in although the menu items cost the same. Dine-in costs include base waitstaff salary and workman's comp, cleaning crew and dishwashers, electricity, insurance, ect.. while takeout requires the very small cost of packaging. Something that always bugs me is restaurants that charge $2 or $5 surcharge for takeout. I'm saving the restaurant a ton of money by not using the dining room, why would they discourage that?
> It cannot be explained by economies of scale
I disagree. Increase in takeout is an increase in efficiency for each line cook and emnployee.
There was a 23 seat restaurant on the top of the hill in Pacific Grove, CA in the 90s named Taste Bisto. The chef and his wife made a fortune from that tiny restaurant. He did two things. First, he set the prices so there was always a little line waiting at the door, not too long, and he encouraged takeout with an emphasis on making the food still look presentable when the person opens the container 30 minutes later at home. According to the chef, his real profits came from the takeout. From the point of view of the grill cook, grilling 8 pork chops or 18 pork chops at. the same time isn't much different, as the cook has to stand by the grill anyhow.
> The restaurants’ productivity growth rates are strongly correlated, however, with reductions in the amount of time their customers spend in the establishments, particularly with a rising share of customers spending 10 minutes or less. The frequency of such ‘take-out’ customers rose considerably during COVID, even at fast food restaurants, and never went back down. The magnitude of the restaurant-level relationship…
Simple. The overhead on takeout is far less than dine-in although the menu items cost the same. Dine-in costs include base waitstaff salary and workman's comp, cleaning crew and dishwashers, electricity, insurance, ect.. while takeout requires the very small cost of packaging. Something that always bugs me is restaurants that charge $2 or $5 surcharge for takeout. I'm saving the restaurant a ton of money by not using…
More specifically - the restaurants that survived (which is already a feat in and of itself) could serve more customers since they didn't have to turn as many tables. Even with the "overhead" of food delivery apps - restaurants could still purchase whole-sale ingredients in bulk and sell to more people without building out their physical plant.
To add - the dine-in experience has gotten faster. You don't need to wait for menus and you don't need to do the dance when settling your bill. Even if you didn't expand your delivery clientele you could probably turn tables faster without any 'hit' on rushing out your loyal customers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the move away from cash coincided with COVID but was not related much. The convenience of digital simply made cash useless (mostly).
You missed the point. The point is that a lot of restaurants used to not report a lot of cash transactions. If almost everybody is using digital, the restaurant no longer has the option to underreport as there is an indelible transaction record (generally with an outsourced third party handling your credit cards). So, some amount of the "productivity increase" is simply the underreported cash transactions now coming…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People only were working remotely that much because everyone was forced to be home which was unprecedented. It can only possibly go downhill from “everyone was forced to be home.” But even that aside, according to Gallup, exclusively remote employees fell from a high of 70% to a measly 26%(!). Many employees did transition to hybrid work but working fully remotely is very different than knowing that you’ll see Mary a…
Another thing driving people back is actually IT departments. Managing remote devices is difficult and adds a lot of complexity. I did a couple years of contracting after COVID and a lot of these companies had to scramble to figure it out and now have weird hacked together hybrid AD/Intune/AAD setups that now are an unwieldy mess. Buying whatever laptops they could find on short notice has led to random makes and mod…
Even the companies with the strongest RTO policies still allow many employees to work from home one day a week / if they are sick / if they are on call / in other extenuating circumstances. So those IT departments still have to manage a fleet of off-premises devices of approximately the same size.
Maybe there are small savings from underprovisioning VPNs, or fewer support requests when people will all be in the office regularly, but that seems tiny in comparison.