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Food cost in restaurants runs usually 20-35%. If a cook makes 10 dishes an hour (including prep), at $20 an hour that is $2 per dish. More upscale restaurants that do more elaborate prep will have a somewhat higher proportion of labor that goes into each dish.
But if the dish costs $14, the food cost is $4, the labor cost is $2, plus another $2 for servers and overhead/operating costs, then where does the other $6 go?
One thing that’s not factored into this are drinks. Those are basically pure profit. The margins can be tighter on food cause that’s how we also sell you sugar water and a shot of booze for $20
Okay but the fancy mexican restaurant my family always goes to for birthday parties makes the most amazing fuckin bloody maries, it’s like a whole salad worth of garnish and they always make mine nice and strong and spicy.
That particular cocktail may have more overhead and sounds good and I don’t even like bloody mary
Oh they’re so fuckin good man, you just haven’t had a proper one. If you don’t get an olive, a pepperoncini, a celery stick and whatever else they add to the garnish depending on location, you have not had a good bloody mary
Doesn’t do it for me. I don’t like tomato juice.
A lot of it goes to the landlord.
Like I get it, I don’t want to defend small business tyrants or anything but restaurants run on razor thin margins and are therefore one of the businesses most likely to fail. I have a family friend who runs a small restaurant and they talk to me about the struggles all the time. Sad thing is that they used to make more money as an accountant but quit that to run a restaurant as a passion project.
With most major chains, they’re the landlord which is why they franchise. So the operating costs go to some schmuck and the rent goes to them.
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I found it really eye-opening when I visited a local chain restaurant in a small town, and everything was half the price as in the city. Because the operator owned the building.
My bosses wife is starting a bookstore and my boss was complaining about how expensive it was becoming to set everything up, turns out most of it is due to the landlord of the one property she found that they were able to afford. I was >< this close to getting him onboard with land reform
Wages haven’t risen across the board at fast food places by any useful amount.
Prices of items at fast food places have been increasing and portions have been decreasing.
In the few cities where fast food places were required to increase their prices to above “living wages” as tests, everything turned out fine.
I remember when I was in high school the in and out paid like $12 an hour which was way more than what other fast food places were giving at the time ($7.25-$9) and eating at in and out was still cheaper or at least on par with the other places. The in and out in question I still in business while some of the other place have closed up and been replaced a time or two already. Fuck anyone who says bullshit like the article.
yeah it might cost another 80 cents like in denmark or whatever
Fast food up here is so expensive that it’s cheaper to just shop for groceries and cook for yourself, and fast food workers don’t have a 20 dollar minimum wage.
This duplicitous horseshit pretends the prices weren’t going up anyway. Labor doesn’t cost as much as other aspects of restaurant finance. The price of food dwarfs it.
Fast food wages might go up, forcing people to turn to exploiting the labor of migrant farm workers with no minimum wage protections instead.
Shits fucked.
what’s that? a business whose primary tension is the simulation of servantry is fundamentally unsustainable if workers are paid sustainable wages? crazy shit, never would have guessed that. (that isn’t to say that making food for others is bad, but the way we do it does not reason about it correctly)
Raise the wage. Here’s why: They are going to raise the prices anyways. 10 bucks for pretty much any fast food meal these days.
The wild thing is that California is the home of In N Out, which is well known for wages that are much higher than other fast food places.
The burgers at In N Out do not cost much more than McDonald’s. And they always have way more people working, to boot.
The people running that place are dedicated af to being efficient and I respect that. After the revolution they should be recruited as planners (post re-education).
I’m boycotting them do to corporate refusing to allow their employees to wear masks.
a boycott is not an individual action. a boycott is when you and a significant number of other people publicly state “we’re not going to use this until xyz occurs.” it’s a form of protest. not buying from them on your own is just not buying from them. im not boycotting the billions of businesses i dont frequent all around the world
and even if you have a group the boycott probably doesn’t mean shit unless it’s connected to organized labor activism against the same company.
They also donated a bunch to the campaign to ban gay marriage in California in 2008. They’re not good people by any stretch of the imagination, just an illustrative case.
Damn I didn’t know about that.
Horrifying: Burger flippers can now afford to live indoors
Businesses are going to charge customers as much as they believe they can get away with. Slightly increased labour costs has no meaningful effect on how much customers are able and willing to pay.
Still, these cheeseburger kulaks tries to make it sound like items are priced by cost of production. They know they’re taking the piss but they do it because they believe whining over labour costs will make customers more likely to accept price gouging.
The prices go up based on the price of production sometimes but never down.
Cost increase is sometimes the impetus for testing higher prices, but the market ultimately decides what you can get away with.
If you’re in a competitive market and raise your price $1/unit because your costs raised $1/unit, if the rest of the market stays the same, all that price increase does is lower your profits. You just have to eat that loss or find another way to increase your margins. If all the producers have the same cost increase and try the same price increase, you might get away with it, but it depends on how badly people want your product (demand elasticity).
If you’re selling something like overpriced, mediocre fast food, a lot of customers just won’t buy your shit anymore if you raise the price. You have to eat the loss or increase your margins some other way.
But think of the owners, how are they going to buy this year’s brand new, exactly the same as the last one, death machine to drive through town???
“Prices will be set as high as the consumer will pay” was literally in the first chapters of every Econ textbook I had in college.
If your business cannot survive while paying it’s employees a livable wage, your business does not deserve to survive
Simple as
If your business cannot survive while paying it’s employees a livable wage, you
r businessdoesnot deserve to survivefixed that for ya
no more half measures walter
unrelated but I think when I make say a pot of chili that would feed 400 people I am pretty sure I’m throwing in like, $30 of coriander alone. I envision it as turning my employer’s profits into flavor
Same, I stick it to the man by making better food than I’m supposed to.
cooking at home is a full time job, to liberate us from domestic labour we need industrial kitchens and places to eat. the idea that it is normal for each individual home to aspirationally cook for themselves enforces good old fashioned ‘family values’, amd solidifies the role of the patriarch, who probably wont be cooking because cooking is gay or whatever
having said this I couldn’t justify eating where I work, it’s too expensive. Learn to cook lentils. 🍛
As a cook, I would soooo have the same job under communism and have a great fucking time doing it. The reason the industry sucks is capitalism also under communism we only make meals to order once or twice a week. The rest of the time it’s stuff that can be mass prepped, there can be a variety, but you’re going buffet style most of the time.
hell yea, I used to work at a bourgie health food store and the best time of the night was at 8pm when the deli started closing and the deli guys would let us raid the hot bar buffet for free. I’d take like a dozen premade burritos in addition to my own dinner to pass out to unhoused folks on my way home. Whenever someone learned I would walk home to the “sketchy” side of town every night they would ask if I wasn’t scared of being accosted or something and I was always like “What who’s gonna fuck with me? I’m the burrito guy!”
Had the same before. Now I’m the pizza guy
Sure in socialism community kitchens would be best, but within our current structure, cooking your own stuff for yourself (or even better, potluck for your affinity group) is taking back a little bit of control. You are not smashing patriarchy by going to McD lmao Also, most restaurant food is literally poison, made to be tasty but is terrible for your health
The Soviet Union had achieved this 90 years ago, people didn’t need to cook at home anymore. They had professionals preparing good food on cheap popular restaurants. No worker exploitation needed.
Could you provide some sources on this subject?
In poland, “milk bars” were created, which were basically just cafeterias serving homely food very cheaply. The name refers to the fact you would not be served alcohol as in a “traditional” restaurant and the menu had a ton of dairy. Hell, even after the transformation, they continued to exist and were often a good way for students and workers to get cheap lunch.
But people still cooked at home. Cooking is part of culture after all, and I actually disagree with the take that cooking for yourself is some recent capitalist invention.
In Anna Louise Strong’s This Soviet World (which you can find on libgen), she describes how the factory became a hub of life for the Soviet worker, far beyond just a place of work. From how she described it, they were practically small cities, with attached daycare centers for the workers’ children, full cafeterias for the workers to eat their meals at, along with classrooms where people could take and organize classes of any subject they wanted, and large meeting spaces to conduct political business.
solidifies the role of the patriarch, who probably wont be cooking because cooking is gay or whatever
Fellas, is it gay to be able to feed yourself?
I really don’t get it. Chefs are masculine coded, wilderness survival guys cooking meat is masculine coded. Even grilling is masculine coded. But do any of that shit in a home kitchen and suddenly it’s gay or girly or whatever.
a chef is a professional, a homecook is a hobby artist, some background work that that goes unnoticed and doesn’t come with the glory of showing the outside world the mastery of your craft (like mowing the lawn am I rite fellas?)
I’m being sarcastic btw for the most part, but i’ve met guys who unconsciously act like this
Its funny, for huge swathes of history the common people didnt prepare and cook their food individually because the resources and space necessary to construct a kitchen in every individual living space made it unfeasible. As with much of their mythology, the RETVRN guy’s (and by extension general western liberal’s) concept of this only goes back to like the 50s.
dont ask them about their opinions on what was going on in the 1930s and 1940s 😱
Yeah like I don’t really understand why everyone is obsessed with everyone cooking for themselves all the time. Restaurants or kitchens are still objectively the best way to feed large groups of people. I like to cook, but damn having to cook and clean multiple times a day while also going to work and doing my hobbies sounds like ass.
![[CW: meat] The horror. More people would buy more groceries, stay home and cook for themselves.](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/4b226b5d-403e-429a-aa2f-a359e564d54d.png){kind=link}