181–190 of 280 posts
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On the flip side, many bars and restaurants are throwing lots of attention to entertainment and in-person experiences. It’s a lot easier to find in person entertainment.
Do you mean like Chuck E. Cheese and Dave and Buster’s?
QR code menus, and phone or tablet ordering, also took off. Surely that affects productivity as well. Im guessing also, just doing things with thinner staff and resources overall caused a lot of establishments to learn how to operate more efficiently.
Especially ones where you have to create an account.
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I am also retired and have more or less the same routine as you. I aim my own cooking time to a maximum of 7.5 minutes e.g. fried eggs and smoked salmon. I do open the door myself though. I hope you have an assistant because you can afford one and not because of some disability.
Oddly, one of the things I'm looking forward to doing in retirement, is spending more time cooking. I started learning in my 40's and can now competently cook some basic dishes. Once I'm retired I'll have more time to experiment and try out different things. One of the upsides of cooking yourself, is knowing exactly what goes in to the meals you're eating and being able to control things like spice level and how well…
A restaurant sells two basic categories of product: food/drink, and service. Labor is expended on both.
They’re ignoring service and only looking at food/drink. The split between these two products has shifted away from service. That means more labor is going into the thing they’re actually counting and less is going into the thing they’re ignoring. Wow, productivity went up!
It’s interesting that the industry has shifted to more takeout, but framing it as “surge of productivity” is ridiculous.
This seems really stupid. A restaurant sells two basic categories of product: food/drink, and service. Labor is expended on both. They’re ignoring service and only looking at food/drink. The split between these two products has shifted away from service. That means more labor is going into the thing they’re actually counting and less is going into the thing they’re ignoring. Wow, productivity went up! It’s interestin…
It's not that productivity is genuinely up, it's that modern restaurants are providing a different product.
Takeout/delivery to eat on your couch has different economics than a full service restaurant. Phrasing it as productivity is disingenuous.
How much of this is the COVID-correlated normalization of delivery apps [0]? Anecdotally I do sometimes notice people eating quickly or taking out, but what I really notice is the nonstop flurry of app delivery folks darting in and out of the pickup area... Seems consistent with the study's observations, too: > As a result, we think the growth in take-out or delivery is the primary driver of the jump in short visits.…
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?!
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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.
Uhhhh, balconies? Reach out of an open window like a reverse drive-through?
> 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…
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This really seems the like 'oh duh' insight. The output of your revenue-making equipment (the kitchen) went up without requiring additional floor space and staff to serve a larger customer-base. 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 - restauran…
Take out is terrible for restaurants. All the profit is in alcohol which people rarely take out. In distant second, profit comes from understaffing. So it should be obvious how and why productivity rises: in the absence of lucrative dine in drinkers, understaff. Then the denominator in the productivity calculation is smaller.
Industry benchmarks for similar chains put food ingredients typically around 28–35% of the menu price and alcoholic beverages around 20–25% of the menu price. Nonetheless, making 2x profit on 25% of sales is incredible for restaurants.
At Cheesecake Factory, total food and beverage cost is 24.6%. Labor cost is 36.7%: of that waitstaff is ~50% of labor and kitchen staff is ~30% of labor. Operating cost is 26.7%. Looks like after other costs the profit was ~1.2%. Not much but that profit comes from the 25% off-premise consumption without alcohol.
Takeout for Michelin star restaurants is not a good idea. For almost all other restaurants, takeout is were the profits are. Engineering a menu and kitchen is like engineering a database, you have to ask things like are there a lot of writes and few reads or a lot of reads and few writes to determine how to structure it. When designing a restaurant and menu there needs to be equilibrium between how many seats in the dining room, what if any liqueur license to acquire, an expectation of percentage of food will be takeout, and menu items that will satisfy both dining room and takeout quality expectations. We eat with our eyes first even if it is opening a steaming hot carton of Orange Chicken from the Cheesecake Factory. There are always tradeoffs and it matters what the end goal is and more often than not the goal for both a database and kitchen is to earn as much profit as possible.
Some advice if you ever open a restaurant. The single biggest pain point when working in a kitchen opening a brand new restaurant is not enough storage. [1] You need enough containers to hold each of every element. You need enough containers to hold each of every element in cold storage for backup during service. Lastly, you need enough clean containers to switch the contents of each element into at the end of each night or to be dirty waiting for cleaning while the others are being used. The week before you open a restaurant, count how many containers you thought you needed and have in stock and triple that amount. Nothing will slow down service like not having enough containers. See, engineering a kitchen is like engineering a database.
[0] https://s29.q4cdn.com/187116270/files/doc_financials/2022/ar...
[1]https://www.amazon.com/Rubbermaid-Commercial-2-Size-3-Quart-...
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Well were their wrong? Car-centric development has been an absolute disaster in dozens of different ways.
those disasters were externalities, which i dont disagree is disheartening, but the personal freedoms and transportation capability given by the personal automobile is worth it. Public transport, even good ones, does not provide this level of comfort and freedom.
OK, it's not as private or comfortable as your own vehicle, but I'd rather be in public but able to read/dream/listen than in private but having to concentrate on the road. (This of course requires a public transport system which is safe and not full of crazies, I understand that's a problem in those US cities which have it).
Granted, there's only a few dozen cities in the world that do it that well.