The curious surge of productivity in U.S. restaurants
bfi.uchicago.edu
bfi.uchicago.edu
One restaurant near me ditched its dine-in service entirely during COVID. They never went back; the dining area is now some odd mix of storage/prep/work area, and they're still take-out only.
Which is a bit sad; the dine-in area was a pretty cozy experience, and you'd get free tea with the meal. (It was a Japanese restaurant.)
I empathize with the economic predicament of restauranteurs but I'll continue to frequent establishments with better comfort features especially because the prices are high no matter where you go. Why pay $25 rushed sloppy meal when you could pay $30 for a better meal, in a better setting, and resulting in a better (earned!) tip.
Seriously, where are you eating? Nothing remotely resembling "high end" anywhere near me uses plastic furniture. It's all well-padded wood. From steak restaurants to ramen to pizza, I can't name a single place I go to that's plastic other than the typical fast food joints.
Some of the gastropub places near me have bare wooden seating. It's part of their "charm" this thread is swooning about. It's literally just a wooden picnic table, but yeah, that's so worth that extra money.
What about those "sit down" places where you load up a QR code, order from that site, pay from that site, but have a server bring your food? are they still a "sit down" place?
To me "sit down" implies you are seated by a host and waited on.
You may be overthinking this way too hard. It’s simply the level of service being received. There are some definite shades of gray here but throwing qr codes into the mix is pedantic. You could have fast food QR code ordering, fast casual and even sit down experiences. The QR code does not really factor too much into it.
>Plural form of restauranteur
>noun
>Alternative form of restaurateur.
odd
Why am I monitoring this? I personally spent 9 years actually doing mechatronic R&D in the food prep, packaging and logistics automation space in China with more aggressive footprint and automation goals and am currently raising for US based go to market on a far higher density platform that sidesteps the last mile delivery providers entirely. Email in profile.
Re. McD's (actually ~15 years ago I used to work with the husband of the head of Europe but never discussed the business) - don't think their risk model has 'operational efficiency' high on the agenda. Mostly risk is outsourced to franchisees. They are so big they can just move really slowly and nobody gets fired. When competitors do something, they copy it and see if it works, recent eg. CosMc's https://www.qsrmagazine.com/story/mcdonalds-unveils-cosmcs-i...
Fundamentally - are we all going to be eating from robots real soon now? Absolutely, yes. But they won't look like 'Flippy' or Creator. They'll just be infrastructure - familiar features of the public environment as common as an electrical socket, garden tap, or street sign. You'll press a button on your own device, and either the results will come to you or you'll take a short walk. Yes, that means they have to be small, highly reliable, and self-managing. Nobody (else) has this yet. We're there.
But the stock tip of this post is - current era last mile players are dead men walking. They have no means to transition to a significant position given pending commercial drone deregulation. The players set to clean up must be vertically integrated and provide both production and delivery (that's us) or have exceptional cycle time confidence and perfect autonomous drone integration with agreed standards to unknown airframes (sketchy proposition).
I don't get why companies can't figure out how to make this profitable.
Reach out of an open window like a reverse drive-through?
Maybe eventually each apartment will have one or it'll be subsidized by delivery platforms.
Separately, there's a very cool startup called Pipedream that does autonomous underground delivery robots that are kind of the next iteration of the concept.
That sounds hilariously abusable.
on the other hand, if it removed some traffic noise which is equal or worse than drone noises...
Perhaps some two-wheeled contraption, of the pedal-power sort?
OK, it's not as private or comfortable as your own vehicle, but I'd rather be in public but able to read/dream/listen than in private but having to concentrate on the road. (This of course requires a public transport system which is safe and not full of crazies, I understand that's a problem in those US cities which have it).
Granted, there's only a few dozen cities in the world that do it that well.
I sure hope that my neighbour's drone delivery doesn't produce collateral damage if it flew near my property. Otherwise, i will have to shoot down the drone.
It’s a lot easier to find in person entertainment.
In many industries there are contract manufacturers that produce products for many different brands.
Because I don't go to restaurants to just eat, albeit fine food, I go for whole experience, environment. Something clicks in each human brain and we have this bubble of different vibes, for lack of better words. Plus social aspects.
Same reason alcoholics or anybody else still go to bars in droves, despite being able to just buy same alcohol in stores for fraction of the price.
That's why I pay restaurant prices for food that often costs much less in take aways or premade in stores. Michelin * are different but again the ambience is top priority there too, you won't get the star just for stellar food.
Au contraire: >A Michelin Star is awarded for the food on the plate – nothing else. The style of a restaurant and its degree of formality or informality have no bearing whatsoever on the award.
https://guide.michelin.com/us/en/article/features/what-is-a-...
I respect the need to have a 'last order' time, and __if they don't list it__ , it isn't unreasonable to assume that's the final time on the door. What if I want to walk in for takeout because I HATE using the drive through? (I do hate that, far less consistent food, no chance to verify it's made right.)
I do respect restaurants that list a separate 'final order' time and 'everyone should be out' time, that's good communication.
A restaurant sells two basic categories of product: food/drink, and service. Labor is expended on both.
They’re ignoring service and only looking at food/drink. The split between these two products has shifted away from service. That means more labor is going into the thing they’re actually counting and less is going into the thing they’re ignoring. Wow, productivity went up!
It’s interesting that the industry has shifted to more takeout, but framing it as “surge of productivity” is ridiculous.
It's not that productivity is genuinely up, it's that modern restaurants are providing a different product.
Takeout/delivery to eat on your couch has different economics than a full service restaurant. Phrasing it as productivity is disingenuous.
The local stations mostly call themselves NPR stations (NPR member stations) and they explicitly include NPR branding (ex - right in the logo for mine: https://www.wabe.org/) and pay membership dues to NPR in addition to content licensing.
APM also has its own set of stations, but the list is much smaller. Plus - basically the only content from APM on my NPR station is Marketplace.
It's "NPR" for all intents and purposes. It's not dual booting, it's like a linux machine running WINE for a single application.
I happen to listen to Marketplace on NPR, not Marketplace by NPR.
They are not just looking at an overall increase in sales, misunderstanding sector-specific inflation, and saying it must be dwell time.
It's a good paper! I would encourage reading it. They have specific dwell time data per location, along with sales data, and explain the difference in productivity by looking at differences in productivity between restaurants over the same time period, find that it is determined by changes in dwell time, and then find that the overall mix shift of reduced dwell time explains the overall change in real sales per employee across the sector. Inflation is not the explanation.
That you can explain the increase in productivity by shift in mix from low-productivity to high-productivity products is, in fact, the entire point of the paper, and does not mean that a "surge in productivity" did not happen.
The authors point out that a change in consumer demand preferences is in fact a type of "technology" in that it can be a driver of sector productivity. Not all technology lives on circuit boards!
Last night I went to a nice (formerly nice?) restaurant. Someone had brought their dog, their children crawled around my feet and one listened to an iPad on moderate to high volume.
I ordered my drink twice, and it never came, my side dish was ordered twice too, and eventually came.
I abandoned movie theatres for similar reasons. Maybe it’s time to abandon restaurants.
The overhead on takeout is far less than dine-in although the menu items cost the same. Dine-in costs include base waitstaff salary and workman's comp, cleaning crew and dishwashers, electricity, insurance, ect.. while takeout requires the very small cost of packaging. Something that always bugs me is restaurants that charge $2 or $5 surcharge for takeout. I'm saving the restaurant a ton of money by not using the dining room, why would they discourage that?
> It cannot be explained by economies of scale
I disagree. Increase in takeout is an increase in efficiency for each line cook and emnployee.
There was a 23 seat restaurant on the top of the hill in Pacific Grove, CA in the 90s named Taste Bisto. The chef and his wife made a fortune from that tiny restaurant. He did two things. First, he set the prices so there was always a little line waiting at the door, not too long, and he encouraged takeout with an emphasis on making the food still look presentable when the person opens the container 30 minutes later at home. According to the chef, his real profits came from the takeout. From the point of view of the grill cook, grilling 8 pork chops or 18 pork chops at. the same time isn't much different, as the cook has to stand by the grill anyhow.
More specifically - the restaurants that survived (which is already a feat in and of itself) could serve more customers since they didn't have to turn as many tables. Even with the "overhead" of food delivery apps - restaurants could still purchase whole-sale ingredients in bulk and sell to more people without building out their physical plant.
To add - the dine-in experience has gotten faster. You don't need to wait for menus and you don't need to do the dance when settling your bill. Even if you didn't expand your delivery clientele you could probably turn tables faster without any 'hit' on rushing out your loyal customers.
Industry benchmarks for similar chains put food ingredients typically around 28–35% of the menu price and alcoholic beverages around 20–25% of the menu price. Nonetheless, making 2x profit on 25% of sales is incredible for restaurants.
At Cheesecake Factory, total food and beverage cost is 24.6%. Labor cost is 36.7%: of that waitstaff is ~50% of labor and kitchen staff is ~30% of labor. Operating cost is 26.7%. Looks like after other costs the profit was ~1.2%. Not much but that profit comes from the 25% off-premise consumption without alcohol.
Takeout for Michelin star restaurants is not a good idea. For almost all other restaurants, takeout is were the profits are. Engineering a menu and kitchen is like engineering a database, you have to ask things like are there a lot of writes and few reads or a lot of reads and few writes to determine how to structure it. When designing a restaurant and menu there needs to be equilibrium between how many seats in the dining room, what if any liqueur license to acquire, an expectation of percentage of food will be takeout, and menu items that will satisfy both dining room and takeout quality expectations. We eat with our eyes first even if it is opening a steaming hot carton of Orange Chicken from the Cheesecake Factory. There are always tradeoffs and it matters what the end goal is and more often than not the goal for both a database and kitchen is to earn as much profit as possible.
Some advice if you ever open a restaurant. The single biggest pain point when working in a kitchen opening a brand new restaurant is not enough storage. [1] You need enough containers to hold each of every element. You need enough containers to hold each of every element in cold storage for backup during service. Lastly, you need enough clean containers to switch the contents of each element into at the end of each night or to be dirty waiting for cleaning while the others are being used. The week before you open a restaurant, count how many containers you thought you needed and have in stock and triple that amount. Nothing will slow down service like not having enough containers. See, engineering a kitchen is like engineering a database.
[0] https://s29.q4cdn.com/187116270/files/doc_financials/2022/ar...
[1]https://www.amazon.com/Rubbermaid-Commercial-2-Size-3-Quart-...
I am not sure which subsidies specifically you are talking about but you are probably right that the fact that they pay their workers so poorly relative to others in hospitality, and that the services their people need are paid for by taxpayers in their communities instead of McDonalds, is a subsidy that is relevant to their bottom line. But, since I don’t know how comparable they are to SMB hospitality, it’s really hard to say. One POV is that McDonalds is the addictive thing that competes against alcohol, and maybe it has gotten less addictive, or it faces cultural headwinds like smoking did.
My parents owned a small family restaurant in Europe when I was little. We never charged extra for takeout, but it was viewed as lower margin as dine in, largely for two reasons.
1. For takeout we usually missed out on the revenue on drinks and desserts, which have enormous margins (think multiples rather than percentages).
2. A lot of the extra labour for dine-in was internalized by the family. Now you might object that using the wife and kids as cheap labour is not an honest calculations of the margins, but with family labour you can (a) largely circumvent the tax wedge (high in Europe) and (b) the presumably undercompensated labour is ofset by higher profits which still stays in the family if the head of family is careful with money.
Because takeout isn't competing with the dining room. Customers don't go to a restaurant and then choose between those options; they've already planned whether to eat in or out. Restauraunts charge that because customers have shown they will pay it. Once you have that meal in mind, that $2 or $5 doesn't discourage you.
Take out customers rarely order drinks, which is where dine-in has high profit margins. The extra charge compensates for that.
The extra charge doesn’t discourage much because most people have already decided that they’re not dining in.
If 11% of sales are alcohol at 20–25% of the menu price and 25% of sales are off premises at 28–35% of the menu price, what is the percentage profit from alcohol and off premises food and non-alcohol beverage, assuming they are mutually exclusive?
To break it down:
Alcohol:
Cost percentage: 20–25% Profit margin: 75–80% Profit contribution: 11% × 75–80% ≈ 8.25–8.8% of total profit
Off premises:
Cost percentage: 28–35% Profit margin: 65–72% Profit contribution: 25% × 65–72% ≈ 16.25–18% of total profit
Notably, the paper shows that the share of visits lasting 11–20 minutes did not drop (and even increased a bit). This indicates that the overall shorter visit times aren’t because dine-in customers are being served faster. Instead, it’s mainly due to a rise in takeout and delivery orders (takeout customers are being served slower because there are more, if you follow.) In other words, even if people wait a bit longer for their takeout, the large number of takeout orders is what lowers the average time customers spend at the restaurant which corresponds to the higher sales per employee. (If you disagree with this interpretation, please refer to the study, as that is its main argument.)
My point is that even though alcohol generally has a higher markup, the extra overhead needed to sell alcohol on premise means that its profit margins do not fully make up for those costs compared to off-premise takeout or delivery. Moreover, the data from The Cheesecake Factory, ~25% off premises takeout or deliver sale, is similar to what is seen in any traditionally dine-in U.S. restaurant, corporate or mom and pop, that isn’t Michelin starred.
There's also a kind of precarious food-business "art" going on behind your anecdote that follows the sentence I quoted (long line, but "not too long," etc.). In your single-minded speculation about the efficiency of takeout that art isn't present.
That art is the difference between this legendary Pacific Grove restaurant on the one hand, and a "for rent" sign on a failed restaurant with a fridge full of frozen pork chops and regret on the other.
Business is another.
"You can make the best soup in the world, but if you takes all day to make it, you will never make a dollar in this business." -- German chef
> As a result, we think the growth in take-out or delivery is the primary driver of the jump in short visits. With take-out, the customer orders on their phone and then comes into the restaurant to pick it up without eating there. With delivery, the customer orders food to be delivered to their home either from a food app like Grubhub or directly from the restaurant itself as with a Domino’s Pizza. It is important to recognize that either of these things connotes a substitution of home production for restaurant labor. The customer cleans up after themselves and washes their own dishes, for example. And delivery services substitute for the customer traveling themselves. But they are still, from the restaurant’s perspective, just a new stream of demand. If the restaurant can satisfy such quick-turn customers in addition to their regular customers with the same labor force, that would show up in the data as a clear, legitimate increase in their productivity.
[0] cf. https://www.businessofapps.com/data/doordash-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/grubhub-statistics/
Everyone I know refuses to touch them due to the massive extra costs piled on top, but whenever I swing by somewhere in-person to get takeout, I have the same experience as you - there's always at least a few bags on the "Doordash shelf" or equivalent. Who's burning all this money?!
Eat at corporate cafeteria for lunch, doordash or get takeout for dinner. Premade salads and microwave prep meals is "cooking." Every meal.
I found no evidence that existing SROs were "outlawed", rather that construction of new SRO hotels has severely declined from a century ago, for a number of reasons including laws/regulations.
I tried to share my food with them but they didn't want it (admittedly I'm not Gordon Ramsey or anything). They were happy eating either frozen meals or doordash (back then it was cheaper) every dinner.
One of the upsides of cooking yourself, is knowing exactly what goes in to the meals you're eating and being able to control things like spice level and how well done you like your dishes.
Covid encouraged me to spend more time cooking and the result is that I now make better versions of most of my favorite dishes than any restaurant does (at least to my taste). I also worked out how to do their preparation in bulk so that they take a half hour or less to prepare.
This made me realize that meal delivery wasn't saving me as much time as I thought it was. Rather it was saving me from learning to cook, but you only have to do that once, and then you end up eating healthier, saving money, eating food that isn't cold because it wasn't sitting in a bag for an hour, and it takes less time than someone who can't cook probably thinks it does.
Grocery delivery on the other hand, now that service is worth its weight in gold. 2+ hours of work every week replaced with 10 minutes ordering online, which is mostly just going down the list of what I got last week and clicking add to cart.
It still takes 2+ hours of work every week, but I was going to be walking or doing some sort of light exercise eventually anyway, and the mental break helps with focus on coding the second half of the day.
The Spend data covers major national brands disproportionately, making it much more representative for limited-service/fast-food restaurants than full-service restaurants. We therefore restrict the sample to POIs reporting NAICS codes corresponding to limited-service eating places (NAICS 722513, 722514, and 722515) and associated with a brand for which there is non-missing visit and spend data. This encompasses three subcategories: limited-service restaurants (e.g., Taco Bell, McDonalds); cafeterias, grill buffets, and buffets (e.g., Hartz Chicken Buffet); and snack and nonalcoholic beverage bars (e.g., Starbucks). Our final sample contains over 100,000 unique restaurants from over 600 distinct brands. From January 2019 to December 2022, our sample captures a total of about $24 billion in nominal sales.Unfortunately these habits seem to affect the sociability of everyone, and I think we still underestimate what a terrible burden staying locked in was on the population.
I have a pet hypothesis that there is high correlation between the people choosing precautions and those who did the social & emotional labour of organizing and cohering in the before times. I'm not suggesting anything has stopped, clearly it hasn't. But it does sound like what remains is a thinner gruel barely covering the bottom of the pot.
Huh. Interesting!
The finding is consistent with both the changes, since the pandemic, in my own eating-out habits and the behavior of other customers I see at restaurants I visit regularly.
Nonetheless, seeing it validated with an analysis of largish-scale data is worth the read.
The question is whether eating-out habits have permanently changed, or whether they will eventually revert to pre-pandemic patterns.
Thank you for sharing this on HN!
I'm in the EU, and of course we had the forced shift to takeout as well, during covid. But while homeoffice as a concept stayed, restaurants very quickly went back to in-house dining when it was over.
Seeing a takeout-only restaurant with a repurposed dine-in area here in 2025 would be beyond weird and would probably just give everyone covid flashbacks.
Interesting to see that the specifics of what has stayed from the covid time and what has reverted could be different from country to country.
Going out to even a basic lunch with my wife is close to 50 usually for the meal.
Takeout I can tip the delivery person a little less. And keep left overs a little easier. Take out is only for being lazy, I'd still just cook and meet or beat in quality any restaurant except ones that mignt win an award or you can't do at home.
> Especially if you're anything above a 7/10 home cook
I'd move your assessment down to a 5/10 home cook.
Most restaurants are using ingredients of sufficiently low quality that it is now pathetically easy to beat them on that axis. Using even slightly better ingredients than average puts you ahead of 90% of restaurants, nowadays--even for something as stupidly easy as a salad.
I'm super lazy, but local restaurants have gotten both so expensive and so slow that I'm always weighing whether to hit the local grocery store, grab some ingredients and throw something together at home.
The way people that don't cook talk about cooking you would think it is on the level of work involved in roofing or pouring cement blocks.
I am literally cooking a Thai dish right now. I could have went to the Thai restaurant but tinkering with this dish is actually more fun.
Low and behold it is actually fun to cook. It is actually more fun to be able to make a new dish yourself than to try a new restaurant. It is amusing how everything DIY is cool in hacker culture besides cooking. For no reason besides custom, people pretend they just don't have time to cook or that learning to cook isn't worth it. It is an obviously thoughtless idea.
Having less time to doom scroll your phone is a feature and not a bug.
Well, I’m in California and I have no idea what that would look like - it’s just not a thing where I am, nor do I see it mentioned in that abstract. What are you referring to??
The first In-n-Out had no seating or parking.
It has more to do with cost of rental and salary difference, comparing to median Income and spending. And it is a world wide thing.
Yeah that tracks for Chicago School economics.
Unironically yes. There are dimensions other than raw profitability that determine the health of a sector. The work that chicago school economists do flattens everything onto just a financial axis, which is harmful in my opinion. What do I care about the "productivity" of the restaurant sector when all the food tastes like shit?
Moreover, real restaurant spending in total is up, so while your personal dining decisions are interesting they don't appear to reflect the aggregate data.
I'm also not sure why you are calling Goolsbee a "Friedmanite." He served in the Obama administration and advocated strong government intervention during the financial crisis. Do you think every UChicago economist is a Friedman disciple?
Lastly, where did you infer the economists are "lauding" the productivity increases? It appears nowhere in the paper. They only defined productivity increases and explained why they occurred. Was there some other reason you wanted them to be lauding it, other than to justify your anger with people whose policy beliefs you don't seem to be familiar with?
The paper is from the Becker-Friedman Institute of Economics. It is literally the Chicago school. Do the authors need to call themselves disciples of Milton Friedman?
> I'm also not sure why you are calling Goolsbee a "Friedmanite." He served in the Obama administration and advocated strong government intervention during the financial crisis. Do you think every UChicago economist is a Friedman disciple?
Most orthodox economists at this point are. Sure maybe an ideologically pure free marketeer would have advocated against government intervention in 2008. But do you really think this guy is outside the neoliberal mainstream?
> where did you infer the economists are "lauding" the productivity increases?
Neoliberal economists believe that productivity is inherently good. I don't see anything in this paper about quality of life of employees or quality of service. Elevating one dimension above everything else implies a particularly importance of that dimension.
Your comment reconfirms this especially pictorially with the last statement: productivity and it alone goes up and quality or service are not even part of the equation.
why do we pay people to measure these things? why do they measure what they measure and not something else? why is this type of thinking dominant among the technocratic elite? Especially when the view from the ground floor only seems to be getting worse and worse.
You might argue that we shouldn't measure things at all -- that it is better to live in darkness and ignorance, and make vague gestures about the way things are with no evidence or rigorous thought. Measuring is how we find truth. Sometimes it is hard. But throwing away our measuring tools is not the path to enlightenment.
Many people choose to ex ante dislike economists, and dismiss anything any of them have to say without further study, because there is a risk that the results of quantifying the world might disagree with their preconceptions.
For example, a neoliberal economist like Becker would say: "There's actually an economic disincentive for racial discrimination"
Sure, if your economic analysis does not take into account class conflict, which most orthodox economists do not. Discrimination is borne intentionally out of class conflict as a tool of dividing the working class.
Orthodox economics is like having a bunch of scientists devoted to a pre-heliocentric model of the solar system. They can describe isolated phenomena within the accepted framework, but they will never be able to accurately describe (in full) the world around them because their foundational world model is incorrect.
It may be, but don't expect organizations to remain true to their names over time. There are very few Friedman-minded economists out there nowadays.
Now restaurants (historically a pretty cash-heavy industry) have fewer cash transactions.
Possibly related?
The convenience of digital simply made cash useless (mostly).
Useless? Wait until your digital transactions fail or your bank or your state decides to block your access to your payment system. And believe me, it's not a "if", this is a real threat that will be waged against people. When it's technically possible, it always ends up becoming a reality. And by that time, "going back to cash" may not be an option in certain places, because of 'convenience'.
When you live in an authoritarian state with arbitrary law 'enforcement', the problem isn't the payment system that you're using. It's that you no longer live in a country of laws.
And that's not a problem that's going to be solved by using dead tree money.
The point is that a lot of restaurants used to not report a lot of cash transactions.
If almost everybody is using digital, the restaurant no longer has the option to underreport as there is an indelible transaction record (generally with an outsourced third party handling your credit cards).
So, some amount of the "productivity increase" is simply the underreported cash transactions now coming onto the books.
Very maybe!
If a chicken and a half, layed an egg and a half in a day and a half, how much productivity is gained by the chicken with a cell phone? A smidgen?
The premise is of course completely preposterous.
I do wonder if the somewhat elliptical, high academic writing (“take-out” in quotes as if it’s an exotic term) and talk of a mystery being solved is to deflect criticism that this feels obvious or like a WSJ story.
The authors use academic tone because they’re academics writing for academics.
The conclusion might feel obvious to you (very conveniently, when you’ve already been handed the answer) but what’s notable is proving it with data and rigorous analysis.
“If everyone’s doing takeout, you need fewer employees” isn’t exactly a shocking revelation.
>Figure 1 shows the remarkable shift in restaurant productivity after years of stagnation. It plots monthly real sales per employee in the industry from the beginning of 1992 to the present (in annualized terms).2
Campgrounds got packed, people got into skateboarding… if you look at statistics, you’ll see a 2020-ish bump for many interests and an associated sudden growth in revenue.
But the question is how long it will last…
Some outdoor brands that expanded with new stores post-pandemic discovered that many people who tried camping/surfing/etc. only had a fleeting interest and these brands had to close stores.
Tech companies that hired during the pandemic found out a lot of people who tried online meetings/online work only did it because they had to and stopped as soon as they could and these companies had to lay off staff.
But maybe the people who “discovered delivery orders” during COVID won’t ever stop.
Quite the opposite: Many (US) companies are still figuring out how to get their office employees to actually start coming to physical offices again.
There seem to have been more lasting pandemic-caused changes of habits in the US than in many other countries, which I also find quite surprising. Maybe people were already more tired of dining out and office work there than in the rest of the world, and that's why the changes in behavior are more sticky?
But even that aside, according to Gallup, exclusively remote employees fell from a high of 70% to a measly 26%(!).
Many employees did transition to hybrid work but working fully remotely is very different than knowing that you’ll see Mary and Bob in the office tomorrow.
I'm a huge proponent of WFH but I think the cost of the management challenge that presents is often ignored. Is it a net saving for the company? Maybe. IT departments? Absolutely not.
Even the companies with the strongest RTO policies still allow many employees to work from home one day a week / if they are sick / if they are on call / in other extenuating circumstances. So those IT departments still have to manage a fleet of off-premises devices of approximately the same size.
Maybe there are small savings from underprovisioning VPNs, or fewer support requests when people will all be in the office regularly, but that seems tiny in comparison.
Well, duh.
I feel I'm in the way eating in a restaurant when 90% of their business is filling DoorDash/Uber orders.
Restaurants are closing earlier. 8 PM closing isn't unusual now. By then, the delivery business has dried up, and they want the onsite customers to clear out.
I previously mentioned a place in Silicon Valley near Apple HQ where not only did they want onsite customers to order via a QR-code menu, they tried to get customers to go through onboarding and set up an account. Eating onsite was simply a delivery with a very short distance, bag and all.
Of course "productivity" is up.
Fortunately that's still the exception rather than the norm where I live, but I try to actively avoid such experiences.
You can get a commercial rider for your policy, but then you won't make any money.
A buddy of mine was trying to make one of those companies his full time job, and it just didn't work out. There are too many hidden costs.
I haven't noticed it as much with other restaurants. Maybe Thai (and other Asian) dishes hold up well because the topping is typically kept separate from the rice?
I enjoy visiting Eastern Europe(and Europe in general) where a party can sit at a table at 7pm, dine, drink, talk, and relax and remain there until close at 1am if they want. No pressure. Just spending time with people and sharing food together. The table is yours for the evening. No pressure to tip at all yet I tip generously.
America's got it all wrong.
Would note that this is common at high-end restaurants in America. (Unless they sear at 10 or 11PM, in which case they may want another turn of tables.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/opinion/krugman-robots-an...
But, then I read:
> We document that, after remaining almost constant for almost 30 years, real labor productivity at U.S. restaurants surged over 15% during the COVID pandemic.
So I wonder if it’s a combination of workers getting better tips and more people buying takeout meals?
ours has a drive thru so we regularly drive thru and bring the food inside and eat it.
For example: If I perviously had 1 server, then brought in a second one which is not on the books at all and I pay under the counter in cash, would it show up as a productivity increase of my still official single employee?
You think one of the staples of all commerce for basically all of time are unproductive?
I would imagine basically any form of sustainability for them has been tried. Sure patterns change; but, I mean literal millennia of food service is something to not ignore.
Obviously, they failed their job responsibilities - failed at being people too. The owner/manager should never be allowing such behavior, if they are acting in a way that makes you feel like you do, that shouldn't be happening at all. That is an administrative failure too.
I'm sorry that it's like that. I'd say stop eating there but you shouldn't have to do that even.
Im guessing also, just doing things with thinner staff and resources overall caused a lot of establishments to learn how to operate more efficiently.
Especially ones where you have to create an account.
It was never going to last. If you don't use your resources efficiently from the very beginning your country is going to stagnant
In reality, "productivity" as a layperson would understand it hasn't increased at all and the reason isn't very "curious." What's happened (by the economists' own conclusion) is that more people are ordering take-out and fewer people are eating in the restaurant, causing the restaurant to make more money per unit of labor. This is a trend that is probably going to make things like social isolation etc. worse, so not really something to celebrate.
Over in say, Europe, the cost of commercial real estate is much lower (including more restaurants owning their own building) and governments simply covered lost revenue versus loans which enabled more full service restaurants to stay in business.
The fact is, full service restaurants are a horrible business model and most aren't priced appropriately (they should be priced much higher).
tl;dr: restaurants are becoming shittier and people are just grabbing food. that makes it possible for the restaurant to maximize his sales/head count. There is no real "productivity" gain here. You removed parts of the usual service, put more load on your employees and still charge high prices.
surely that's when the same product or service is delivered more cheaply
the starting question must have been more like 'why are restaurants more profitable now'
and it's because restaurants are now selling more take-out meals; essentially a different product, which has lower overheads
I don't blame restaurants for this at all, it's a tough business, but I do think it's about time we apply just an ounce of shame to people who uber-eats every meal they eat from restaurants clearly designed for eating-in. Not to rant, but take out is for the pizza place, the Indian grocery store with no seating, the tiny hole-in-the-wall Chinese place, etc. If you order a southern fried chicken plate from a nice neighborhood restaurant for delivery, shame on you. Delivery sushi? Boo and hiss!
Sitting at a bar with other people, suddenly you are not eating alone.
It's called socializing. Some people enjoy such things.
I'm not a regular/local. Why would I go where I am not welcome?
If I owned the restaurant, why would I cater to an unwelcoming crowd?
Help me out here. What negative effect does that behavior have on the world such that people should feel shame for doing it?
(I'm still Covid cautious enough that I avoid dining indoors in places where I share air with strangers. This is a huge lifestyle limitation, but I enjoy not having to deal with long Covid very much.)
It's really not that big of a deal, but I will never not be a bit irked by that bar space being used to stack bags instead of to serve beer and brisket.
I think the productivity was in some part driven by minimum wage laws. At lower wages, developing, installing and maintaining ordering kiosks and smart phone ordering apps makes less sense, because fast food cashiers are so cheap. When fast food cashiers become more expensive (and the technology costs come down) kiosks and apps make more sense. The same amount of food sold without the cost of cashiers is the resultant increase in productivity.
So my theory in a nutshell was that cashiers added little value. Substituting capital for labor led to labor productivity gains.
> Within McDonald’s restaurants, for example, the locations with the largest increase in short-stay customers saw the most productivity growth.