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hobbesmaster
Jan 28, 2008

Well to a first approximation it's something like 1/3 is the cost of goods sold, 1/3 labor leaving 1/3 for rent, marketing, etc and profit.

So "small" might be overstating things but you can't compare revenue directly to the cost of goods sold and say "look at how much money they're making!!!!"

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Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
I WILL CUT OFF BOTH OF MY ARMS BEFORE I VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT IS MORE POPULAR THAN BERNIE!!!!!
Maybe this isn't very plugged in to retail, but I'm curious to see what's going to happen to the fashion industry in the next 20 years. Everything I've read about it paints it as an industry that survives on unpaid internships and extremely low-paying jobs held by young people whose parents can afford to continue supporting them well into their 20s. That class of people is going to shrink dramatically.

I don't know what's more likely: that the top firms will pick up shop and flee NYC, Paris, London, and Tokyo, or that they'll pay living wages for those cities.

BarbarianElephant
Feb 12, 2015
The fairy of forgiveness has removed your red text.

Halloween Jack posted:

Maybe this isn't very plugged in to retail, but I'm curious to see what's going to happen to the fashion industry in the next 20 years. Everything I've read about it paints it as an industry that survives on unpaid internships and extremely low-paying jobs held by young people whose parents can afford to continue supporting them well into their 20s. That class of people is going to shrink dramatically.

The 1% are going to do fine, and it's the kids of the 1% you are describing.

ToxicSlurpee
Nov 5, 2003

-=SEND HELP=-


Pillbug
It also relies heavily on people being able to afford $300 pants in the first place. With the middle class evaporating and anybody entering it having a high likelihood of crippling student debt that will be a problem.

WampaLord
Jan 14, 2010

hobbesmaster posted:

Well to a first approximation it's something like 1/3 is the cost of goods sold, 1/3 labor leaving 1/3 for rent, marketing, etc and profit.

So "small" might be overstating things but you can't compare revenue directly to the cost of goods sold and say "look at how much money they're making!!!!"

But every other business that has a smaller margin yet rents a similar sized building is doing fine, so what is the X factor?

Like, grocery margins suck but grocery stores don't constantly close, imagine a grocery store that had 400% markup, they'd be doing gangbusters.

Leon Trotsky 2012
Aug 27, 2009

YOU CAN TRUST ME!*


*Israeli Government-affiliated poster

ToxicSlurpee posted:

It also relies heavily on people being able to afford $300 pants in the first place. With the middle class evaporating and anybody entering it having a high likelihood of crippling student debt that will be a problem.

The actual fashion industry in NY, Paris, and London are not tied to the fate of retail in any appreciable way.

They have always been about exclusivity and marketing to a small sub-set of the population. The decline of retail is a symptom of larger macro economic trends that aren't really influenced by the small portion of the population who were buying things from NY fashion week.

There is virtually no chance that their business model will be dramatically changed by the same forces that are hurting Sears and The Gap.

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Tiny Brontosaurus posted:

Is that fixable? I mean, I want it to be, it's not a rhetorical question, but everybody always says the margins are crazy thin in food service. I sometimes think about ways to fix the fact that kitchen workers can never take sick days, and it seems like even if there were a pool of temps to draw from, kitchen team dynamics are so crucial that you can't really slot someone in just for the day.

Reformed labor law, including an applicable minimum wage and an end to tipping. There'd be fewer restaurants in the short term, but like any other decent labor reform there'd be a net stimulative effect.

Leon Trotsky 2012
Aug 27, 2009

YOU CAN TRUST ME!*


*Israeli Government-affiliated poster

WampaLord posted:

But every other business that has a smaller margin yet rents a similar sized building is doing fine, so what is the X factor?

Like, grocery margins suck but grocery stores don't constantly close, imagine a grocery store that had 400% markup, they'd be doing gangbusters.

It's because there isn't a predictable revenue stream with a restaurant.

If you have a grocery store, then you usually only have a few competitors in the area (and even if you aren't better/cheaper than your competitors your location will give you a built-in base of customers who just come for convenience).

People need to get food/toiletries/prescriptions at relatively consistent intervals and amounts.

A restaurant could have 300 competitors in a 5-mile radius, people don't eat out at regular intervals or go to the same place every time, 95% of your goods are perishable, and your costs are fixed even though 80% of your business happens 3 days a week.

WampaLord
Jan 14, 2010

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

It's because there isn't a predictable revenue stream with a restaurant.

...

80% of your business happens 3 days a week.

Seems pretty predictable to me!

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
I WILL CUT OFF BOTH OF MY ARMS BEFORE I VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT IS MORE POPULAR THAN BERNIE!!!!!

BarbarianElephant posted:

The 1% are going to do fine, and it's the kids of the 1% you are describing.
Eh, I don't think it's just the 1%, but also a prosperous upper middle class who can afford to support a child through grad school in a field that's not likely to result in a high-paying job. Those people are absolutely getting squeezed.

Leon Trotsky 2012
Aug 27, 2009

YOU CAN TRUST ME!*


*Israeli Government-affiliated poster

WampaLord posted:

Seems pretty predictable to me!

But costs are fixed during that period and 80% of your business may be during those 3 days, but you don't have a consistent LEVEL of business.

80% of people eating out are only doing it on those 3 days and they have 300 restaurants to choose from + people don't like to eat the same thing/at the same place every time.

There are some people who go out to the same restaurant every single week, but that number is not even in the same universe as the number of people who go to the same grocery store every week.

Eating out is also relatively optional, but buying toilet paper and food for home use isn't. A bad weekend at a restaurant can blow your profits for the month. A bad weekend at the grocery store will probably be made up for next week or tomorrow. People have to come back at some point.

Leon Trotsky 2012 fucked around with this message at 19:06 on May 30, 2017

Submarine Sandpaper
May 27, 2007


a single high profile negative review can destroy a restaurant. I can't think of other services where an opinion can have such weight

Tiny Brontosaurus
Aug 1, 2013

by Lowtax

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

The actual fashion industry in NY, Paris, and London are not tied to the fate of retail in any appreciable way.

They have always been about exclusivity and marketing to a small sub-set of the population. The decline of retail is a symptom of larger macro economic trends that aren't really influenced by the small portion of the population who were buying things from NY fashion week.

There is virtually no chance that their business model will be dramatically changed by the same forces that are hurting Sears and The Gap.

This is right. High-end fashion and couture are more similar to the fine art market than retail. There are artists and collectors and critics and publications and it's all a fairly closed system that doesn't know or care what's happening on Main street.

WampaLord posted:

But every other business that has a smaller margin yet rents a similar sized building is doing fine, so what is the X factor?

Like, grocery margins suck but grocery stores don't constantly close, imagine a grocery store that had 400% markup, they'd be doing gangbusters.
Grocery stores are much more expensive to open in the first place and require much more real estate, so there aren't as many of them in the first place. Like, they don't rent a similar-sized building at all. What the hell kind of warehouse restaurants you going to? Sure, in your larger cities there are bodegas and corner markets that are in smaller storefronts, but they do go out of business a lot and they also focus more on less-perishable, higher-markup goods like junk food and bottled beverages.

WampaLord posted:

Seems pretty predictable to me!

What's your deal, man. [Edit: WampaLord is not awful, another guy with a short-ish W name is awful] why are you so offended about the restaurant industry?

Tiny Brontosaurus fucked around with this message at 22:30 on May 30, 2017

WampaLord
Jan 14, 2010

Tiny Brontosaurus posted:

What's your deal, man. I mean, I kind of get why you're so awful (so incredibly, incredibly awful) about politics and human rights, but why are you so offended about the restaurant industry?

Wow, that came out of nowhere. I'm not offended, I'm honestly curious, I think you read a hostile tone where there was none to begin with. Also, holy poo poo, I didn't realize I was viewed as some terrible person re: politics and human rights on here.

I got great answers for my questions, by the way!

Leon Trotsky 2012
Aug 27, 2009

YOU CAN TRUST ME!*


*Israeli Government-affiliated poster
The restaurant industry is notorious for being a place where people get into it to lose money. Because of all the various reasons mentioned before (inconsistent revenue streams, lots of competition, your place could go out of style, fixed costs, etc) the restaurant industry is hyper polarized.

About 5% are wildly profitable because they have close to maximum occupancy at all times and therefore have a consistent revenue stream on items with a 400% markup. (1,600% or more on some sodas and alcohol)

These are usually only in major traffic areas for tourism or extremely popular restaurants.

Another 20% are just barely getting by/making a modest profit that could be wiped out by a few bad months.

And 75% of restaurants end up closing down within two years of opening.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
I WILL CUT OFF BOTH OF MY ARMS BEFORE I VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT IS MORE POPULAR THAN BERNIE!!!!!
Maybe I've watched too much Kitchen Nightmares, but it seems like there's no other industry with so many people sinking so much money into it despite knowing absolutely nothing about it. I don't hear about well-to-do couples sinking their entire retirement fund into opening a bookstore because it was their *~dream~*, although I'm sure it's been done.

Craptacular!
Jul 9, 2001

Fuck the DH
"There's a whole bunch of competitors in the same physical area and there's only 3 days where there's a high level of customers and the other four are a ghost town" reminds me of Vegas casinos, as someone who has been around that business. They also have restaurants, and nowadays are expected to turn their own profit rather than be a loss leader for gambling. And in general, they do pretty well.

Although they're able to successfully split the difference and gate a space for exclusive VIPs to feel special about themselves in a property that has to have thousands of rooms and millions of customers a year, which is kind of what I think of when people post about premium fashion brands here. Clothing is weird because anyone truly rich will buy stuff you only ever see at a runway from a limited number of stores. These dumb "high end chains" that don't want to be seen on uncool people over 200 pounds will have to face that you can't sustain 200 retail locations nationwide on the folks that remain.

Shoes are a pretty good example: the most exclusive/interesting athletic shoes from Nike etc are stocked at specialty retailers like "Size?" (that's actually what it's called), not at your city's Niketown and not at Champs Sports. But Nike does still sell shoes for high schoolers at Champs and shoes for your dad at Famous Footwear and it doesn't hurt their high end appeal.

Craptacular! fucked around with this message at 21:56 on May 30, 2017

OhFunny
Jun 26, 2013

EXTREMELY PISSED AT THE DNC
http://www.businessinsider.com/will-sears-survive-2017-5

So Sears posted a profit for 1st quarter thanks to the sell of Craftsman. Once you remove that one time cash injection Sears lost $230 million in the quarter. Up from $199 million last year and sales fell 20%.

It plans to try and sell $700 million in its real estate holdings and cut $1.25 billion in costs to shore things up, but everyone can see Sears is on a march into the grave. All it can buy is time.

Paradoxish
Dec 19, 2003

Will you stop going crazy in there?

Tiny Brontosaurus posted:

Is that fixable? I mean, I want it to be, it's not a rhetorical question, but everybody always says the margins are crazy thin in food service. I sometimes think about ways to fix the fact that kitchen workers can never take sick days, and it seems like even if there were a pool of temps to draw from, kitchen team dynamics are so crucial that you can't really slot someone in just for the day.

This is only very tangentially related, but home health care aides (another job that pays very poor wages on par with retail work) have a similar issue. Calling in sick generally means that a client who may not be able to function independently won't have anyone in the house that day, and even if another aide can be scheduled to fill that slot on short notice there's still the problem of that person not knowing the client, where food or other items are in their home, etc. I deal with this a lot since I'm a secondary caregiver for my grandmother, and it's extremely common for her to end up sick because an aide who really shouldn't have been there wasn't able to call out for the day.

Big Hubris
Mar 8, 2011


BarbarianElephant posted:

I really wish they could take sick days. Norovirus is no joke.

But Doctor Drew said that anyone who tries to get off for Norovirus should be fired!

Tiny Brontosaurus
Aug 1, 2013

by Lowtax

Paradoxish posted:

This is only very tangentially related, but home health care aides (another job that pays very poor wages on par with retail work) have a similar issue. Calling in sick generally means that a client who may not be able to function independently won't have anyone in the house that day, and even if another aide can be scheduled to fill that slot on short notice there's still the problem of that person not knowing the client, where food or other items are in their home, etc. I deal with this a lot since I'm a secondary caregiver for my grandmother, and it's extremely common for her to end up sick because an aide who really shouldn't have been there wasn't able to call out for the day.

That's a great point. I really wonder what the employment landscape would look like if everybody took off every time they were contagious. We'd have to structure things completely differently I think.

Heliogabalos
Apr 16, 2017
you can still key in codes for the cheapest of item (for example, celery instead of organic whatever) and no one pays any attention and it saves me a fuckton of money on organic produce

Submarine Sandpaper posted:

a single high profile negative review can destroy a restaurant. I can't think of other services where an opinion can have such weight

Not always when it should

ISeeCuckedPeople
Feb 7, 2017

by Smythe

OhFunny posted:

http://www.businessinsider.com/will-sears-survive-2017-5

So Sears posted a profit for 1st quarter thanks to the sell of Craftsman. Once you remove that one time cash injection Sears lost $230 million in the quarter. Up from $199 million last year and sales fell 20%.

It plans to try and sell $700 million in its real estate holdings and cut $1.25 billion in costs to shore things up, but everyone can see Sears is on a march into the grave. All it can buy is time.

Even JCPenney is hosed. They owe $44 per square foot of real estate they own. They are going bankrupt. The only question is when.

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

It's because there isn't a predictable revenue stream with a restaurant.

If you have a grocery store, then you usually only have a few competitors in the area (and even if you aren't better/cheaper than your competitors your location will give you a built-in base of customers who just come for convenience).

People need to get food/toiletries/prescriptions at relatively consistent intervals and amounts.

A restaurant could have 300 competitors in a 5-mile radius, people don't eat out at regular intervals or go to the same place every time, 95% of your goods are perishable, and your costs are fixed even though 80% of your business happens 3 days a week.

I'd say a big contributing factor is how little people eat out now compared to in the past and how expensive eating out has gotten. Part of the responsibility for this is due to food regulations but it's not everything.

Restaurants in other societies still are able to leverage their buying ability and ability to create meals in bulk and sell food cheaper than people can do at home. You can see that in a lot of other countries on earth and in early restaurant history in america.

For example, Childs was the largest restaurant in history of the United States at it's time. It featured meals that would set you back $2-$4 when adjusted for inflation. But featured full meals instead of fast food.

Similarly [url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horn_%26_Hardart"]Horns & Hardart[url] featured meals for about that same price range.
When looking up average wages in 1912 was presented with a hourly wage amount that varied between .30 cents to 40 cents an hour which comes out to $7.41 - $9.88 when adjusted for inflation.

We really don't have those experiences anymore - where it is cheaper to eat in a restaurant than at at home...

OhFunny
Jun 26, 2013

EXTREMELY PISSED AT THE DNC

ISeeCuckedPeople posted:

Even JCPenney is hosed. They owe $44 per square foot of real estate they own. They are going bankrupt. The only question is when.

Probably not long after Sears.

New Hampshire's three major malls are all anchored by a Sears and JCPenny. I except the Mall of New Hampshire to go under. Rockingham Mall and the mall in Nashua should weather things ok.

Tiny Brontosaurus
Aug 1, 2013

by Lowtax

ISeeCuckedPeople posted:

I'd say a big contributing factor is how little people eat out now compared to in the past and how expensive eating out has gotten. Part of the responsibility for this is due to food regulations but it's not everything.

Restaurants in other societies still are able to leverage their buying ability and ability to create meals in bulk and sell food cheaper than people can do at home. You can see that in a lot of other countries on earth and in early restaurant history in america.

For example, Childs was the largest restaurant in history of the United States at it's time. It featured meals that would set you back $2-$4 when adjusted for inflation. But featured full meals instead of fast food.

Similarly [url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horn_%26_Hardart"]Horns & Hardart[url] featured meals for about that same price range.
When looking up average wages in 1912 was presented with a hourly wage amount that varied between .30 cents to 40 cents an hour which comes out to $7.41 - $9.88 when adjusted for inflation.

We really don't have those experiences anymore - where it is cheaper to eat in a restaurant than at at home...

Quite the opposite, people eat out way more than they used to and restaurants are practically the only growth sector in retail. You're right, food was cheap back then but it still wasn't cheaper than eating at home. And don't forget that people eat much larger meals, more frequently and in more variety, than they ever did before. A cup of coffee in the morning and a bowl of soup at lunch wasn't too uncommon for office workers back at the turn of the 20th.

hakimashou
Jul 15, 2002
Upset Trowel
https://twitter.com/AmazonHelp/status/869701445859332097

ISeeCuckedPeople
Feb 7, 2017

by Smythe
The dash button is dumb ok.

You know how many loving boxes you have to deal with to ship all this food stuff?

Imagine every time you had to go to the grocery you had to throw out a cardboard box.

Except each item is sent individually so its like every item you bought at a grocery store came in a seperate box.

Who are the fckers who have time to throw away all these cardboard boxes? I certainly dont. my trashcan is tiny

DR FRASIER KRANG
Feb 4, 2005

"Are you forgetting that just this afternoon I was punched in the face by a turtle now dead?
I get your point but why aren't you recycling cardboard? Also my recycle can is massive.

Amused to Death
Aug 10, 2009

google "The Night Witches", and prepare for :stare:

ISeeCuckedPeople posted:


Imagine every time you had to go to the grocery you had to throw out a cardboard box.

We actually do this in reverse. Maybe a year and a half ago we decided to start putting the boxes that gallon water comes in up front on a table for people to take who didn't want to use bags. Makes us look eco friendly and saves money on bags. When we first started I thought it was dumb, that no one was going to take these boxes to go shopping with. Boy howdy was I wrong, people loving love taking these boxes. And I assume eventually they need to throw them away (but we also have the huge single stream recycling bins)

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

Amused to Death posted:

We actually do this in reverse. Maybe a year and a half ago we decided to start putting the boxes that gallon water comes in up front on a table for people to take who didn't want to use bags. Makes us look eco friendly and saves money on bags. When we first started I thought it was dumb, that no one was going to take these boxes to go shopping with. Boy howdy was I wrong, people loving love taking these boxes. And I assume eventually they need to throw them away (but we also have the huge single stream recycling bins)

Some supermarkets in the UK put the banana boxes under the end of the checkouts, they're quite handy for if you need a really beefy card box for something, though they do have a hole in the bottom which is irritating.

ISeeCuckedPeople
Feb 7, 2017

by Smythe

HEY NONG MAN posted:

I get your point but why aren't you recycling cardboard? Also my recycle can is massive.

I live in the south we don't recycle.

We also roll coal 24/7.

SpaceCadetBob
Dec 27, 2012
The box issue really does seem like a mess. My wife is home full time raising our new son, and as such has found amazon to be the great deliverer of all things without having to bundle up baby to go get stuff every day. So over the last 8 months amazon has been shipping us craploads of food/baby gear/housewares, and I've been dutifully flattening all the boxes and storing them in the garage till I could get a van to take them to the recycle place.

This weekend I finally made the trip, I ended up with almost 100 lbs of carboard, filling up a 5' cubic space all flattened out. There has got to be a better way to get things to people without all that waste. (Even if recycled)

Willie Tomg
Feb 2, 2006

Tiny Brontosaurus posted:

Is that fixable? I mean, I want it to be, it's not a rhetorical question, but everybody always says the margins are crazy thin in food service. I sometimes think about ways to fix the fact that kitchen workers can never take sick days, and it seems like even if there were a pool of temps to draw from, kitchen team dynamics are so crucial that you can't really slot someone in just for the day.

You schedule 2 redundant cooks if only to take the load off in the weeds and cross train everybody because of course you do that because everybody is looking to get better at their job. It isn't rocket surgery.

BrandorKP posted:

Here's the place I'm going with it, this is a small part of a model from a lawsuit between the navy and a shipyard :

https://imgur.com/Wq5vNPH

What we are seeing isn't something that is new. These cycles of overworking and burning people out are modelable . Retail or a restaurant would look a little different but not significantly different. Now at the mid management level there is probably ignorance. But at the top.... business is about making systems. You set up processes that repeat to generate money. You continually tweak and improve the prices. They know how to model these things, or hire consultants that do (McKinsey, etc)


That's it, at some level some precentage of it is being done on purpose. The rest is lazyness just the repeating the lovely norms of those doing it on purpose.

Paradoxish posted:

This is only very tangentially related, but home health care aides (another job that pays very poor wages on par with retail work) have a similar issue. Calling in sick generally means that a client who may not be able to function independently won't have anyone in the house that day, and even if another aide can be scheduled to fill that slot on short notice there's still the problem of that person not knowing the client, where food or other items are in their home, etc. I deal with this a lot since I'm a secondary caregiver for my grandmother, and it's extremely common for her to end up sick because an aide who really shouldn't have been there wasn't able to call out for the day.

These posts are good as hell and more of what I wanted to talk about, rather than kitchens-as-such. There are broader trends going on here that I think are more systemic than Online Is Killing The Malls, that I think will force crises in similarly stressed fields.

WampaLord posted:

Isn't the default markup on food 400%? With that and only having to pay front of house people $2.50 an hour, how can margins be so thin?

Poor. loving. Ownership/management. Running a restaurant is a lot of very hard an unavoidable work, and not the "i sit in an office and basically do math problems, professionally" kinda work. If you're smart enough and (physically and emotionally) tough enough to make a go of the restaurant, then you're also enough of those things to realize there are ways to make a lot more money more easily. Bad ownership cuts or drives off labor, which trims work hours or skill which means you cut the menu or bring in cans and boxes of things instead of ordering fresh and performing labor upon those ingredients, which increases the food cost part of the equation 150% which then changes labor and plate cost which only provides short term revenue and long term loss and and AND AND AND. Generally speaking this means the best restaurants are either run by families with a shitload of food service tradition, or chefs.

Plate cost is also abnormally low, generally speaking, except at the margins. That 8oz salmon entree should be like, $35-40 by rights, if you're pretending that you want the cooks who work there to also be able to eat there. Most people flinch at this, IME, in ways that are revealing. This is why the primary sectors for growth are, again, at the super low end and the super high end, with the middle ground suddenly becoming economically unviable. I contend similar, if not identical things are happening in the restaurant industry as are happening in retail despite an increase in demand, and not a contraction

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

It's because there isn't a predictable revenue stream with a restaurant.

Cool lemme call up every restaurant group in the country and tell them they're dumbasses.

(you can absolutely predict revenue within a margin of error just like every other industry. maybe you can't, but you can.)

Tiny Brontosaurus posted:

Grocery stores are much more expensive to open in the first place and require much more real estate, so there aren't as many of them in the first place. Like, they don't rent a similar-sized building at all. What the hell kind of warehouse restaurants you going to? Sure, in your larger cities there are bodegas and corner markets that are in smaller storefronts, but they do go out of business a lot and they also focus more on less-perishable, higher-markup goods like junk food and bottled beverages.


What's your deal, man. [Edit: WampaLord is not awful, another guy with a short-ish W name is awful] why are you so offended about the restaurant industry?

kudos for the edit but you are acting really weirdly angry for someone who doesn't realize "flex shift" is a thing. this is a chef who's had a bad day telling you you're being a little angry, btw. for reference.

ISeeCuckedPeople posted:

I'd say a big contributing factor is how little people eat out now compared to in the past and how expensive eating out has gotten. Part of the responsibility for this is due to food regulations but it's not everything.

Restaurants in other societies still are able to leverage their buying ability and ability to create meals in bulk and sell food cheaper than people can do at home. You can see that in a lot of other countries on earth and in early restaurant history in america.

For example, Childs was the largest restaurant in history of the United States at it's time. It featured meals that would set you back $2-$4 when adjusted for inflation. But featured full meals instead of fast food.

This is absolute gibberish and it would take a Food System Megathread literally a couple hundred pages to diagnose the almost-impressive number of ways you manage to be profoundly wrong so concisely. Setting aside the average inflation-adjusted household income (this, and not nominal wage, is one of the metrics for evaluating demand in a location btw), our food system itself has changed more in the last 100 years in particular than it has in the last 10,000.

Tiny Brontosaurus posted:

Quite the opposite, people eat out way more than they used to and restaurants are practically the only growth sector in retail. You're right, food was cheap back then but it still wasn't cheaper than eating at home. And don't forget that people eat much larger meals, more frequently and in more variety, than they ever did before. A cup of coffee in the morning and a bowl of soup at lunch wasn't too uncommon for office workers back at the turn of the 20th.

Exactly! ^^^ like this

hakimashou
Jul 15, 2002
Upset Trowel
Costco doesnt use shopping bags I don't think, they always reuse product boxes when they pack your stuff up for you to take home.

got any sevens
Feb 9, 2013

by Cyrano4747
I'd actually eat out more if meals weren't mega-sized and priced accordingly, since I can't always take leftovers with me (going to work for a few more hours or seeing a movie or whatever) and dont often feel like paying 10-20 bucks for a meal I can only eat half of.

Craptacular!
Jul 9, 2001

Fuck the DH
Dash Buttons are a fine way to help an elderly person manage their own inventory. "Mom, if you're running out of stuff, push the button."

The people complaining seem to be implying that I should buy my own poo poo locally and carry it home to save the environment from the burdensome cardboard boxes that I recycle and use to ship things I resell on eBay, but I don't own a car and am riding public transit to save the environment, so carrying an 12 pack of paper towels is out of the question.

ISeeCuckedPeople
Feb 7, 2017

by Smythe

Willie Tomg posted:


This is absolute gibberish and it would take a Food System Megathread literally a couple hundred pages to diagnose the almost-impressive number of ways you manage to be profoundly wrong so concisely. Setting aside the average inflation-adjusted household income (this, and not nominal wage, is one of the metrics for evaluating demand in a location btw), our food system itself has changed more in the last 100 years in particular than it has in the last 10,000.


Then please explain why I can get a dinner plate that's like a home cooked meal in many other countries for less than half the average hourly wage? While your talking about $35 Salmon plats and how much more expensive food should be.

Eating at a restaurant, if I go by tradition of nearly any other country should be only a bit more expensive than eating at home, if not cheaper. It is in a lot of other countries on earth. But not America. That doesn't make any sense.

But I connect it once again to something I've brought up in other threads; the death of small business in America.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

Of all the things that are unpleasant to carry on a bus, paper towels are the least.

DC Murderverse
Nov 10, 2016

"Tell that to Zod's snapped neck!"

Willie Tomg posted:

Poor. loving. Ownership/management. Running a restaurant is a lot of very hard an unavoidable work, and not the "i sit in an office and basically do math problems, professionally" kinda work. If you're smart enough and (physically and emotionally) tough enough to make a go of the restaurant, then you're also enough of those things to realize there are ways to make a lot more money more easily. Bad ownership cuts or drives off labor, which trims work hours or skill which means you cut the menu or bring in cans and boxes of things instead of ordering fresh and performing labor upon those ingredients, which increases the food cost part of the equation 150% which then changes labor and plate cost which only provides short term revenue and long term loss and and AND AND AND. Generally speaking this means the best restaurants are either run by families with a shitload of food service tradition, or chefs.

ooh, ooh, story time!

So when I lived in chicago, I went looking for a bakery job and found one in a very small bakery owned by a guy who also owned a coffee shop/roastery. We made all of the baked goods for that coffee shop, as well as a few other shops that bought in bulk from us. We were able to stay in business almost entirely because of those bulk purchases, and the fact that our own was independently wealthy from some dot com boom bullshit (as it turns out, when you have a boatload of money, it is easier to make a coffee shop that people want to go to because you can afford things like roasting your own beans, or hanging a loving DeLorean in the coffee shop). My manager was an incredibly great baker who came up with most of the recipes (delicious and mostly vegan to boot) herself. I switched to front of the house about 3 months in because i couldn't continue working midnight-7am shifts without wanting to kill myself, and not long after that, my manager and the owner made a deal to sell the business to my manager at a very good deal, under the premise that we'd continue to provide baked goods at a discount. My manager, unlike the old owner, was not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, and had to go into massive debt to make the purchase as well as keep the bakery afloat for the 16 months or so that it was open. Our biggest problems were a combination of ownership and labor. She was a great manager, but she was very much a perfectionist (which explained the quality of the food), and would often work 18 hour days just to make sure everything was up to her quality, mostly because a lot of the people we hired got burnt out very quickly. There were a few of us that stuck around for an extended period of time, but the night baker position was something that we couldn't keep filled, and there was a multiple week period where she would sleep about one night a week in her apartment, and the rest of the time she'd take naps on an air mattress in the back. It also didn't help that, without the extra money from the rich owner guy, we didn't have much of a marketing budget, and spent very little on things that weren't ingredients and labor, and things that were legally required of us (exterminator, appliance repair, etc).

My manager was an incredibly good person, a hard worker, the food was really good (best croissant I've ever had to this day), and we had a cadre of loyal customers, but a few crucial errors and not having a lot of capital to begin with doomed us. I don't think this is an uncommon story in the restaurant world. It was a situation where one person being sick for a couple days could throw a gigantic wrench in the entire operation and every screwup was magnified by the amount of money it cost.

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Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
I WILL CUT OFF BOTH OF MY ARMS BEFORE I VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT IS MORE POPULAR THAN BERNIE!!!!!

Paradoxish posted:

This is only very tangentially related, but home health care aides (another job that pays very poor wages on par with retail work) have a similar issue. Calling in sick generally means that a client who may not be able to function independently won't have anyone in the house that day, and even if another aide can be scheduled to fill that slot on short notice there's still the problem of that person not knowing the client, where food or other items are in their home, etc. I deal with this a lot since I'm a secondary caregiver for my grandmother, and it's extremely common for her to end up sick because an aide who really shouldn't have been there wasn't able to call out for the day.
I don't remember what thread, but I once read a post on SA saying "I am under investigation by the state for falling asleep on the job as a home care giver. I fell asleep because my shift was 120 hours long. If the next shift no-shows, it's my responsibility to find coverage and I'm not legally allowed to leave. If I call everyone else who works for my company and they can't or won't show, I'm still the one liable." It's a horrible industry.

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