55% Yelp businesses that were temp closed are now perm
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Restaurant/fastfood chains are preferred over local ones as well. I have no clue why (outside money, but cooking yourself is cheaper and nicer): if I wanted to eat plastic, I could just eat a garbage bag. But it is what it is.
Same goes for wine, beer etc; you fav craftbeer is probably owned by Heineken, while the local brewers are going out of business, even if their beer is far better.
Stimulating local businesses starts with completely cutting out the companies that own everything. People will never do that though for many reasons. It starts with money; without subsidising local companies by the gov, there is no way they can compete.
Edit: as I get downvoted, let me reformulate as I guess it reads different than I meant (not native English). I am curious why she doesn't like; my wife being a brewer has nothing to do with it.
The joke is that he is enjoying local brewers so much that he has gained a lot of weight or has some behavior changes due to increased alcohol intake that bother his wife :)
Cooking for myself costs me more per calorie than fast food, probably even more per meal, especially if I want it to be nicer.
Obviously there are cheaper fast food options than a Big Mac, and I've used average prices which doesn't help you, and I've assumed you're in the US, and I haven't accounted for things like fuel and water, but there's something seriously wrong with the market economics of where you live if fast food is really cheaper than cooking for yourself.
Ofcourse not counting time; counting time makes all cooking crazy costly, but yeah, it does so with a lot of other things as well; actual eating (fastfood or otherwise; why not a nutrients drip next to your computer?), going to the gym, shopping, cleaning, showering, going to the toilet and most people probably did not optimise any of those either.
I think you missed a subtle point though: Cooking takes time and energy, which you should not value at $0, unless you really enjoy cooking, in which case you probably don't eat at McDonald's a lot.
If you're not being paid for your time then the value is $0. Most people on HN are on salaries where the hours we work have no direct impact to what we earn.
I'm not suggesting there's no value in choosing what you should spend your time on, but rather that using some imaginary hourly wage to define it is stupid. There are much better ways to choose how to spend your time than dreaming up a threshold of "things that aren't worth $x/hour" vs "things that are worth $x/hour" because it will always end up being the boring, tiresome jobs that fall below that threshold even if they're actually useful or important.
I know a lot of people who claim they don't have time to cook or clean their houses or do gardening, and use the dollar value of their time as a reason. Most of them seem to have time to watch the latest Netflix shows or play videogames though. For some reason watching Stranger Things is apparently worth $100/hour.
Now, if you like cooking, perhaps it is like leisure, perhaps it actually replenishes you. Otherwise, you might as well put a dollar value on it, because you are effectively working overtime.
Another way to look at it is that you're really using dollars as a way to better manage your time. Let's say you work 8 hours a day, but you put in another 2 hours into learning something new, maybe a side business, anything that isn't just leisure. Of course that doesn't translate directly into a salary, but the expected value is not zero dollars.
Is it that simple?
When deciding whether to do something myself versus paying somebody else, I factor in the time taken multiplied by the pleasure or displeasure of doing the task myself, probably sometimes multiplied by the probability of the outcome being above or below ideal.
I’d therefore argue that my unpaid time does actually have a dollar value: it’s the amount I’d be willing to pay to not perform a task myself in that time. It’s complicated by the other factors, but a relationship still exists.
At some point, the system will run out of suckers who put their lifeblood into a venture rather than a cozy job.
Small businesses struggle because people are too poor to afford anything more than cheap crap at Walmart and McDonalds. We should focus on providing basics to all americans instead of getting upset when the pop-up barbecue ice cream truck doesn't make any money and went under when people's health became more important than someone's life long "dream" to become a barista at their own cafe.
There's always the argument "the town won't be the same if they're gone". That's true, but change isn't bad, it's just different.
Like, maybe Starbucks traffic is down 20% or whatever, but if 50% of their competition (independent coffeeshops) permanently close, they'll be better set up for success in the 5 years to come, and this accounts for their current relatively strong valuation.
(obviously even stronger in the case of AMZN, but even Target and Wal-Mart are benefitting from being allowed to stay open, while a lot of their competition was shut down -- speciality stores like salons and clothing stores were closed, but big-box stores selling everything stayed open)
indie coffee shops will come again. Starbucks coffee is basically the mcdonalds of restaurants - no real flavour and too much sugar imho. It's good, consistent, but not top notch quality.
Indie coffee shops are usually run by people who are passionate about making the best cup. This downturn will kill some of them - but i'm sure they will eventually return.
Big businesses can increase their efficiency through lobbying, scale, money, and political favors. Most people in a broken economy will look for the cheapest than the best value. This will surely kill many indie businesses - just not completely destroy the term.
if the indie business has no value proposition, then market forces says they can't exist. It's not as if they are entitled to exist just because they are "indie".
As for coffee shops, if they can't make a latte better than starbucks, then they weren't going to survive anyway.
Old data, but a decade ago, I saw an independent coffee shop for sale for around $50k. Obviously, not everyone can afford to open one, but the barrier to entry is relatively low. Boeing and Airbus are too big to fail for the same reason: they're strategically important, no one else has the knowledge and expertise to build large passenger jets (Embraer and Bombardier might be able to do it in a pinch), and redeveloping this would take too long.
You're right, to run a coffee shop you need a table, two chairs, a cash register and an espresso machine. While traveling I ran across a coffee shop in an outdoor market that was just a wood-fired espresso machine on a cart hauled around with a donkey. The donkey didn't look super happy but the owner looked like they were doing ok for themselves.
That… feels like a better explanation of Boeing’s recent quality issues than the other excuses I’ve heard on HN.
As much as it may be unpleasant, it may be beneficial for employment to help hedge funds with a lot of cash snap these up to prevent them and the associated jobs from disappearing entirely.
And barely profitable includes businesses that would have spent a ton on capital expenditures. If those expenditures can be had for cheap, profits can increase.
I’d love to have a side hustle brick and mortar biz alongside my day job.
But it would be fun.
If I was rich, I'd personally buy a super market, simply because they do so many things that annoy me as a customer and I'd like to try and change them and see whether one can do better.
Yes your local coffee shop might have some quirks compared to a local Starbucks but their lack of efficiency is not on the store per se, rather than Starbucks has: a) bigger leverage in rents b) effective lower corporate tax c) more streamlined supply chains
And then you think, why are not people buying mom and pop shops and running them independently with high efficiency? Because it is hard
Great TV show.
Closing business have creditors most of the time. You can't really buy them.
I'm sure that not _every_ business can do this, but I've definitely enjoyed supporting this business in particular because I like their coffee, and I know it's supporting them and the community at least for now.
I think for some businesses they just won't be able to survive unless they can pivot. One way that I've seen is by giving up a brick and mortar location, moving to a shared/communal kitchen, and then doing pop-ups.
That's the free market. When things are booming, pigfuckers like yelp are free to seek rent and extort. When things go bad, hopefully yelp and yelp-like things go down with everyone else.
I don't wish unemployment on anyone who actually works for a living. But the C-suite and investors of companies like Yelp can take a dive, as far as I'm concerned.