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The state of the restaurant industry

opentable.com

171–180 of 591 posts

Re: The state of the restaurant industry

#171
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a very good idea for time-series data which has a "freshness" aspect. If you started with the beginning of the dataset, February 18, you'd be adding significant weight to values which are comparative to, but no longer representative of, the current state of things on March 16. Not to mention, if it was first-to-last displayed left to right, you may miss the scroll bar and not understand the value of the data bei…

You can still put the most recent data on the right, and zoom in to show the rightmost data points. This is an established practice in stock charts and works well.

For charting, absolutely. If OpenTable had visualized this as a two-axis line chart I would have not have complained.

My comment was addressing the OP's criticism regarding how tabular data was displayed in the article.

Re: The state of the restaurant industry

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SBA just announced a program for loans up to $2M at 3.75% to make payroll

For restaurant owner running on 3-5% margins, when salaries are a significant expense, it would be suicide to take a loan to make payroll; your business would probably never be profitable again. Better to let the business die and reinvent yourself in June/July.

Yes, better from a personal standpoint, but jeez, from a humanitarian perspective, can you really blame any restaurant owner from wanting to make payroll at any cost so that their employees can continue to feed themselves, pay rent, and take care of their loved ones?

Re: The state of the restaurant industry

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SBA just announced a program for loans up to $2M at 3.75% to make payroll

The problem with loans are you have to repay them. Giving out loans as a social safety net is a cruel joke. It just makes people worse off in the long run.

Zero percent interest loans over a long enough repayment period (eg. ten years) would work though. It allows spreading the immediate loss in sales over a much longer period.

Not that it would happen though.

Re: The state of the restaurant industry

#174
post #50

Perhaps US eat-out culture will die, and those who worked those jobs will just have to find some other means by which to negotiate value from the economy.

Remarkable how quickly you were able to dehumanize the economic impact on millions of lives and yet simultaneously anthropomorphize the “economy”. A single sentence.

I don't see any evidence of anthropomorphizing the economy or dehumanizing the individual here in the comment you are replying to.

Maybe you need to reread what you commented on

Re: The state of the restaurant industry

#175

I can't understand why would somebody think that putting latest data on the left is a good idea.

People read from left to right so it makes sense that the latest information would be on the left side for a time series table that keeps on growing.

People (in this language) read from left to right, so they're used to what is on the left coming before what is on the right. If you have a time series that keeps growing, trim or scale it to the display size, or change the sample rate, or give some UI options to let them vary those parameters. Don't ask people to invert their expectation of "before" and "after". Those are too fundamental.

Re: The state of the restaurant industry

#176

I'm always a little surprised that so many people never picked up the ability to even do basic cooking. Of course, as recently as Sunday people like Nunes were telling people it was important to support their local businesses by eating out as if it were their patriotic duty. It might be different now that even Fox and Trump are saying the same thing as the CDC finally. Maybe not if people literally cannot feed themse…

Maybe the demand is also caused by people who have returned from traveling in the past two weeks and are self quarantining somewhere where they have no cooking equipment?

Could be, and obviously some people can't cook for reasons other than lack of willingness to learn. I get that, I'm also disabled and cooking is sometimes too hard. But I bet it looks a lot different next Saturday than it did last Saturday just from 46% of the country suddenly hearing from the only source they trust that this is, indeed, a big deal.

I'm thankful for this, though I wish we hadn't spent the last month trying to convince that same 46% of the country (who trend significantly towards the elderly end of the spectrum) that it was an overblown conspiracy against the incumbent president.

Re: The state of the restaurant industry

#179

>the cascading economic impact from just this one sector will be enormous. The entire hospitality industry is going to take a huge hit. I do work in the convention, corporate travel/event space, and my calendar up until June has been wiped out. Cascading is the key thing people seem to gloss over. Sure, servers and kitchen staff are obvious. The food delivery people will not be needed. Companies like Aramark that pro…

It's going to be wiped out far beyond June. Based on the recent models run by UK, the same models that prompted the White House to warn against gatherings of greater than 10 people, the curve doesn't end even without intervention until August. With intervention what we are going through right now could last well into 2021.

Re: The state of the restaurant industry

#180
post #5

Does that data indicate that seated reservations are only presently down 56% YOY in the US ? That's pretty discouraging if that many people are still ignoring standard guidance.

A friend of mine spoke to someone today who was not aware of COVID-19 at all. Literally had not heard the term.
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