Hacker News Reader

Comment by brazzy | Hacker News Reader

> There's no reason they couldn't all coordinate better so that each individual store is only open through the night a couple times per week. That would make a lot more sense.

You incorrectly assume their primary goal is to provide service to customers.

Their primary goal is to maximize profits, and in a saturated market the only way to do that is by trying to take market share from the competition.

View on HN

Profit = income - expense. The other way to maximize profit is reduce wasteful operating expenses.

Something I've often thought gets overlooked

As long as your chasing profit not revenue expenses are already part of the equation.

If being open at 2am provides 1$ an hour of profit, that’s still profit.

It's questionable if you're going to get any profit at all when you have to pay someone to man the store at odd hours when there's almost no customers. A few people coming in during the late-night shift and buying $3 worth of stuff each is not going to pay that employee's salary.

Have you read the article? The franchise pushes the store owner to make it work anyway, and since the employee's salary would eat his profit, he cannibalizes his free time and sleep instead. The franchise contract is probably structured in a way that the franchise company profits even from stores that are themselves barely profitable.

And in a market where the parent company doesn’t protect area rights, your competition can be other stores of the same franchise. Something about that seems wrong.

Depending on how the franchise contract is structured, the parent company may profit from every store, no matter how little profit that store itself makes, because of things like having to buy supplies and equipment from the parent company at inflated prices.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com