I've known two chefs who've gone on to start their own restaurants over the years, and the one thing they have in common (other than smoking) is they are REALLY highly strung. I don't just mean a little anxious/fidgety - they quite literally don't seem to be able to sit still even for a few seconds. Even little actions like pulling out a chair to sit down happens as fast as they're physically able to do it. Noisiest…
You ever seen Gordon Ramsey when he's demonstrating or standing in place gesticulating, dude is like a jackrabbit on meth, he can't keep still.
This should be easy to study in Seattle and other "Fight for $15" cities as the higher minimum wage is phased in.
If you increase everyone's wages the quality of employees across the board won't change. If you increase your wages, while other employers' wages stay the same, you'll get better applicants.
I think the argument is if you raise someone's income above a living wage, you reduce their incentive to steal.
I know a lot of really experienced bartenders, waitstaff, etc and was in the industry for years. No one you'd want to hire would work at a place that didn't do cash tips, unless we're talking super duper fine dining black tie stuff. And possibly even then. EDIT: I've also known of places that switched to cashless have all their good staff quit, and be stuck with only completely useless people
Every study I've seen shows that people spend and tip more when they are using credit cards than cash. Do high and mid income earners walk around cash and use it a lot at any place but strip clubs?
Depends on whether it's a bar or restaurant.
I'd tend to agree at restaurants (anecdotally). But, when I tip at a bar with cash, it's a buck a drink, even when it's a 2 dollar coors light. If I pay with credit card, the 20% thinking kicks in and that's what I tip. 40 cents on a 2 dollar beer.
Starbucks may be consistent at making coffee, but coffee elitists would claim that their coffee beans are over-roasted in order to hide the generally poor quality of the beans and used to burn out a lot of the flavors. If you buy a bag of coffee beans of freshly roasted coffee beans from a local coffee shop, and a bag from Starbucks, then make yourself a cup of coffee the difference is enormous. The predominant taste…
Agreed. I don't have a sophisticated palate and even I can tell that Starbucks is inferior to competitors.
Agreed again. Starbucks coffee being over roasted is a common complaint, also I find the atmosphere unappealing usually. Most coffee shops I frequent have to hit the sweet spot of having decent coffee + price and being a pleasant place to work while having access to reliable wifi -- for me that turned out to be the local supermarket, I get real ambient noise as well without having music being blasted over speakers all the time. The trick I found is to look for places where people want to hold conversations in public; I often see Arab immigrants gathering to converse, local meetings proceeding, retirees conversing, and people conducting business at this location -- the defining feature is that nobody is really under the age of 30-35 usually if they use the venue for social functions. It changes from city to city, sometimes it's a local hipster cafe or a random 24h chain where interesting things happen outside the purview of what is mainstream.
I read the whole article end to end - this guy looks like he had a real interest into cooking, was willing to work hard and was able to contribute to the society in terms of a nice highly rated restaurant. It doesn't look like he wanted to draw millions of dollars from day 1 nor that he wanted his restaurant in the fanciest of the places. This should be a very normal thing to do and such people should succeed. Why is…
If you read the whole article you'd see that it was perfectly possible to succeed, just that you cannot go in completely blind and just expect things to work by magic. Once a guy who had some experience in the restaurant business and wasn't completely naive about the whole process took over the place it started turning a profit.
If you increase everyone's wages the quality of employees across the board won't change. If you increase your wages, while other employers' wages stay the same, you'll get better applicants.
I think the argument is if you raise someone's income above a living wage, you reduce their incentive to steal.
But if you raise all wages, all prices go up, so you never get there.
> We had started with $60,000; after six weeks, we were down to $3,000, and there was still so much to do. I don't think he did nearly enough research into how much it costs to start a restaurant.
Many of my dreams have died after I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation of startup costs and revenue potential.
I've often wondered about the selection bias of the "80% of restaurants fail, they're the worst investment" because I had a suspicion that many people start restaurants thinking essentially, "My Mom's pasta sauce is so good, people say they would pay for it. I should open up a restaurant with her recipe." and then proceed to fall flat on their face. Reading this article, I think I'm right. I wonder what the success r…
Yes, you're mostly correct. Most new restaurants fail because they don't handle the fundamentals properly.
To be fair, it's not that easy to learn all the fundamentals without doing the whole process and failing at it.
You won't go into debt if you have enough capitalization. Of course, you almost never have enough capitalization.
Right, i should note that not all the things i’ve seen are smart.... avoiding going into personal debt is fairly straigtforward. But, I frankly can’t imagine a restaurant business not taking on some debt in some seasons, at least at first.
Whether you go in to debt or not is about how much money you start with. ;-)