441–450 of 472 posts
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Had no idea. They’ve got great pizza with very reasonable prices. (and some huge sizes)
Very reasonable prices are $40 + 8% coop fee for a standard large pizza? That's almost $50 after tax. https://asliceofny.com/sunnyvale/menu/
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Sure, i'm not commenting on the tastiness. Just that I remember balking at the $40 I spent for a pizza there, and am surprised that anyone thinks the prices are "reasonable" when it's likely one of the most expensive pizza places in the entire country.
I mean: http://www.pizzamyheart.com/menu/ Maybe there's more to the prices than the co-op structure?
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> assumes all the risks, while gifting the potential rewards. Why would worker ownership be a charity and why would owners not be sharing the profits regardless of whether they also work there?
Because someone had to put up the original capital, and it's not necessarily the same people working there. And if non-workers hold onto ownership, it's not a worker co-op.
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Because someone had to put up the original capital, and it's not necessarily the same people working there. And if non-workers hold onto ownership, it's not a worker co-op.
If something is owned by workers then that means they are the ones who put in the capital. They could have bought the business from the original investors, or made the initial investment with common funds. If there are other investors still owning a part of the business then it’s not worker owned (at least not fully worker owned).
No matter how it's done, someone somewhere has to be extra generous.
Wonderful story, thanks for sharing. Do you know any worker-owned food businesses? Share in the comments! In Preston, UK, we have The Larder. Not sure about the ownership model but it is a social enterprise working on food justice: https://larder.org.uk/
In San Francisco, the Rainbow Grocery Cooperative has been around since the 70s. While working in the food industry in San Francisco, I had heard that employees there made in the ballpark of 100k~ a year, but that's purely hearsay and I have no idea how accurate it is. Before Bay Area tech workers chime in with how even 100k~ is effectively unlivable out there, I'll mention that I lived on about 25k a year in the Bay…
I'd say up until early/mid-2022 or so you could get by on a surprisingly small amount of money in San Francisco. Watching prices skyrocket over the past 18 months or so has been a wild ride.
Another aside: it's interesting to me how lots of tech workers in the Bay
Area live in an entirely different Bay Area than me or most people I knew
out there -- these two worlds seem to scarcely talk to each other in any
meaningful ways.
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> Hey we can't pay workers $250/hr without raises prices to above what customers are willing to pay There are restaurants that charge north of 800$ per person which are always fully booked half a year in advance with glowing reviews even from the worst critics hellbent on being negative. You certainly can pay workers $250 an hour without raising prices above what customers are willing to pay depending on the product.…
Well, Noma can charge customers up to $1500 per person and average worker is paid around $50/ hr. Masa Sushi charges $1000/ person and hourly worker pay is $20. There maybe a rare one but I don't know of a restaurants that charges $1K / person can pay worker $250.
What are you talking about? This was never the case, and when Rene had to pay market prices on labour he shut the place down.
People who dine at these places are all too self-infatuated to ever realize but you are litterly working for slave wages in those kitchens, the saying goes that 'you were paid in knowledge' in order to start your own concept if you survived (as very few would decide to stay as a Sous) those barren years of your career. Never would they offer $50/hr when most heavy season days are easily 12+ hours long.
Just the amount of money they paid to stages racked up 40k GBP/month [1].
Personally speaking, Noma had the cache because of Rene's affiliation to Feran Adria cohort and then Bourdain (who initially dismissed Adria's work as needless snobbery) to most outside of the culinary World, but after El Bulli closed I felt that an era had ended (culinary avant garde) that would never be truly replicated again as it existed mainly during the bubble era before 2008.
Noma tried to re-ignite it with it's creative work-shopping and focus on local-foraging twist but it had all the pitfalls El Bulli had with none of the ground-breaking innovation (I think David Muñoz did a better job of that with XO concepts and he never worked for Feran), including not paying it's workers.
0: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/01/09/worlds-bes...
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/KitchenConfidential/comments/108856...
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Not really. Democracy requires an incredible amount of work. Most people don't want that work. Even in governments which are technically democracies, the vast majority of the population never participate and accept a dictatorial rule. Not because of brainwashing, but because they don't want to get involved. They just want to live out their life and let someone else make the decisions.
The big democratic govts are also usually not direct democracies.
And fair enough. It’s still a lot of work to even participate without lengthy travel. It is completely understandable why most are content to be under dictatorial control. They don’t need brainwashing to get there.
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If something is owned by workers then that means they are the ones who put in the capital. They could have bought the business from the original investors, or made the initial investment with common funds. If there are other investors still owning a part of the business then it’s not worker owned (at least not fully worker owned).
Yes, and that's what happens sometimes. But it requires the workers to have a lot of capital in the first place, which is rare. Or they'll rely on family and friends for the funding. Then they're being charitable again if they give more out to hire new employees. Other times, the owner will distribute the business for some charitably low price to the workers, like the Avedisyans did with Cheeseboard. No matter how it…
That depends entirely on what sort of business it is. Far from all businesses require up front investment. E.g. starting a service company like a cleaning business or computer contracting firm or whatever with a group of friends wouldn't require much up front investment.
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This assumes all founders act as rational economic actors. Yes, it's hard to pivot from a traditional corporation to a co-op because of capitalism, but there are plenty of people who love the idea of a co-op but either don't have the capital or where the available capital is not evenly distributed among those interested to found the co-op with them. Amazingly, most humans do not do primarily what has the biggest econ…
I don’t think my words were abrasive. I was just pointing out that there exists financial incentives that disfavor co-op formation. If my argument, which is opposed to your argument, assumes “founders act as rational market participants” doesn’t that imply your argument assumes market participants act irrationally ? Of course people act irrationally all the time, but what seems more likely on the whole, especially in…
Corporations act somewhat rationally in aggregate only because the people in charge of them are bound to do so by law. And even this breaks down when the corporation is directly run by one person who also owns it.
"Market participants" is not what we're talking about. "Market participants" includes corporations and other forms of organizations that impose strict controls on their own behavior. We're talking about humans. And humans are very irrational. They're just also very good at rationalizing their irrational behavior and prefer doing things they can rationalize.
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What sort of hard times are you talking about? Like the 2008 crash, for example?
Any. Eg of what's happening next to me: a tunnel has to be closed for repairs, so it's becoming way harder for customers to access your location. As a consequence you are loosing a lot of customer for whom it's really inconvenient to come now. You have roughly 50% less customers for now. Repairs will last 2 years, and insurance helps you pay for the rent until the end of the repairs.