Things You Didn't Know About The Restaurant Industry | Hacker News Reader

Things You Didn't Know About The Restaurant Industry

feefighters.com

17 pointsarst82918 comments

"Infographics" these days tend to have graphics so bad that it's hard to pull any information out of them.

This one was horrendous; it hurt my eyes and I immediately clicked "back".

There's an art and a science to presenting information well.

#include Tufte

Gathering a bunch of boring statistics and then "tying them together" with bad graphic design creates no value for anyone.

There really should be a rule stating that you can't use text in an arc greater than say, 120 degrees. Tilting my head is fun when you're trying to play a joke, not when I'm trying to extract meaningful information.

Text is too small to comfortably read at normal zoom too.

For example:

http://happenupon.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/resume-infogra...

Came here to say the same thing. God damn that was bad.

I've been involved in the restaurant business in almost every aspect, from barback/bartender/waiter to manager to owner/investor in high volume bars, fine-dining, burger joints, food trucks, and pizza parlors.

There's a pretty solid delta between this information and reality when it comes to the "Restaurant Profits" section.

38% is WAY too high for CoGS; reality is closer to 25% to 35%. You won't see 38% food cost unless you're a seafood place that's not selling enough pasta/rice based dishes.

Net profits are typically between 4-8%. I'm not going to say a 13% net margin doesn't exist, but I've never seen anything close to that. Best I've seen was almost 10% in a food truck operation that had 35% food cost and almost no facility overhead.

There's a reason I'm now in the software business. :)

Actually, I can find 38% food cost believable right now. Buying, selling and running food service and similar businesses is a side interest of mine, and I've noticed that the reported food cost of businesses for sale in the LA area have been rising in the past couple years. What used to be as low as 25% or lower is now much closer to 38% than to 25% and businesses that report lower tend to be omitting their 2010/2011 invoices from the calculation (like someone's not going to notice?). Rent and wages and people not spending as much money aren't what's cutting into profit today, it's the food cost.

For example the other day, a family friend that runs a small burger/sandwich joint raised all her prices by $2 ($5 hot sandwich -> $7, combo meal $7 -> $9) because the meat she buys went from costing $40 a year ago to $100 today for the same amount of meat. That's just an extreme example, but the prices she pays for cases of lettuce and tomato and such have risen and every little bit ends up counting towards that percentage.

Good to know... information in infographic is from BizMiner, which does a lot of industry benchmarking by industry codes

http://www.bizminer.com/Retail/Eating-and-Drinking-Places-58...

Those sorts of things can often be wrong but it's taken from filings of 440,148 companies.

Wow, that graphic is impossibly hard to read.

Neat info, and I got a great neck workout swiveling my head around to read it all.

Totally agree... We're trying to figure out how to manage infographics... We've been contracting with infographic designers we think are good (based on their portfolios) and giving them a try, sometimes not having much success :(

It especially sucks because we give so much detail to every design at http://feefighters.com ... so it hurts when we put something like this out there which gets dissed on (though I totally agree with the design comments made here)

OPPORTUNITY: if you are a good infographic designer (will design things that won't hurt my head), please email me with samples!

Or- if you've had success with infographics, can you share tips?

I think it is correct for you to specifically solicit infographic designers. Some astounding artists just don't know how to gracefully represent data in an aesthetically appealing way.

Check out http://www.informationisbeautiful.net for some wonderful examples and hopefully some leads.

And then there's the converse, like me. I've got a good eye for infographic design, but I can't paint pixels worth a damn.

Have you heard of JESS3? http://jess3.com/

I went to a talk they put on a while back and was really impressed with the quality of their work.

Tip: just because you can align text to a path doesn't mean you should.

Very interesting stuff, but I'm always very skeptical of claims along the lines of "Every x dollars spent on [good/service] generates y additional [jobs/dollars/other good stuff]." First, I'm highly dubious of the ability of economists to isolate such complex relationships down to single-single input, single-output relationships. More importantly, there's never any analysis of opportunity costs to provide context: what if that same money, spent on something else, provided an even bigger economic benefit?

Check out multipliers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplier_(economics)

I agree with lucas, but more because of the faulty Keynesian economics described in that article.

Innovation and productive activity "generates" money, not consumption.

It doesn't make any sense to say that if I purchase something off of the McDonald's Dollar Menu, I have somehow generated and additional $2.08.

Shaffer's rounds of spending chapter explains it better than the wikipedia article: http://www.rri.wvu.edu/WebBook/Schaffer/chap05.html (not sure why I jumped to wikipedia first).

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