So offended that Steak N Shake has order screens instead of servers these days and they still expect a similar tip before service is even rendered.
same with shake shack, went there once, never going back. also asked me for my phone number.
The curious surge of productivity in U.S. restaurants
211–220 of 280 posts
Re: The curious surge of productivity in U.S. restaurants
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because drones are noisy and irritating in reality and nobody wants them flying around their neighborhood and they don’t scale and they can potentially scare animals and and and…
I can't tell if this is sarcasm, because it sounds almost exactly like how a horse rider would have described new-fangled automobiles.
Balony express?
Re: The curious surge of productivity in U.S. restaurants
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I believe they wirelessly communicate with the elevator control system. That sounds hilariously abusable.
The robots are operated by the building, for what it's worth. The delivery drivers drop the deliveries off to the robots in the lobby, and the robots take it from there to the individual rooms.
That actually sounds a lot better.
Re: The curious surge of productivity in U.S. restaurants
#214This 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…
Another effect they're glossing over is inflation. They're measuring real labor productivity ((dollars generated / inflation) / hours worked), but usually the way you measure inflation in that equation is to plug in some society-wide metric like the CPI or GDP deflator. By most accounts restaurant inflation has gone up more than overall CPI inflation; at least, I'm spending $120 on a meal that would've cost $80 pre-pandemic, yet official CPI inflation over this time period has been only about 23%. If you use that formula naively, it looks like the earnings of the restaurant sector have increased (which, technically speaking, they have relative to the rest of the economy), but it's really because you're paying more for the same service than you did before.
Re: The curious surge of productivity in U.S. restaurants
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Where does the profit from subsidies go to? A few years ago, McDonalds has subsidies of $1.5B USD, and $1.5B in profits. They really are a real estate company, and nursemaids for broken ice cream machines.
Re: The curious surge of productivity in U.S. restaurants
#216My favorite ~75 year old BBQ place here in Pasadena has half the bar (where you'd sit and eat and socialize if you were eating alone) reserved to give space for all the take-out orders and uber-eats pickups flowing through. I see single people come in and, without a space at the bar, take a seat at a booth alone. I don't blame restaurants for this at all, it's a tough business, but I do think it's about time we apply…
Nothing wrong with someone sitting in a booth alone if there’s a seat. It’s up to the restaurant to worry about maximizing their space. And it’s the restaurant’s choice to serve the take-out market. Shaming customers isn’t going to fix or change anything, and the restaurant does bear some of the responsibility; you can’t blame customers for buying what’s on order any more than you can blame restaurants for selling what customers will buy. Times have changed, and take out is no longer limited to pizza. You can choose to eat at restaurants that don’t do take-out, reward them with your business and tell them why, if you don’t want to see take-out business, right? I’m not sure but that might be limited to expensive fine dining at this point. Still, the only way you’ll curb the take-out take-over is if restaurants can make more money on dine-ins, and that sounds like a tall order. Or worse, a ship that’s sailed.
Re: The curious surge of productivity in U.S. restaurants
#217Simple. 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…
> Increase in takeout is an increase in efficiency for each line cook and emnployee.
There's also a kind of precarious food-business "art" going on behind your anecdote that follows the sentence I quoted (long line, but "not too long," etc.). In your single-minded speculation about the efficiency of takeout that art isn't present.
That art is the difference between this legendary Pacific Grove restaurant on the one hand, and a "for rent" sign on a failed restaurant with a fridge full of frozen pork chops and regret on the other.
Re: The curious surge of productivity in U.S. restaurants
#218Re: The curious surge of productivity in U.S. restaurants
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that more or less likely than the state deciding to block your access to freedom, and arresting and imprisoning/deporting you? When you live in an authoritarian state with arbitrary law 'enforcement', the problem isn't the payment system that you're using. It's that you no longer live in a country of laws. And that's not a problem that's going to be solved by using dead tree money.
More likely, by a huge margin, since it takes only checking a box in some software system, whereas the alternatives you mention need a lot of messy work to achieve.
States that aren't governed by rule of law have no issue with doing 'messy work'. All the pieces of the security apparatus are already there, and they are full of people who will obey.