[quote=“Ryuthrowsstuff, post:144, topic:99028, full:true”]
Very, very high over head. And the tipping economy. Basically.
Most restaurants rent their space, and commercial rents are always higher than residential. In NYC they can go as high as a million dollars a month. More typical is in the 10-50k range. To serve liquor you need a license, which is often expensive. But also pretty hefty liability insurance. Heating, and especially cooling restaurant buildings (you’re pumping tons of heat in there between cooking equipment and refrigeration) is crazy expensive. Other utilities. Imagine running your whole house at max electrical consumption for 18 hours a day. And then multiply by 10. We’re bigger, our equipment eats more power, and we have more of it. You’ve got one fridge with an integrated freezer. My restaurant has 14+ fridges and 4 freezers. Staffing eats up a lot, even as pay is pretty low/unlivable over all. Even when people are cheap, you pack enough in there and it ads up. And you need a lot of people. There are at least 5 people involved in handing you a plate of food. Most states put a serious tax burden on restaurants. The financials are complex so you have to have business management, book keepers, and accountants. Lawyers on retainer. And so forth. Food cost is really high. Food can often be cheaper at retail vs wholesale. Because your wholesale price is determined by volume of buy. Unless you have multiple locations even a small supermarket is making larger buys and getting a lower per unit price than you are. Just as an example I buy limes at retail for my bar. They’re 3 for a dollar. Wholesale at the volumes we run, they’re a buck a piece. And prices are not stable. Last year the price of eggs quadrupled over the course of 4 days. We went from paying $20 or $30 bucks a gross at the beginning of the month. To paying over $100 a gross withing 30 days. A few years back some crop failures in the Mexican citrus market drove the price of limes to four dollars each. The lime garnishing your cocktail potentially cost more than the entire contents of the glass. Beyond that quality costs. We often have customers request we sub vegetables in for a side of pasta. A side of pasta (~8oz) costs us a quarter. The equivalent amount of broccoli costs us almost 2 bucks. Now we could get broccoli for the same price as the pasta. But it’d be shitty frozen broccoli imported from wherever. Instead of nice fresh domestic broccoli. My current employer is stupid cheep to run. You can do it with like 4 employees, small place etc. Still runs $2k+ per hour to keep the doors open. A successful restaurant will remodel every 5 years or so, in my state that’s a cost of about half a mil every 5 years. And there’s about a thousand other things I can’t just pull of the top of my head. You have to compensate for all that in pricing. So a given plate might only cost us say 8 bucks to put out. But if we sold it for $16, a relatively usual 50% markup. We’d still have a negative profit margin. Instead we need to sell it at $24 minimum to breach some sort of profit. More likely it’d be $27-$30. That’s kind of universal. Regardless of where you are in the world. There are a lot of moving parts. A lot of expenses. And it just all ads up. In a market where you may be putting that money out there with out seeing any coming in at any given moment. You get a day with no customers and it can be $25k-$50k down the drain. [/quote]
A member of my family works as a cook in Europe. I am not entirely sure, but I think that the situation is completely different. Rent seems to be much lower and I am pretty sure that wholesale is cheaper than retail. Not to criticize what you are writing, on the contrary I find it fascinating. But the differences should be studied to find out what is really going on.
