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The curious surge of productivity in U.S. restaurants

bfi.uchicago.edu

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Re: The curious surge of productivity in U.S. restaurants

#231

Post by UltraSane »

borgdefenser wrote: post #225
UltraSane wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

most restaurants are absolutely terrible value for money.

The whole restaurant experience forced me to get more into cooking for myself because the value is just not there. Low and behold it is actually fun to cook. It is actually more fun to be able to make a new dish yourself than to try a new restaurant. It is amusing how everything DIY is cool in hacker culture besides cooking. For no reason besides custom, people pretend they just don't have time to cook or that learni…

I discovered air fryers + cheap Costco chicken is a great combination! Chicken tenderloins are $3.30 a pound and take very little time to cook and are delicious, low calorie, and high in protein.

Re: The curious surge of productivity in U.S. restaurants

#232

Post by UltraSane »

db48x wrote: post #119
UltraSane wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

most restaurants are absolutely terrible value for money.

Depends on what you value. If all you value are calories, then sure, there are much cheaper ways of getting the calories you need. But if you value time, or novelty, or the dining experience, or conversation with a neighbor or even just the bartender then there are plenty of places that cater to your values.

I can justify spending $25 to $50 a week eating at restaurants with friends. But eating fast food every single day is just pissing money away.

Re: The curious surge of productivity in U.S. restaurants

#233

Post by UltraSane »

walthamstow wrote: post #123
UltraSane wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

most restaurants are absolutely terrible value for money.

Especially if you're anything above a 7/10 home cook

Eh, for most restaurants I wold say 5/10. So much restaurant food is just reheated stuff they buy from Sysco.

Re: The curious surge of productivity in U.S. restaurants

#234

Post by mediaman »

wormlord wrote: post #55
lynguist wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like under whatever hood one looks or whichever layer of paint one looks behind - when it’s a relatively new change in society, one always finds the root cause to be neoliberalism. Your comment reconfirms this especially pictorially with the last statement: productivity and it alone goes up and quality or service are not even part of the equation.

I get why people took issue with my parent comment, because it seems like I am just whining that economists are measuring the only things they can measure. But it's like the fish asking "what's water?". why do we pay people to measure these things? why do they measure what they measure and not something else? why is this type of thinking dominant among the technocratic elite? Especially when the view from the ground…

Most of the profession of economics in the last several decades has been focused on figuring out how to measure difficult-to-measure truths about how people behave. That's what behavioral economics is about. The other name on the UChicago institute you don't like, Gary Becker, won a Nobel for finding ways to creatively study behaviorism: family structure, why people commit crime, studying societal benefits from education, and quantifying damage of discrimination.

You might argue that we shouldn't measure things at all -- that it is better to live in darkness and ignorance, and make vague gestures about the way things are with no evidence or rigorous thought. Measuring is how we find truth. Sometimes it is hard. But throwing away our measuring tools is not the path to enlightenment.

Many people choose to ex ante dislike economists, and dismiss anything any of them have to say without further study, because there is a risk that the results of quantifying the world might disagree with their preconceptions.

Re: The curious surge of productivity in U.S. restaurants

#235

Post by lostlogin »

wat10000 wrote: post #184

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…

> the industry has shifted to more takeout

Last night I went to a nice (formerly nice?) restaurant. Someone had brought their dog, their children crawled around my feet and one listened to an iPad on moderate to high volume.

I ordered my drink twice, and it never came, my side dish was ordered twice too, and eventually came.

I abandoned movie theatres for similar reasons. Maybe it’s time to abandon restaurants.

Re: The curious surge of productivity in U.S. restaurants

#236

Post by dehrmann »

brians wrote: post #223
dehrmann wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nit: Marketplace is an APM show--essentially a competitor of NPR. "NPR" has just become shorthand for "public radio."

Also Marketplace airs on NPR stations. I have Windows on a Dell, and I hear Marketplace on NPR.

Marketplace airs on stations that might happen to also air NPR. It's more like dual booting Windows and Linux on your Dell that has a Windows sticker on it.

Re: The curious surge of productivity in U.S. restaurants

#237

Post by PeterStuer »

Would the numbers reflect the same if restaurants increased had their contingent of undocumented and thus undeclared workers?

For example: If I perviously had 1 server, then brought in a second one which is not on the books at all and I pay under the counter in cash, would it show up as a productivity increase of my still official single employee?

Re: The curious surge of productivity in U.S. restaurants

#238

Post by wat10000 »

mediaman wrote: post #224
wat10000 wrote: post #184

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…

If you read the paper, they explicitly define "productivity" as real sales per employee. Your point about service versus food would be valid except that, apparently, they weren't being paid well for the service, because real sales went up per employee as a function of reduced dwell time. That means that service was a low productivity offering. That you can explain the increase in productivity by shift in mix from low…

In the US, service is paid almost entirely from tips. The word “tip” doesn’t occur anywhere in their paper so I’m not optimistic that they accounted for this.

Re: The curious surge of productivity in U.S. restaurants

#239

Post by kayo_20211030 »

I'm confused. The paper is about something called "Restaurant Productivity", but it's not defined up-front, or any place close to up-front. Maybe, it's defined by page 9, but it's hard to tell. It all might be completely correct, but for God's sake write a paper that a reasonably intelligent person can follow. What are we talking about? What do we know? What you think we know, but isn't true. What we now believe, having done the analysis. Quick summary, and then done. I think Goolsbee is famous somewhere, but why be a lead author on a badly written paper? It's just prose. Maybe it's true, but who'd know?

Re: The curious surge of productivity in U.S. restaurants

#240

Post by dylan604 »

shigawire wrote: post #63
dylan604 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess we do, because I am not familiar with that specific definition What about those "sit down" places where you load up a QR code, order from that site, pay from that site, but have a server bring your food? are they still a "sit down" place?

Most would say no I'd guess in the US. To me "sit down" implies you are seated by a host and waited on.

So a sit-down restaurant was a sit-down restaurant pre-COVID, then became not a sit-down restaurant during COVID just because the style of waiting/serving became different. That's a tilted definition
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