Before Food Trucks, Americans Ate 'Night Lunch' from Beautiful Wagons
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
There's also the argument for renting, where those wagons went unused during the day: if I rent, notionally, what I am renting can be made cheaper by the owners renting to others when I don't need it. But, this does not work well in all markets.
Throughout industrial history fat margins and egregious royalties are frequently sweet targets for disruption.
Every day, Spotify goes to work looking for a way to route around or limit the obnoxious music cartel. They'll never stop pursuing that. Just as Netflix did before them with the movie industry cartel. The old movie industry ended up creating its biggest competitive nightmare.
Adobe went from this model to SaaS, and their user growth has taken off, because it turns out paying the full cost of the software in a front-loaded fashion is really expensive.
I remember pirating visual studio when I was a child, because it cost thousands of dollars that I could not afford, but these days it is free because platform providers have realised that increasing developer share is more important, and now finance their platform via the 30% take.
The App Store’s 5% cut is not currently a major revenue stream for them, but it’s still revenue and would be a big deal for most companies. https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-store-taking-5-cut...
> The App Store’s 5% cut is not currently a major revenue stream for them, but it’s still revenue and would be a big deal for most companies.
Do you have a citation for how much money it is? And it's only a big deal if it's larger than expenses, which I'll believe but not assume.
Firstly, Visual Studio is not free. There is a free version that can only be used by learners, hobbyists, and those creating free software. This is a cut-down version from the commercial product, which offers more features and is required if creating commercial software.
Secondly, Microsoft do not finance VS from a 30% take. As I said above, if you want to develop commercial software you have to buy the commercial version. Instead, the free version is a "hearts and minds" exercise. Get people used to the free version when they are learning and when they are creating free software. If they then want to create commercial software their first instinct will be to plump for paying for the commercial version.
On the other hand, some of those replying to you are also mistaken as VS is also available on subscription as well as standalone.
The windows app store store does take a cut, though it seems to be reduced to 15%: https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2018/05/07/a-new-micr...
But even if it was just a hearts and minds exercise - why do you want hearts and minds? As a strategic play to support other parts of your business, i.e. Windows, even if it's not the Windows store.
In any case, it doesn't really matter the specifics are at MS now, you could look at Android or iOS instead, where the dev tools are free and they are definitely taking a 30% cut, and contrast that to a few decades ago where you had to shell out a few thousand dollars if you wanted MS' dev tools at all. Or take a look at Unity which has a subscription, which people are pretty happy with.
There's a reason Ron Swanson's brand of Libertarian idealism was used as a punchline so often.
Wagon factory don't give a shit if you break your wagon. They don't care if someone bought it to create lure kids to eat rat poison.
The analogy doesn't even make sense.
Go ahead and write your app for other platform on the internet. Or go ahead and sells your Android APK directly on your website.
Never encountered it in half a century here, just military time "0 3 hundred" as used on the shipping forecast, or simply 3am.
Never seen it in the UK.
Theo only time I have come across is when I had to count the hours between two times in an excel sheet & found that by default MS Excel formats 25:00 hours to 01:00 & I need to use [hh]:mm to bring it to 25:00
I've lived in Scotland and England most of my life, and can't recall ever having seen it and am now curious about what these special contexts are.
is the same as
(–8):30 to 03:00
I miss getting out of a concert at Lupo's or the Strand, and getting hotdogs at Haven Bros. They have outlasted many concert venues in Providence.
There's a 24 hour cafe called Happy Donuts however it's anything but: unheated, decrepit and must've been remodeled last in 1967.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17972163
It sure feels like it. :)
Yet across America police are shutting down lemonaide stands. Even ones run by kids. Food trucks and stalls are ticketed and confiscated in other cases.
Developers might be wise to speak up before you need an expensive license or medallion or charter in order to sell apps or other tech services. It's no less likely to happen, it just hasn't had time to yet.
Firstly, you have a large population who are going to purchase food several times a day. That means a food vendor can potentially establish themselves in single location or a neighborhood and build a base of repeat customers, customers who may purchase from them several times a week, if not every day.
Beyond that direct repeat business, regulars will order from their favorite vendor even when they have no queue of waiting customers. That initial group of regulars around a vendor waiting for their order sends a strong positive signal to other potential customers who may not usually buy food in this area. If you dont know the vendors, buying from a vendor with no customers is a risky move.
Next, because buying meals is such a common part of everyone's life it becomes a common conversation. That provides an additional chance to reward quality vendors while punishing low quality vendors.
That environment strongly punishes food vendors that make their customers sick in particular. Your regulars will abandon you and bad mouth you to all their friends and coworkers.
Meanwhile, in the west mobile food vendors rarely have that kind of repeat clientele. Most customers will purchase food from them precisely once. And even if you complain to your friends, chances are that so much time will have passed before they encounter that vendor that they will have forgotten the conversation.
I'm perfectly happy to take my personal food safety responsibility myself when visiting, say, Thailand - some of their street food is _amazing_, and I'm sure some of it is not very safe. I've never "rolled the dice" wrong there, using just a small modicum of common sense and trustworthy local advice... (I'd eat pretty much anything deep fried, pretty much nothing raw, and lean on locals for advice on choices in between...)
> What's more American than the entrepreneurial spirit which drives self-owned & operated businesses like this?
Clearly, lobbying the government to make your competitors illegal.
/snark
It's super cool that a guy with a basket turned into night lunch wagons turned into diners.
It's also then pretty interesting that it took nearly a century for a comeback. (Not that roach coaches haven't been a thing, but, food trucks took it to another level).
Any indications for the intervening slump?
Food Trucks are glorified roach coached which charge a premium and serve mostly office workers who have more discretionary spending and sometimes more demanding palates. Admittedly, things are going “upscale”,
Food trucks tend to be "new" food (fusions, for example) and decorated... and also all the things you said :)
Braden tastes, the foodie culture, the idea that even if you just want a hot dog there are good ones to be had for a bit more money changed things, but it took decades. You can chart a similar peak-trough-peak in bread in America actually. It used to be nice stuff, then post-war it was mass produced, pre-sliced crap for decades, and now... it’s back to some version of fresh. WWII didn’t have quite the impact on the American palette that it did on the Brits, but it did have an impact, as did modern “convenience” food.
Postwar, people were also much more about modernity and convenience. The drive thru is new, modern and sanitary, and you can drive right up; the food truck is for the poors, is in the dirty city, and you need to find a parking space. But today suburbs are culturally deadening and cities are the hip place to be. We've had a flight back to the cities for a while; this coincides with more food truck uptake.
It doesn't detract from your larger point, but just a note: food trucks are (at least in the places I've known) required to do most of their prep in a fixed location. It has to be an inspected and commercially licensed kitchen; generally there are shared places that several small-scale food vendors will lease space in.
Equifax did the developer equivalent of exposing most of the US to salmonella. Reports this week seem to indicate it's had practically no detectable punishment via any form of "self-responsibility".
I'm not so much anti-regulation as much as I am for regulating sensibly.
E coli comes from fecal contamination. Do we really need to ban street food because of fecal contamination? Do people need a license to know not to contaminate food with shit?
That is the top criticism and post here objecting to mine. And if you believe in that sort of thing, then you everything should be regulated. I dont know what is more common sense than not putting shit in food.
There are times where regulation makes sense, but this is not it.
I'm struggling to see what's particularly American about this? Have you been to Asia?
> Food trucks and stalls are ticketed and confiscated in other cases.
I -- for one -- enjoy not having e-coli.
I have spent years in Asia and never heard of it. In the states I know of a few cases of it happening. Not from food trucks or otherwise unlicensed places.
I'm all for prudent regulations. I'm not suggesting we abolish the FDA. However, I think government interfering in me and a lemonaide stand, or food truck being, able to voluntarily exchange value is far across the line into the absurd.