Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/06/14/man-happily-pays-a-london-cafe.html
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I feel like this article is clickbait, but in a good way.
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Very nice.
The most shocking part of this story to me was:
Wow! In 2007 that would have been £20 ($40).
(Of course the purchasing power of the pound hasn’t really changed over that time, just the exchange rate)
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Enkwife and I are staring down retirement and… what to do. Not gonna drink myself to death like my parents (oh and they played tennis and sat at the beach, yelled at the TeeVee and watched Bill O’Reilly like he was a mega pastor… sigh)
I have a book/app/drawing thing I’ve been working on, but I said “why don’t we move to a small tourist town or smallish city and open a pay-what you want vegetarian (ok mb flexitarian) restaurant. I love to cook and lentils are cheap. Could build a tiny food truck or something.” She said “That sounds too much like work”
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Those toast soldiers are shockingly wide, and need cutting in half lengthways to be usable.
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I feel like every time I step out of my NYC apartment to get anything - a newspaper, a bagel, or whatever, I come back $20 poorer. And I’m not happy about it.
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Concur. And whats worse, they don’t have Marmite on them.
(Steps away conscious I may just have started a major flame war/thread derail. And before anyone points out that my toasty avatar does not have Marmite on either, you will note it does not have any eggs in sight. But we do not need to repeat the great toast thread, do we.)
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I hope they can keep going, as it seems like a nice way to balance out the city’s gross inequality and feed some hungry people.
I’m recently back from there, and what I’ve always said still goes: it’s like they stick a vacuum cleaner in your wallet every time you arrive in town.
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Soldiers get cut down the toast, not across. What an idiot.
I hope this enterprise can survive an error of this magnitude.
ETA: Now I want toast.
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Don’t you start! 
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She’s probably right. Running a restaurant is a lot of work and usually not financially rewarding. I don’t know what my retirement job will be, but it sure as hell won’t involve customers. They’re the worst.
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i moved to NYC for the first time in 2000, and my roommate then said to me that she found herself having to take out 20 bucks a day from the ATM. At the time I thought that was nuts. Now I feel like I’m frugal if I don’t spend 60 a day. This place is expensive.
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I’d happily swap with you for living in Brighton (UK), though.
Dammit, I now I’m fighting the urge to check flights to NYC again (I really shouldn’t visit a third time in almost as many years).
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There is a solid economical reason to try this model. On average, the customers would not pay as much as, e.g., in a usual café. However, throughput would be higher, so the break-even is reached by a smaller margin on more customers.
There’s a Persian Restaurant in Frankfurt am Main, Germany which used to charge 7.99€ for a lunch buffet. In an experiment together with Frankfurt University, they made it pay-as-you-want, while still telling people that 7.99€ was their former price.
Outcome: as described.
Last time I was there, they still were doing fine on this.
Anyone having a stopover and some time on their hands in FFM, the restaurants name is Kish, and you should be able to find it using any routing app.
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Yeah, I had to make a trip there in July 2007. It was $2.19 per £1 at that time. All over the news was how everybody was leaving the UK to travel to the States.
There’s a pay what you want restaurant in Kansas City now. I haven’t tried it but I hear it’s very good. They also will allow you to volunteer in exchange for a meal.
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