291–300 of 410 posts
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OMG an interrobang, my eyes can hardly believe it. Haha. I love the idea (I constantly use '?!' in online chat) but they don't look so great. Also, in chess, !? and ?! have different meanings..
¿¡
https://spanish.stackexchange.com/questions/137/origin-and-u...
They all miss the point of the story, which is crushingly relevant to startups:
If you build a company with people you like and love, and circumstances outside of your control force it to scale in a hurry, those people you like and love are going to get hurt in the process.
That's not an engineering problem to fix. Stanich's didn't need an algorithmic order filling solution, it needed to lose the people that made it Stanich's. It was doomed no matter what. It was unscalable; it's unscalability is what imbued it with what Alexander liked about it.
The story begins and ends with Stanich's parents and the reason why they started the business in the first place for a _massive_ reason, one that seems to have gone over the heads of most HN commenters (and I'll bet also most people reading it via HN), and that's at least as depressing as the story itself.
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Of course there's a ceiling, but you're assuming the ceiling is based on the burger. It's not. It's based on the demand for the burger, and that demand is way, way higher than the supply, so the ceiling is higher than the current price. Pretty simple. And yes, you can only raise it to a certain point, but you only need to raise it to a certain point: that certain point is the ceiling . And you don't need to jump from…
This is a terrible term but I'll use it because it works here: the genre of burger we are talking about here is "cheap burger" (I mean that as a quality/experience descriptor, not price). It's a relatively thin, wide ground chuck patty on a good-but-standard bun; the only "interesting" ingredient they use is hamburger relish. So, yeah I am explicitly saying that the price ceiling and the demand for the burger aren't…
That assumes that whatever it is that he was doing before things blew up can be scaled. I think it's quite possible that it can't. Particularly as, according to Alexander, the things that pushed the place over the top were intangibles about atmosphere, which isn't reproducible.
Also, "scaling" assumes that the owner wants to scale. If he's only interested in operating a neighborhood burger diner, he probably doesn't.
It's hard to blame Kevin Alexander for this, because Steve Stanich played ball with the review, like most restaurants would. If he wanted to, he could have asked not to be featured in the list, and Alexander probably would have complied; otherwise, he could have done other things to make it clear to his customers that he wasn't interested in fulfilling the role the ranking carved out for him. We see this effect in Ch…
Au Cheval is easily the most overrated burger (and perhaps restaurant) in Chicago. Hey guess what, if you make a 12oz burger, put three slices of cheese on it, place it on a buttered roll, then put pork belly, a fried egg, and mayo on it, it will taste good. And it will also make you want to freakin die the moment you're done because you just consumed 25,000 calories. But people will wait literally 2.5 hours for this…
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This is a terrible term but I'll use it because it works here: the genre of burger we are talking about here is "cheap burger" (I mean that as a quality/experience descriptor, not price). It's a relatively thin, wide ground chuck patty on a good-but-standard bun; the only "interesting" ingredient they use is hamburger relish. So, yeah I am explicitly saying that the price ceiling and the demand for the burger aren't…
> He probably should franchise. That assumes that whatever it is that he was doing before things blew up can be scaled. I think it's quite possible that it can't. Particularly as, according to Alexander, the things that pushed the place over the top were intangibles about atmosphere, which isn't reproducible. Also, "scaling" assumes that the owner wants to scale. If he's only interested in operating a neighborhood bu…
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Yea _reading_ the linked article goes into all of this.
Not really, the author is pretty convinced that he killed the restaurant, despite Stanich mentioning family problems.
Apparently, after my story came out, crowds of people started coming in the restaurant, people in from out of town, or from the suburbs, basically just non-regulars. And as the lines started to build up, his employees -- who were mainly family members -- got stressed out, and the stress would cause them to not be as friendly as they should be, or to shout out crazy long wait times for burgers in an attempt to maybe convince people to leave, and as this started happening, things fell by the wayside. Dishes weren’t cleared quickly, and these new people weren’t having the proper Stanich’s experience, and Steve would spend his entire day going around apologizing and trying to fix things.
Way back in the '80s, I worked in the kitchen at a little ice cream and lunch counter place called Great Midwestern. Ronald Reagan visited, and declared the blueberry ice cream "best ice cream in America" (to be fair, it was really excellent). This led to a big boom in business - and more importantly, mandatory visits by GOP presidential candidates in 1987 Iowa, with all the press circus that involved. The owners too…
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You can do that to a point, but if what you're serving is simply a well-executed diner burger, then, like I said, there's a ceiling. You can't charge $30 for that. Or, you can, but you'll create more problems than you'll solve. This guy ate at 330 different burger restaurants. He has a finely-tuned metric for what a good burger is (his #3 is also a neighborhood place he grew up with). He's set up to appreciate what S…
I think this is the In-n-out effect - people who grew up on it see it as a vastly superior version of McDs, Wendy's etc for the same price, and are understandably effusive about this. But visitors expect something profound instead of a well executed fast food style burger.
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Of course there's a ceiling, but you're assuming the ceiling is based on the burger. It's not. It's based on the demand for the burger, and that demand is way, way higher than the supply, so the ceiling is higher than the current price. Pretty simple. And yes, you can only raise it to a certain point, but you only need to raise it to a certain point: that certain point is the ceiling . And you don't need to jump from…
This is a terrible term but I'll use it because it works here: the genre of burger we are talking about here is "cheap burger" (I mean that as a quality/experience descriptor, not price). It's a relatively thin, wide ground chuck patty on a good-but-standard bun; the only "interesting" ingredient they use is hamburger relish. So, yeah I am explicitly saying that the price ceiling and the demand for the burger aren't…
And you don't need to charge $30. Charging a few extra bucks probably solves this problem without the downsides you're talking about.
Finally, I'm also not convinced those problems you suggest would be caused by charging $30 are actually problems. Maybe people feel like it wasn't worth it, but so what? Word gets out that the $30 burgers are overpriced...does that mean people will stop coming? There's an entire class of overpriced crappy restaurants that stay busy because of former glory, or location, or whatever. Like almost every big restaurant in a tourist zone of major world cities.
And if they DO stop coming, then doesn't that solve the original problem? Crowds dry up, you drop the prices back down, life goes on.
Just seems like almost anything would be better than throwing your hands up and shutting down the restaurant. Which ironically isn't even what happened here!