Barriers to Business – How cities can pave a path to entrepreneurship
inc.com
inc.com
This obviously introduced many issues. The (~6 very large) bins were always full by 3 days after pickup and then overfilled all over the back of the complex for the rest of the week. Rodent and especially ant/fruit fly issues exploded. The smell was atrocious. The bins were directly behind our kitchen door, and we didn't have AC, so our kitchen door had to stay closed. The kitchen door was key to the airflow that would naturally cool the apartment, so the entire apartment was miserable.
Worst of all, the neighbor did not take any of the bins to the curb each week, was unresponsive, and our landlord was predictably unhelpful. For many weeks I patched the issue by hauling this guy's business trash to the curb every single morning (which is a lot more work, and much more unpleasant, than it perhaps sounds like).
Before that experience, I would probably see rules like "food trucks must file a form proving they have a legal place to dump their refuse" and consider it to be absurd red tape.
"Our neighbors have a lot of trash" is not a complaint that a city inspector is going to take seriously, and in any case our city was very landlord-friendly/human-hostile. In most cities waiting for the leas to be up and then moving out is always easier...
We resolved this by threatening the neighbor to go to the office that permitted his food truck.
If food truck regulations didn't exist, we would have been SOL until the lease was up.
> Or refuse to haul the trash entirely.
This was an impractical option.
On an 85 degree day, our apartment would stay below 75 (and below 70 until late afternoon close to the end of the workday) if we kept the large front windows open, the kitchen door open, and some well-placed fans. It would heat up to 85 very quickly if you closed off the airflow. Working in 85 degree heat is highly unpleasant.
To say nothing of the rats and fruit flies/ants, which were impossible to keep out of the apartment even when we kept the doors and windows closed.
Well, that's the root of the issue.
1. You have a conversation and politely ask as a neighbor. Maybe mention it a couple times to make sure the point gets across.
2. If that doesn't work, you research the regulation and have a second conversation explaining the issue in legal terms instead of neighborly terms.
3. If that doesn't work, you have a conversation and leave a note explaining that you don't want to cause trouble but that you will report to the city.
4. If that doesn't work, you -- at last -- get the city involved.
Without regulation, step 3 has no teeth. And you only get to step 3 if steps 1-2 fail, so the premise here is that simply asking isn't going to help anyways.
Most legal disputes can be handled amicably without getting the state or courts involved when it's clear who is in the right. But the law has to exist first, or else the abusive/negligent party will just continue to ignore the situation.
Unfortunately if this is the case, I imagine it would still be the case even if food truck vendors were forced to submit a form testifying they had proper disposal arranged. As a thought-experiment, I imagine if this food truck was dumping his garbage in the mayor's garbage-bins, that they would find a way to make him stop with existing laws on the books.
There are usually laws on the books that could be used that simply are not enforced. Many jurisdictions have (by)laws about citizens being allowed the "private enjoyment" of their property, and you could easily claim that's infringed on here for the reasons you laid out. Public nuisance laws are also, by design, incredibly broad.
My point is that I believe it's a problem of enforcement and political will; not of letter of the law.
Where I am from (Canada), the correct remediation would be to take your landlord to the tenancy courts where you could represent yourself (i.e. not need a lawyer), but that's still undeniably a huge pain for a rough situation. I'm glad you're in a better spot now.
Renters are low class and have very little political power.
Fortunately for us, food truck operators in that city are also low class and also have very little political power.
Asserting our rights against a neighbor or landlord as renters was difficult. But asserting our rights as a residential citizen against a food truck operator was much easier (or, at least, the neighbor perceived that this would be the case and acquiesced).
If a picture of a rat could get a building condemned in all jurisdictions, NYC would be leveled by the end of the week ;-)
The problem with this is that if you're doing it enough to make a living off of (i.e. not a side gig) it makes you a massive target for enforcers looking to issue fines. And there's always the Karen who'd rather narc on you than politely ask you not to do something that you didn't even know was pissing them off.
True, but you might actually never get close to the top of their pile of priorities.
I've spent 2 years trying to get permission to have electricians put wire back into conduit that is already there in a building I own.
Saturday thieves broke into my outdoor containers (because I can't get an occupancy permit) and stole over $20,000 worth of stuff. I can't install security lighting and security systems without power to run them!
This stuff is really getting to me and I feel like I'm in an Ayn Rand book.
Well, no. After he stopped using our residential bins, he started dumping in city trash cans, was fined, and then ultimately paid for use of a dumpster.
> so adding that rule wouldn't have helped
He wasn't aware that either of his illegal dumping methods were illegal, and changed his behavior when he was informed (in the second case by a fine). So a form probably would have, in fact, prevented the situation from happening.
> and then everyone in Boston would have a 93rd step in the process.
I probably spent 40 hours on this issue. Much of that time highly unpleasant (cleaning out rodent traps, taking out cheap trash bags that would break and make a mess, spraying down gross trash bins and the back sidewalk, etc)
A one page online form that takes 5 minutes to fill out, for every food truck in the city, consumes perhaps 20 hours of time on the high end. So this one event I experienced already pays a net 20 hour profit to society.
I'm not the only one who has had issues with food truck trash disposal -- it's actually a fairly common issue for cities and one of the primary sources of complaints my city received about food trucks. A quick google search shows that other cities have similar issues and some even ban food trucks because of trash issues.
I'm sorry about your building code issues, that sounds very annoying and unfair, but only Ayn Rand could complain about filling out forms when a business is literally trashing someone's home ;-)
People only have so much bandwidth, and forcing someone to do a bunch of pointless stuff doesn't do anyone any good.
Maybe your city should just make sure there are enough sanitation resources that the ones you are complaining about aren't overloaded.
Seems like a separate issue of your neighbor not being very considerate and dumping (illegally?).
Refuse externalities are a systemic issue for food trucks. They were the #1 reason for complaints about food trucks in my city. There are news articles about beach towns banning food trucks and an article about Portland considering a ban in certain areas because of trash issues. This case was egregious but the problem is not uncommon.
> The thing is, red tape shouldn’t be there to enforce compliance. He could have done that even if he’d paid the fees, which maybe he did?
He went on to dump in city trash cans (illegally), was fined, then arranged for a dumpster. He claims, and I believe this is true, that he didn't know either residential or city trash was off-limits. (I believe it is true because getting away with illegal dumping when done intentionally is super easy... you only get caught when you do it in broad daylight in front of a cop because you don't know it's not allowed.)
Given that issues with trash from food trucks are predictable and known, simply asking for proof that the food truck owner has access to a dumpster or other waste management option seems pretty reasonable. If the food truck owner has a proper waste management plan then describing it should take a few minutes max ("I am paying XYZ to use the dumpster located behind 123 Main St."). If they don't have a plan then this is a net positive for them because they'd almost certainly otherwise end up with either fines or a revoked license.
Even assuming a 1/200 success rate at reducing illegal dumping, requiring a waste management plan would cost 20 hours (amortized over hundreds of people) and save 40 hours (amortized over 1 person). The actual savings are probably much higher because 1/200 is unrealistically low -- I'm willing to bet most illegal dumping of food truck waste is not intentionally illegal.
Why is it incumbent on the rest of society to subsidize food truck owners at the tune of 2x time?
Thats like.. The only purpose of red tape?
Red tape is by definition, arbitrary, purposeless, and slows things down without any beneficial effect.
As a result, most western countries now have an ever growing apparatus of bureaucrats who are not accountable to the citizenship and who's sole reason for being is the facilitation of process. In order to increase their relevance and hence influence and paygrade, it is in their best interest to increase the amount of process and the role that process plays in everyday decision making.
What worries me is that I don't see any remedy to this. Germany, a particularly bad offender when it comes to process and red tape has been attempting "Bürokratieabbau" - bureaucracy reduction since 1997. As a result we now have a commission for bureaucracy reduction which manages several operating bodies for bureaucracy reduction, all with their own processes and guidelines.
I'm honestly worried that this might grow to a point of collapse.
For example, when it comes to taxation the outcome is that certain kinds transactions are incentivized, leading to no tax, while no individual bureaucrat or politician or resident would seem to agree about the ability of not paying any tax, the aggregate tax revenue services collaborate with a tax filer and support that ability
It used to be easy to do things. But then business owners would do things that would make citizens say, "they shouldn't be able to do that." So rules/laws were made to prevent people from doing it.
You can go on a mission to reduce redtape, but the results will probably be temporary. Contrary to the way some people think, these regulations aren't put into place willy-nilly, they are the natural outcome of people cheating the system and causing others harm.
It's not just governments either. Anyone who has worked at a startup and a huge mega corp sees the difference in how easy it is to deploy something. Startups have no guards in place, while megacorps need sign-offs from various departments, etc.
I think the steelman of the GP is that the red tape was not accurately predicted. Most citizens can probably agree "all else equal, we don't want a pub in the middle of a residential district open till 4am with drunkards wandering the streets". But did they also properly opening a local business should be so hard that each business effectively has a local moat, raising prices and reducing restaurant selection?
Also, the opinion that unresponsive bureaucracy needs to exist seems defeatist on the side of government regulation. Why can't we design better permitting processes that both ensure crazy pubs don't open in the middle of a suburb, and yet also make opening most normal businesses a 1-day affair?
Depending on the level of government involved: probably.
Economic analysis of laws/regulations are common requirements for governmental activity. As are after-the-fact analysis and comparisons to ensure a law/regulation is achieving its goal. It's part of the red-tape-for-red-tape system.
An adjacent question is when governments predict the cost of a particular program. I always say when that occurs their prediction is actually a floor and the program is going to actually cost prediction+.
We know how much extra it costs to add a stairwell to a building design which will survive a fire for the period of time defined by building regulations.
By "citizens", I assume you mean other business owners trying to keep new entrants out of the sector, or putting themselves in place to approve those that do.
There is an interesting "parable" [1] from the 70's that goes over this and lays it out for what it is, which is basically always a form of regulatory capture.
[1] https://www.nationalaffairs.com/public_interest/detail/the-p...
The regulatory bureaucracy is a lagging, indirect response to bad behavior by previous individuals and businesses. It’s never going to absolutely prevent bad behavior just as speed limits do not actually prevent speeding, but it is a legal tool or cudgel to inhibit the behavior and punish it in retrospect. And that in turn is both to reduce the cost of government from dealing with responses to bad behavior and ensure the politicians get reelected.
And reduce the number of food poisoning incidents to some degree, of course.
I have already talked with one US President, and with another, and with the third - Presidents come and go, but the policy does not change. Do you know why? Because the power of the bureaucracy is very strong. The person gets elected, he comes with some ideas, and then people come to him with briefcases, well dressed and in dark suits, like mine, but not with a red tie, but with black or dark blue, and they begin to explain what he should do - and everything changes at once. This happens from one administration to the next.
Neither Obama nor Trump had any experience managing a very large organization and it showed. Both thought they could just snap their fingers, sign an executive order, and it would just get done.
I do not think people appreciate how hard it is to get a given thing done across a large (100,000 people+) organization even when everyone claims to be aligned, everyone speaks the same language, and at the surface there is zero reason to believe anyone would act maliciously to prevent whatever "good thing" it is you want to accomplish getting accomplished. And no one, no where, is ever 100% aligned with whatever the dear leader/CEO/czar/caesar/chairman wants to accomplish.
I will say that the worst burocracy is created when private companies meddle with the government affairs.
Even if it doesn't mean they want to make more work (like how most developers wouldn't maliciously add bugs to create more work), it does mean the incentive to make less work without a way to preserve oneself is extremely low.
If you go ask them what they prefer, you may be surprised. Or maybe not, if you go imagining they are humans.
What people call "The Government", in this case, is the Municipal Corporation of Boston.
This corporation profits from a monopoly control over many aspects of people's lives and special legal privileges within its geographical boundaries.
Like any other human organization it's true "purpose" and "motivation" is the collective desires of the people that run and make up that organization. Which is, mostly, going to be:
Financing the life styles and political ambitions of the people running it. That is how it works once you strip away all the flowery language and idealism.
People get involved in city government because it benefits them. It may be a stepping stone in a career in bigger government. Maybe they are looking for stable income, cheap benefits, and solid pension. Or cushy job they can't get fired from. Or its social status; they enjoy having power over people's lives, they enjoy having their opinions matter and being perceived as a person of importance.
Lots of different motivations. The corporation's motivations are their motivations. Its purpose is their purpose.
> As a result we now have a commission for bureaucracy reduction which manages several operating bodies for bureaucracy reduction, all with their own processes and guidelines.
The first order of business for any bureaucracy is to ensure its own survival.
Nobody wants to eliminate their own well being. Everybody wants security in their job. And everybody wants more money and a promotion, for the most part.
With large very stable organizations like government corporations anybody that wants to make more money (ie: get a promotion) will usually have to wait for the guy above them to retire or quit, which can take years. Sometimes education can open doors, but mostly it's going to be people leaving the organization that have been there longer then you have. Things like seniority ensure there is very little opportunity for growth.
The main opportunity for growth for a government bureaucrat is laterally... Meaning new agencies or bureaucracies need to be created that they can move into and have seniority there.
So once a bureaucracy has secured its own survival the second order of business is to grow new bureaucracies.
Which is exactly the pattern we see in all governments.
You listed many reasons, and built a long argument on the implications of these reasons. Perhaps this was an oversight but it’s worth mentioning that civic engagement for its own sake is a fairly natural instinct and is arguably more important than any of the other aforementioned factors.
For example, let's say that to do some specific work the law says a degree is required. Normally, a degree is something that a university gives to its successful students so it shouldn't be that big of a bureaucracy to hire someone for that job, right?
firts, they start by simply taking the xerox copy of the diploma. Then someone starts hiring people without a diploma and forges a fake xerox copy and gets caught? To solve this, bureaucrats introduce a requirement for diploma registrations so they can check against fakes.
Congratulation, now you have an office visit step where you go show your original diploma.
Unfortunately, some people start showing fake diplomas. Once the bureaucrats catch on, they introduce a protocol with the universities to start checking the diplomas. Unfortunately, some universities say they can't accommodate that, others say they can do it moving forward but can't to for those who graduated more than 5 years ago. Also, some people studied abroad, others have their institutions merged or seized to exits.
Congratulation, now you have multiple ways to accomplish the same thing. You will need to fill the correct form.
Why is the government in the business of requiring degrees for financial transactions? Maybe that's valid for a doctor, but it's certainly not valid for a hair dresser.
I also find the educational requirements for hairdressing to be rather perplexing.
I would for instance argue, that only professions where a negative outcome is irreversible should have government standards. E.g. if a surgeon or a civil engineer building bridges is unqualified, the outcome might be irreversible damage. If your cook or hairdresser suck, the market will take care of it.
The problem is entrepreneurial support organizations (typically organized as a "non-profit") that the government awards economic development grants to, who are then supposed to support the entrepreneurs. These are often incubators, accelerators and/or venture support/investment organizations. Universities sometimes fill this role as well.
These organizations take a MASSIVE cut of the funding to cover their "overhead" before any money goes to the entrepreneurs. The amount of the allotted government funding that goes to entrepreneurs to actually grow their business is tiny after the various "non profit" organizations get their hands on it.
I've seen state funded business plan pitch competitions that cost far in excess of $2M to put on their annual pitch event, with teams of 5+ employees "working" full-time on them. I've seen a party planner get paid $195k to put on a one-time demo day for 300 people. I've seen consultants get hired for $15k to put on a one-day sales workshop for founders. A successful founder paid $170k to give a speech at a demo day. Universities charging 53% overhead rates to run government funded programs. Program directors paid $200k+ to work on an accelerator that runs for 3 months of the year. I could go on and on.
All of this was government funded in the name of "economic development." How many of us on HN could start a brand new business if we got even a fraction of this funding instead of wasting it on pomp and circumstance that masquerades as economic development?
I guess the bureaucrats could/should realize this is a waste and put a stop to it, so perhaps it is back to being their fault. But these "non profit" orgs whose mission is to "support entrepreneurs" have no qualms about pulling up to the trough of government fundings and sucking it dry before it goes to actual entrepreneurs...
(Source: I've seen this spending first-hand since I work at once of these places, which is why I'm posting this under a newly created alt account. Trying to do my tiny part to stop it, but it's systemic and hard to change.)
There is a logic: elected officials want to be seen as supporting new business growth but of course can't literally invest taxpayer money in seed rounds. It's not reasonable or sane, of course, but that's why it happens...
Anyways, I think that sort of thing is mostly in the past by now? I don't see it happening much around here anymore. Perhaps there's a new grift.
This makes the constituency for strong regulation not only all diners, but all existing restaurants, with the constituency against strong regulation being whomever happens to be currently trying to open a new restaurant in the area.
Balance of power goes to obstruction.
See also Mancur Olsen's classic "The Logic of Collective Action" (both a short paper which captures the essence, and a book which dives into greater detail and more examples).
This is exactly same in corporations - they are also full of bureocrats.
I can spend 5 grand on AWS rltomorriw and noone will raise an eyebrow
but we arent allowed to get a rmmmtablet to test the application qewe are developing actually works as intended
People couldn't get the permits required to do the work to fix the problems that needed fixing, or it was just easier to just go start over in a place that let you raise your goats or whatever in peace without needing to fill out 92 forms for each one.
I'd reframe this movement not as 'business vs government' but 'everyone vs inefficiency.'
Making the process inefficient raises the floor of the minimum viable business. And, more importantly, it raises the floor for who can start one so that you don't get people closing up shop and being bankrupt when something bad happens.
The institutions designing these processes are chock f-ing full of people of questionable intentions. You hear "affordable prices" they hear "trashy clientele". You hear "thin margins" and they hear "can't afford to be taxed more than they currently are". You hear "small family owned business" and they hear "people who have no other assets we can threaten to lien in the case of a dispute". And just to be clear, these people aren't evil (well their actions are, but they're done with good intentions). It's just that the regulatory agencies they work for are set up in such a way that the 2nd and 3rd order "nice to push for but not technically within the scope of what we do here" opinions of all the people involved seep through. At its root this is a diversity problem. There aren't enough Ron Swansons and people who've been f-ed by government bureaucracies working for government bureaucracies so you get bureaucracies doing things that are completely and totally tone deaf.
Edit: And before anyone puts any more words in my mouth, they have no intention of making the process onerous and exclusionary. They have just settled into that equilibrium over the centuries because that is the local maximum their crude "did our last round of changes do what we wanted or not" hill climbing algorithm has found.
The people implementing these regulations don't have the time, resources, or expertise to create holistically efficient systems. Instead they can have meetings, write rules, have more meetings, vote on the rules, and then add another step to a process that assumes you go to an office and fill out a form because that's how it was done the first time someone had to come up with the permitting process.
If I approach a rule maker and say "you're trying to over regulate!" then I'm challenging their raison d'etre without demonstrating understanding of their limited toolset. If, on the other hand, I say, "let me reduce your costs, save you time, and help you collect money faster" then (I believe) I'm going to have a better time. It's for that reason that I feel the "everyone vs inefficiency" argument is more likely to succeed.
This is such a weird take. You get taxed on profits. If you don’t turn a profit you pay zero tax.
Oh, and payroll is not profit.
In the same category: “I can’t afford to pay more than minimum wage”
A bike rack out front. A change in the ratio of hand washing stations per employee. It's all "cheap", and most of it's good stuff that's easy to justify. But it adds up in a big way. And you let this stuff run for awhile and this is how that "authentic" taco stand or used book store you loved gets pushed out of business.
In California, an LLC pays $800/year taxes even on zero profit; you must pay for a business license tax, and you pay "property taxes" on the equipment and fixtures in your facility. (See: https://www.sccassessor.org/index.php/property-information/b... )
You also must pay for certain professional licenses, and pay for certain inspections. Just one example, I have to pay about $150/year for a "water backflow valve" inspection, even though our computer consulting office has no equipment that connects to the water supply.
But you’re right, running a business in the US sounds _terrible_. Condolences. My assumptions were based on institutions not being hostile.
None of that carries over to the blue collar world.
You need to have an inspection by the water board to size the grease trap because some asshole dumped his cooking waste down the drain and created a fat berg that clogged the sewer. You need fire inspections because assholes block emergency egress, disable smoke alarms, etc. We have health permitting and inspection because people will do things like not fix freezers or leave a tray of raw chicken in 90 degree heat on a tray perched in the grease trap.
Entrepeneurs are great, but many will cut corners to make it work. I’d rather not get poisoned to advance their dream.
Having controls does not mean that they must be inefficient. In fact, bureaucracy and inefficiencies are the enemies of the end goal because they tend to devalue the work of government agencies (or whoever enforce those controls). And then you end up with a libertarian outlet like Institute for Justice telling you that you need half a century to open a donut store.
You could have a process that approves things optimistically and have inspections coming later. You could have some form of certification program that let's you say "It's not my first rodeo. I know what I am doing, please let me do it and I take full responsibility for any shit that might happen if I deviate from the best practices."
Your solution has the same level of bureaucracy but delays it and even adds, essentially, an addition licensure so it’s not really the bureaucracy but the timing.
I agree to a point (history is filled with cases of laws that were created precisely to curb perfectly "normal" behavior which was not favored by the elites) but anyway it does not follow that just because a law exists we need to implement ubiquitous policing.
E.g, we put traffic lights in busy streets as a way to coordinate people and traffic, not as a way see to chase those who deviate from the "rules".
> even adds, essentially, an addition licensure
The idea of a certification would be as an alternative, not a substitute.
I'm not saying that there won't be an inspection. What I am saying is that there are plenty of steps in the process that could be done with less gate-keeping.
A restaurant is one thing, but anybody who has ever hired somebody in the trades to do work on their house knows that the default is not pulling permits at all. If you hire an electrician to add a switch to the light in your closet he's not even going to bother. In many contexts the permitting process is so slow and stupid and inefficient that almost everybody ignores it.
You can't keep upping the ante forever and expect people to go along with it. In the end you might just make things worse.
Reality: almost nobody does this.
This is a pretty good list of situations where you will/won't need a permit. In most cases you can replace an existing outlet/fixture without a permit, but anything new will require one:
https://www.lightingtutor.com/electrical-work-done-without-a...
Codes/permits aren't aimed to stop the median person from doing their own work, they're to stop the 10th percentile dummy creating an unsafe environment for anyone who comes into contact with their work product.
The risks vary. If you replace an old electrical socket, the risk is pretty low. But when someone gets electrocuted due to some dumb-dumb improperly running electricity to the pool, it’s probably not gonna be your house anymore.
The Restaurant manager may have intended to streamline a process by leaving the tray of chicken out for 4 hours instead of in the walk in. I don’t care - the customers will get sick from contamination.
The movie theatre manager may block an emergency egress because gangs of teenagers are letting their friends in for free and he doesn’t have the budget to station an employee there. I don’t care - dying in a fire or stampede isn’t for me.
Brakes are what allows cars to go fast. I’d rather have some assurance that there’s a baseline level of competence than to try to figure out whether some asshole will disregard my safety or be unqualified to make the decisions they are making.
We are about to have a natural experiment take place related to this. In several states they have amended their health codes to take away the power of inspectors to actually do anything when they find such code violations other than tell the restaurant that they should fix it.
Their county/city health departments can only act now when there is verified report that someone was actually seriously sickened due to the restaurant's actions.
I have often wondered if any place would do something like this… although I hoped it wouldn’t happen.
Also, do you know if this is somehow in response to Covid restrictions? Or just a general “let’s see what happens, we haven’t heard of anyone getting really poisoned by food lately” attitude?
And yes, it was in response to COVID restrictions. Most red states have passed laws limiting the power of state and local health authorities. I think the majority of them are just aimed at infectious disease prevention measures. I think the ones that also removed the ability to preemptively close a restaurant until it fixes a major health code violation that hasn't yet hospitalized anyone did so due to hasty and sloppy drafting rather than intent.
- Which steps are unnecessary? Unless you have the view that the bureaucracy is just designed to be hellish, you need to figure out what each step is trying to achieve, and what would be lost if it were removed.
- Can steps/agencies be merged? If there are nine government agencies involved, you could simplify the procedure by moving the responsibilities to fewer agencies. But there are limits... at the extreme, if you made just one government agency responsible for restaurants, you'd make opening a restaurant easier, but - congratulations! - you've effectively just created a new government agency for restaurants. Now you've added to the bureaucracy!
The services they offer range from registering your apartment (doubles as voter registration), getting IDs, passport, and driver licenses, changing the registration of your car, getting proof of (the absence) of your criminal record. For many of these services, they have delegated or assigned authority from whatever government agency is responsible while for some they merely operate as a service center.
I wish more of this could be done online, but it’s certainly nice I don’t have to go to 15 different places to do all of that.
How many times have you had to do more than one of those things in the same visit?
In the last year I moved twice and will likely move once more in the next 12 months (temporary places, looking to buy something) so I’m a bit more appreciative right now.
The UK isn't a great example for much, but for instance: * Passport application - controlled centrally. Has been done by post for years. Now available online. * Update car registration - controlled centrally. Has been done by post for years. Now available online. * Register to vote (closest thing the UK has to the anmeldung) - controlled locally. Done by posting or emailing a form to your local council.
1) Is your local DMV really as bad as you claim?
2) Can you not do all that over the internet/mail?
2- I could not. Moving back from NY hurt. Had to do everything in person.
After getting accustomed to NY DMVs where you set up an appointment, and you are served immediately when you get there, Texas (or at least Houston) is painful.
1. Create a true one-stop shop for starting a business, with step-by-step guides and well-organized information that cover city and state requirements.
2. Simplify the process to obtain building permits by combining steps and paperwork, creating more guides for complying with agency rules, and lowering fees.
These seem like excellent recommendations.
I'm not so sure about the other recommendations:
> 3. Eliminate “clean hands” requirements to ensure those working to lift themselves out of poverty are not immediately disqualified.
Maybe. Not being able to start a business because of a few parking tickets on your personal vehicle is obviously harmful. But there's also potential for abuse. Some sort of dollar limit does seem reasonable.
> Remove unfair barriers that burden specific types of work, such as home-based businesses and food trucks, with unnecessary restrictions.
1. What barriers? "Must prove you have a refuse management plan" may sound like needless red tape, but see my top-level post.
2. home-based businesses sound like no big deal when you're on SFH >= half acre lots, but these rules exist in dense cities for a good reason. The type of business and type of residential dwelling are important considerations. Running a business out of a studio apartment using the hallway as a waiting room can be enormously disruptive to hundreds of people.
> Work with the state to eliminate state-level bar- riers to work, such as criminal history checks, that often target vulnerable residents.
Again, largely in favor but the details matter.
It's a bit like the housing crisis. We need more homes, ok well who votes on those homes? The people that already owns homes and are interested in the value of those homes going up.
And the reasons for all this regulation are fundamentally weak. Regulators tend towards taking no risks. Small businesses are the part of society that are most useful when they experiment and ... take big risks. If the risk is removed, in 20 years there will be a lot less reward than would otherwise have been the case.
But to be realistic about the costs - these regulations were probably put in place because of things like like food poisoning or people getting crushed to death in warehouses. There would be real downsides to removing them. But the crux of the issue is (as can be seen in Asia) it is possible to get economic miracles and build up entire new industries propelling people into a future they did not see coming through steady investment in new industries. People are way underestimating the damage that locking in the status-quo does during this era of miracles. Triggering big economic improvements is worth a lot more than a futile exercise in causing no harm. It is impossible to do no harm, and so these regulations will fail to really achieve their goals while setting communities up for less success in the medium term.
Capitalists routinely wipe the floor with people who don't take enough risk. Risk is necessary to get the best outcomes. Where will the risk taking happen if people try to regulate it out of existence?
For every foodborne illness prevented or permanent disability from an on the job accident avoided, the community saves a couple million dollars.
If you want less friction, then fund the regulators. We slash city budgets and then wonder why health departments rely on fees and inspectors take weeks.
I feel you are being dogmatic here rather than evidence based. The markets for restaurants in a given neighbourhood is rather static - and roughly zero-sum in terms of earnings, but _not_ in terms of quality. If you encourage some "fragile genius" who can't follow instructions for fire safety, food hygiene, payroll accounting or plumbing to open a restaurant, you will a vibrant mix of more unsafe restaurants, unhygienic food, unpaid employees and clogged sewers, all of which are a burden on the rest of society.
All pre-start paperwork does is filter out people who are diligent at paperwork, because they have to do a lot more to get to the starting line.
This is a straw man argument.
Good entrepreneurship is taking a risk on a new cuisine that is underserved in your city, which no one is regulating.
Bad entrepreneurship is taking a risk on inadequate food safety and fire suppression equipment, which municipalities are indeed trying to regulate out of existence.
My buddy opened a small guitar pedal shop from his attic, and was promptly told by the city he was circumventing zoning regulations, and was eventually forced to find a spot in the “industrial” sector, even though he was a tiny operation.
If politicians want to actually support small businesses and entrepreneurship, IMO auditing current bylaws and processes is the way to go.
Edit: words
This is one of the major reasons for the stagnation of all empires.
I still have some faith in possible change at the municipal level, at least in smaller ones.
After failing to get permits/licenses/whatever it was, someone told him he needed to give the city administrator some cash on the side for things to go through. Boom! Instant success!
At the time of our talking, he'd accepted that paying bribes to the government (not what the locals called it) was just a regular part of doing business.
It was astonishing that it was required, openly acknowledged/accepted by the locals, and pervasive through other government branches.
> Right to Start fights to expand entrepreneurial opportunity for all. We drive civic change through: grassroots organizing and mobilizing, policy advocacy and engagement, and lifting the voices of entrepreneurs through media and storytelling. Our campaign is based in two affiliated nonprofits: Right to Start is a 501(c)3 and Right to Start Fund is a 501(c)4.
I was trying to think of a job that’s held up on a higher pedestal to make a follow-on joke (“yeah next we need a non-profit to glorify ___”) but even cops, soldiers, and movie stars have less of a halo on them than entrepreneurs.
But sympathy makes a bit of sense when you think about it economically. The businesses that do make it in have more market share and are selected to be those that are politically connected. The regulations serve to keep other businesses out, and we should try to help people that aren't as connected start businesses as well.
If we're talking about pure regulatory capture, fine. But the only concrete examples I ever hear about ones like "small businesses can't afford to pay for health insurance" w/r/t the ACA.
To put my cards on the table, though, I'm not pro-regulation for regulation's sake. I'm more of a "skip the middlemen and just do it through the State, and no one needs to 'regulate' anyone - I can just regulate them myself w/ my vote (and my dollar, if it's a state-owned-enterprise)" guy. But if my quality of life is 100% controlled by disconnected, self-interested private owners who don't care what I have to say, I need the government to come in and at least give me a freedom or two to leverage against them...please.
There's this story about the extremely heavy and complicated French labor laws. The story goes, businesspeople complain that the law is more than a hundred pages long booklet and as a response the French legislators print the booklet in smaller font, thus successfully taking the laws under 100 pages.
It's supposed to show the ridiculousness of the bureaucracy but IMHO it's pretty fair to solve the problem by using smaller font if the complaint is about the number of pages.
Maybe we can have more intelligent discussion if we actually know the context and the content. I suspect that some of those steps, fees and forms are reasonable and some are outdated and only exist because the law was made pre-internet, pre-smartphone era.
https://ij.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Barriers-to-Busine...
There are again tables about number of steps etc. I find that ridiculous.
It would be funny if the regulators respond by combining the steps though. Instead of 1. book sanitary checks 2. pay sanitary check fees, maybe it can be solved in one quick step of 1. booking sanitary checks and pay check fees
It seems counter intutive but adding another agency (the "start a business" agency) might help. That group will get fed up with the process and since they're doing it repeatably they can see the issuses and perhaps force a fix. Most people go through this process once and there is little incentive to fix. (I had to go to the historical commision to get new windows a 2 month process.. it was a pain, but now I'm done I've never revisited)
Then I noticed there are 138 more pages. Finally they actually just list the barriers by state - and each state is 1-2 pages (basically repeated over and over for each of the states) - much more useful.
Included among the heinous barries to freedom to live the american dream are things like "Hand washing regulations" and "Paying Tax".
But let’s say restaurant-goers power through the higher rate of stomach bugs, because the food is so worth it. There are a lot of jobs that are harder to do when you’re at home shitting[0] or, with some probability, dead.
So, you have to pay the price somewhere: the business pays (fee or lower demand), the government pays (eat the cost or deal with angry citizens or angry businesses), or the consumer pays (health or foregoing restaurants) etc.
But, ofc these folx rarely discuss many of the relevant trade-offs. Unless you were born yesterday, it’s obvious what they’re up to.
[0]: An assumption on my part. As a coder I’d be fine :)
The complaint is obviously not about the number of pages. Printing the booklet in a smaller font is trolling.
'Why did they complain about the number of pages then' argumentation is also trolling.
Semantic argumentation is great for making yourself look clever on the internet but achieves little else.
That's really not semantic argumentation at all when the core argument is literally about the number of steps.
Yes, I see that the actual argument is about the complexity of the process but the person who argues that doesn't provide any information for us to judge if those steps are necessary or on. The used stats and numbers don't mean anything. What's the right number of steps for opening a restaurant?
Basically it's an opinion - from a person that's completed the process - that the process is too complex and involves unnecessary (in their opinion) bureaucracy. That's the gist of the message and that's the intended takeaway. Debating as to whether or not there's a 'correct' number of steps is kinda adjacent to the point being made.
How could that possibly be fair, when it clearly violates the intent of the request? If anything that move just shows the maliciousness of the regulators.
Then there came an opportunity, and I started my own web design business. I learned something important.
I was right. It's really not that bad, and as many people have suggested, this red tape was put into place for reasons. I admit it's frequently annoying, but in no way is it a meaningful barrier to someone who has a dream and really wants to work for it.
> ... a one-time fee that communities pay to Metropolitan Council Environmental Services (MCES) when a residence or business connects to the metropolitan disposal system for the first time. [0]
If one started a restaurant in a previously used restaurant space, my sense is that many of these large fees would be essentially zero. Still there is a lot of licensing and inspecting.
[0] https://www2.minneapolismn.gov/business-services/licenses-pe....
In most cases, it costs about 4x as much to open a restaurant than to acquire a distressed one. Anecdotally, a restaurant that was built with a cost of about a million bucks (local currency) in a 500 sq ft place (expensive city), was acquired by him for about 50k, and is now back to clocking about 1.5 million in revenue.
- Ron Swanson, Parks and Recreation
Then someone died and the outraged public demanded regulation.
This isn’t that hard.
And besides, what’s the incentive for a government agency to care about apple safety? Tons of examples over the years when regulators approved dubious things (a long list of pharmaceuticals that turned out to be deadly for instance.) Rather than being shut down, those regulators get even bigger budgets. And the myth that the bureaucracy is accountable to the people needs to stop. Ever been to the DMV? Despite being universally hated for inefficiency, that place is still inefficient. How is the DMV accountable to anyone?
1. Unless these independent companies are themselves regulated, they can just exist to give rubber-stamp approval to companies that pay them for this. There are plenty of examples of this: Yelp, the Better Business Bureau, those "Hacker Safe" badges you used to see online. Just google one of these, "$certification_company extortion", to understand the business model.
2. Consumers, really, really don't care. Richer consumers will buy the clean apples and poorer consumers will take a risk on the gamble apples. Again, just look at the actual market -- there are tons products stratified along the lines of regular version vs safe/ethical version.
3. The certification company has many more levers to pull than less or more accuracy. Just do a thought experiment where you're an evil CEO of one of these companies - what moves would you pull, and then look at the market... they do them. Example: Name yourself something that sounds like a govt agency to trick consumers.
What your saying makes sense if you are trying to prove a counter-factual about safety in a world of un-FDA-regulated apples. But there are also plenty of un-FDA-regulated products on the market right now that you can use to test your theory.
My favorite one right now is delta-8 THC. The companies that sell it are fly-by-night sketchy companies that often are multiple brands by the same people. All of their websites are littered with badges about how safe and certified they are.
So with your predictions in mind, please read about this journalist's attempt to track the chain of authenticity on their Delta-8, in practice: https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2021/08/10519251/what-is-de...
tl;dr: your idea is currently failing.
--- edit, Here's my own funny example I found while adding to my comment: Podcasts are advertising this one online THC company "Diet Smoke". I clicked a delta-9 product (https://www.dietsmoke.com/product/diet-smoke-extra-mango-gum...). Click "Lab Tests", then open the linked PDF. You'll notice that the lab test is for a completely different product, since the test shows delta-8, not delta-9. According to your theory, this should degrade consumer confidence and harm the business, so I should not be hearing ads every week for this company, and I shouldn't be hearing the podcast hosts talking about taking their products. When I click on their Instagram I should see a consumer revolt instead of guys going "sheeesh this got me faded". ---
And, the main point you're missing is that the government has the freedom to actually execute on regulations decided on by the public. You need an actual enforcement mechanism, e.g. "I'm visiting your business unannounced, spot-checking it, and if you store your apples in a vat of poison then we're shutting you down." The private equivalents can't do that.
> And besides, what’s the incentive for a government agency to care about apple safety? Tons of examples over the years when regulators approved dubious things (a long list of pharmaceuticals that turned out to be deadly for instance.) Rather than being shut down, those regulators get even bigger budgets. And the myth that the bureaucracy is accountable to the people needs to stop. Ever been to the DMV? Despite being universally hated for inefficiency, that place is still inefficient. How is the DMV accountable to anyone?
Where's the private DMV? Anyone could start it. If the DMV is so terrible, why hasn't anyone?
Also, DMVs are maximally accountable. I don't know what else you could want besides being able to democratically control its budget and policies. People tend to not want to fund it (counter-examples welcome) so they tend to be underfunded and understaffed -- not great, but that's definitely a form accountability. Also, see the IRS. Hated, has no budget.
And if that's the whole hang-up is around insufficient democracy, then that's the real root issue here.
How could a grocery store buyer even avoid evil apples inc? Individually demand to see their factory and process?
Otherwise the simple model only works when you know and trust the vendor enough to take the risk that what they sell you is not quite what you wanted.
I actually helped a friend open a restaurant in Long Beach, CA a few decades back and among the reasons for the expense:
- You're serving food, so there has to be some check that you're procuring food that isn't spoiled and you're properly storing and preparing it
- Anything communally served (i.e. buffet style) needs to have safeguards in place to ensure you're not creating disease vectors
- You're generating a bunch of biological waste and need to dispose of that properly
- The cooking process puts out a bunch of waste grease that needs to be trapped and kept out of the normal water disposal system so you're not clogging everyone else's pipes
- A kitchen is quite obviously a fire hazard and needs to comply with codes preventing fires
- If you're not providing your own parking lot, your customers are going to be parking on the street and someone needs to pay for that additional congestion to prevent externalities
There is no way to automate the inspection process, so humans need to do it, and I'm not gonna say these are super high-skill jobs, but code inspectors still need to be paid. What other way is there to do this except paying upfront before you have revenue?
So again, maybe this exact number of steps is excessive, maybe the in-person visits are excessive, maybe the expense is excessive, but simply enumerating them doesn't demonstrate that. What are the steps? What is on the forms? What is the purpose of these visits? How are these fees being spent?
- State & local government is a preemptively over-regulated system, putting up tons of obstacles before you can get something accomplished. Examples: flurry of permits, NIMBYism, etc
- Federal government is a retroactively under-regulated system, where the actual regulation occurs after some/much of the damage has already been done. Examples: regulation of antitrust/anti-competitive practices that come sometimes years after the acts began.
In the 1st case, accomplishing beneficial things is too slow. In the 2nd case, preventing bad things is too slow.
An interesting thing to note is that European countries tend to make rules to outlaw risky behavior in the first place, but have limited fines in case the risk materializes, whereas the United States tends to allow more risk taking, but imposes exorbitant fines if something goes wrong.
Both systems have their advantages.
The goal should be to reduce friction by an order of magnitude. Shoot for a goal of 10 steps and $500 in fees.
Is it one step if the single form for opening a restaurant is 200 pages?
Is it zero fees if the fine for violating a health inspection is $10,000?
The forms demonstrate that the new restaurateur has safe plans in place for traffic, seating, fire risk, equipment, food storage (dry, refrigerated and frozen), sanitation, and know the requirements for employment and training. If there's alcohol, there's licensing and training requirements. Are the kitchen floors both non-slip and impervious to water, with a proper drain? Are there arrangements for waste disposal, especially for used oils?
I'm not even in the food business; I'm sure an expert can tell you much more.
I’m wondering how different the world would have been if we had enforced a $0.01 cost for email…
The "worst" thing I can think of is the virtual assistant from Accelerando that forms the ideal form of operation for any mundane transaction its user is performing.
So without knowing what the steps are and the fees cover, you're just opposed? If it was 10 steps and $500 would you be pitching 1 step and $50?
Fact is, if you cannot figure out how to fill out forms indicating you know enough to avoid it, I don't trust you not to poison people, clog the sewers with fat or barricade the emergency exits.
> In Minneapolis, for example, many brick-and-mortar business owners must pay a fee associated with the impact their business will have on the sewer system; in the case of a restaurant, this fee reaches $8,275—bringing the total cost of legal permission to start a restaurant in Minneapolis to $13,973.
I've yet to see a libertarian or libertarian-inspired article that did not heavily rely on dishonesty and this IJ report is no different.
Omitting costs that might or might not outlast your business seems at least as likely to be misleading or dishonest as including them.
I'm left with the feeling that opening a restaurant is hard, but there is nothing to chew on in terms of improving the situation as a citizen or interested party.
This is the state legislature's doing.
Others are standard nationwide, and not going away:
Setting up a corporation, or LLC for example. Or filing for a "doing business as" d/b/a name.
I am unsympathetic to counting these as a step.
I cannot get worked up about building permits. Here is why:
This is a national regime, and most states operate under the "International Building Code", and similar Electrical and other codes, and the requirements there, for commercial structures are often based on factual risks and deaths from lack of proper construction.
That means every building needs to be up to code when renovated in various categories: electrical, plumbing, heating/ventilation, smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, fire code compliance, structurally, and more recently for energy code (typically insulation and heating/cooling related). These are essential for safety and health, and for economic well being in the long run. Yes these take capital. That can be 5 to 10 permits and inspections there, and those requirements are not going away, nationwide.
There can be other municipal department participation for curb cuts, street access, sidewalk access and so on. Deal with it.
Zoning is a municipal level, and that requires City Council and Planning Board participation, and not in control of the administrators operating the regulations. This is political level of regulation, and requires political effort to modify, typicall not in the ambit of administrators.
Other "steps" in which all fees and taxes to a municipality need to be up to date are simply good practice.
- No action if you are overdue on your real estate taxes, or have outstanding orders for compliance with health or building codes.
That is mere enforcement of existing municipal regulations. Get up to date on all of your obligations.
There's this saying, "safety regulations are written in blood". The vast majority of regulations are written reactively, after something went wrong. (US regulations forcing minimum lot, yard, house sizes are notable exceptions).
Especially for something as a restaurant, where 1) people eat, so hygiene and etc. is important; 2) people will work; 3) people will visit, so you needs lots of insurance, health, fire etc. checks and OKs.
2) Maybe govts should waive the fees in favor of taking equity as payment. e: And a broader point: there are many more options for removing barriers than removing the regulations themselves. So, this focus on the regulations themselves is fishy. We could fund them with taxes, put businesses on payment plans, and most importantly, consolidate this administrative work (e.g. this is unrealistic, but imagine the efficiencies you could find, regulating all businesses in the US at the federal level. You might be able to get it all done with 1 form!)
3) Currently, being born into this mortal coil has burdensome[0] startup costs of >= $HospitalBill. I’d be down with achieving _that_ Right to Start.
[0] Souls sitting in Earth’s pre-game lobby remain there when their investors (parents) don’t have the capital to front them :-(
The five categories of businesses they are focused on are:
- Restaurants
- Retail bookstores
- Food trucks
- Barbershops
- Home-based tutoring
----------------------------------------
[1] https://ij.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Barriers-to-Busine...
Nobody "wants" to run an under the table business and have their income be subject to the whims of enforcement but the other option is just so bad it's the lesser evil.
Cash in hand no tax. Plenty of people want to earn that, and plenty of people want to pay no sales tax.
And perhaps Indiana should have more regulation for software businesses that do have safety implications.
In the classic case, at least 3.
Neither the headline, the article, nor the linked Institute for Justice report[2] list the specific steps, forms, visits, or fees. It is hard to know which are superfluous, overpriced, or excessively burdonsome. The report defines "steps" on page 17 (PDF page 21):
> We calculated this metric by totaling the discrete tasks an entrepreneur must complete to start each of the business types. Tasks we counted as steps include but are not limited to: filing a form or application, submitting supporting documentation, scheduling and attending meetings and inspections, and completing ancillary requirements like training or zoning checks.
Of the five business types in 20 cities studied, the report lists fees only for starting a restaurant in Minneapolis. Totalling $13,972.68, the fees are LLC filing: $155, Trade name registration: $50, Building plan review: $1,399.13, Building permit: $2,242.50, Plumbing permit: $207, Mechanical permit: $250, Electrical permit: $251, Sign permit: $156, Sewer availability charge: $8,275.05, Background report: $8, Restaurant license: $535, Food plan review: $310, Certified Food Protection Manager (CFPM) training: $99, and CFPM certificate: $35.
We can compare the roughly $14,000 in startup fees (or just $5,554 in Boston) with the $375,500 median cost of starting a restaurant (according to a 2018 survey[3] by RestaurantOwner.com). I don't think those fees discourage entrepreneurs from opening restaurants.
I agree with the report's overall conclusion: cities should make it cheaper, make it faster, and make it simpler.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoanut_Grove_fire
[2] https://ij.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Barriers-to-Busine...
[3] https://www.restaurantowner.com/public/Survey-How-Much-Does-...
It seems likely we are nearing that point for many business models. Small scale retail, small scale restaurant. Even large scale retail is nearly dead, see the dead mall situation.
It does seem somewhat ridiculous to have an ultra short term relationship with a servant to have them cook assembly line fashion, generally mediocre, food for you at enormous expense with numerous layers of middlemen in between.
Certainly restaurants were an extremely small fraction of total caloric intake for the majority of history; there just wasn't enough excess wealth floating around for nonsense like that. Soon, as permanent economic decline continues, we will go back to generally not having restaurants. As always, people will adapt or perish, and usually they adapt.
The future is always unevenly distributed and Boston may just be a little further along.
And, due to such bureaucracy corruption also increased because there is a risk that if we don't feed malfeasant officer they might become hindrance.
What alternatives? Someone visits the restaurant and says, "yeah that all looks OK"? Then they take a bribe and the system breaks again.
At least a paper trail provides some history and ability to audit certain things, blacklist owners who posioned their customers, make sure they are paying their fees to pay for the inspections etc.
1. Graduate from a 1500-Hour Rhode Island Barber Training Program
2. Submit a Rhode Island Barber License Application
3. Pass the Rhode Island Written and Practical Licensing Exams
4. Start a Career in Rhode Island’s Barbering Industry
5. Renew your Rhode Island Barbering License Biannually
https://www.bostonherald.com/2021/02/05/time-to-loosen-hair-...
Do people really need to be protected from barbers with limited training or could that be handled with disclosures? And how are violations discovered and resolved. In my case I started cleaning houses for money and had completed hundreds of cleanings by the time the city found out and let me know that license fees were due for that activity. The city insisted on full back payment of all licensing along with late fees and there was no option for negotiation, just the requirement that someone who was cleaning houses for money should suddenly cough up a couple of thousand dollars. Not only was a large payment required but records needed to be sorted out which ended up generating two long and tense visits to offices downtown.
Of course some regulations are needed on businesses, but these regulations should be put in place for robust reasons, regularly reviewed, and enforced with care and compassion and options for forgiving unpaid fees in return for present and future compliance.
I also think restaurants can be a bad example:
* Everyone wants to open them and there is no special qualification for doing so
* They can easily make a lot of people sick
* They employ kids, informally qualified staff, low wage workers and immigrants making it easy to for-see all sorts of abuses or issues especially in a demanding physical job with tiny profit margins
* They often want to serve alcohol which is a socially complex, rightfully regulated activity
* They require on-going management, not just "did you buy the right kit and hire the right person" but are you actually cleaning everything everyday correctly etc?
They're a mess of big risks and poor management and no funding. And customers have no idea what they're getting until 24h+ later when they're bent over a toilet...
IMO the effort of any campaign versus bureaucracy is best spent on reducing the friction of governance, particularly for small entrepreneurs: digitalising processes, publishing clear guides, harmonising rules, establishing guaranteed response times, adding exemptions for small businesses etc.
Too often there's a reflexive "bonfire of the red tape" view – in contrast, I'd say it's actually pretty good that restaurant businesses have to e.g. demonstrate that they meet hygiene standards, produce a fire safety plan etc. and we probably don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
For all its faults, look to the UK for a relatively balanced approach to regulation of this sort.
In The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else by Hernando Desoto; He makes mention of the bureaucracy overhead in countries that fail at capitalism. Sounds like America needs some house cleaning in places.
My sad observation however is that normal people try to fix things by adding on. It takes quite a bit of smarts to remove things from a system and make it work better. The only case I have heard of is New Zealand re-wrote their tax code to 12 (?) pages or something like that 30 years ago. I wonder how big it is now?
People have said it’s a bit preachy, but I prefer to consider it thought provoking.
So, I save on the money that otherwise has to go to paper shuffling, city bureaucrats, likely also lawyers, etc., all before hiring any workers to get the food ready for customers.
I like to think of current progress in computing and the Internet technology as keys to greater economic productivity, but tough to see easy applications of this technology to the context of the OP, other restaurants, many small businesses, etc.
Those costs to start up the restaurant add almost nothing to the cost of your pizza. What makes a restaurant pizza cost so much more than your home made pizza is the restaurant's ongoing costs, such as rent, wages and benefits, utilities, insurance, advertising, delivery, and many I've probably left out.
Doing a bit of Googling, I get that Domino's averages around 100 pizzas per restaurant per day. When I've went there there are typically maybe 3 employees visible plus drivers coming and going. Let's call it the equivalent of 5 employees at any given time. They are open 14 hours a day. If they are just paying Federal minimum wage that's a tad over $500/day in wages. That's $5/pizza right there.
More Googling tells me that the rent for an average sized restaurant in the US is about $5000/month, which would be about $160 per day, but a Domino's doesn't need as much space so let's call it $100/day. There's another $1/pizza.
That was assuming they are in one of the 15 states where the minimum wage is just the Federal minimum, and that rent was about average. I'd guess most on HN are in states with a higher minimum wage and higher rents.
I didn't say, suggest, or believe that the extra cost of restaurant food was due just or mostly to the initial, one-time costs of the startup.
Instead I wrote
> all before hiring any workers to get the food ready for customers.
So, those are the on-going costs you illustrated.
Also my main lament and summary remark was quite general covering both times and categories of small businesses:
> I like to think of current progress in computing and the Internet technology as keys to greater economic productivity, but tough to see easy applications of this technology to the context of the OP, other restaurants, many small businesses, etc.
Sure, small gains in "economic productivity" are visible, so I would revise that lament to "tough to see the desired big gains ...."
Perhaps it is because when more than 10%-ish of economy is sapped for goverance overhead, it generally starts to suffer … badly.
Goes on to report San Francisco is 4x the cost in Boston. Really?
If I think about what it would take to open a restaurant here in Germany (a country which also has a reputation for bureaucracy to be fair) I think there are a lot of unavoidable steps:
Register a business, register with the chamber of commerce, and the tax office. Maybe also with town hall. Check if the restaurant is in accordance with the development plan. Apply for any exemptions/licenses if needed. You need certifications from the health department. You need to take steps to proove you don't have unreported employees. There are fire safety checks. You need toilets, but fortunately not parking spots (usually). And this is just scratching the surface.
But I think, unfortunately, many of these make sense and are unavoidable. And honestly, you can get help for many steps, and the time and money expended is not too big compared with, I don't know, the current rent for a restaurant in a good location.
I guess to frame it a different way, is there a major city in the US that doesn't have the bureaucracy, and also has a better restaurant scene?
Why limit the possibilities to just the US? Why not look at street food in Thailand or Singapore? Isn't it unlikely that the current status quo is the ideal balance between safety and exploration?
I don't agree that it's tautological. One-time paperwork fees are a small price compared to retail leases and build-out costs in a major city. You're probably looking to spend in the area of $500k to get started. An annual lease might be in the area of $50k for a small restaurant.
For your first year paperwork is probably 5% of your total costs. Passing that on to the consumer is maybe a few cents per dollar.
An unclean barber can spread lice and other diseases if they are unclean, not to mention that they are using sharp tools near someone's head ... or a razorblade on someone's face.
Do you want to trust that you'll not catch diseases or other things from the barber or would you rather be able to have some sort of license?
If you'd rather take the risk, so be it. I'd rather not.
Opening an above the table business in Boston has been onerous since 1630. The micormangerial jerks you need to get permission from happen to have moved their office from the church to the cube farm over the centuries.
Is US in the process of becoming a socialist bureaucratic country?
The root cause is at the political level — at all three levels.
I don't think so, dude.