I mean it seems obvious to me that if you have 100+ restaurants within a 20 min walk, all with near minimum wage workers that is a lot of less wealthy people having to commute in to give you that experience. That's great for you I guess.
What are you getting at? Are you saying that restaurants won't pay their staff very high wages to entice them to commute for several hours, and that the restaurant will go out of business?
How exactly is this a problem?
Too bad for the restaurant owner, but he can re-open in a place where he can hire staff more easily.
Why does the Bay Area need restaurants? If the wealthy homeowners there don't want any lowly restaurant staff living around them, then why should they have any restaurants?
And worse, the places where people have smaller dine-out budgets are also where all of the low-wage chain restaurants are clustered. All of those youth and unskilled labor jobs in the suburbs are pretty much in restaurants.
It's inexcusable that people in restaurants are being exploited for their labor, but I think we absolutely have to figure out an alternative before putting them out of work.
It's definitely a welcome development, but it still costs more than cooking your own meals and cleaning up by a whole lot, so something is amiss. (As I wrote before, I don't mean to say it is all the restaurant's fault, it could be rents are simply too high.)
If something like this is financially viable (doubt) then it sounds like the density already exists and the problem is the restaurants aren't near the people. All the replies are focused on the density you mentioned but mixed use is probably the bigger and far more easily solved problem.
Letting restaurants open nearby to where there are clearly a lot of people is a tried and proven solution, not gadgetbhan for food.
You are talking about a fundamentally different situation than the article, and than a lot of areas face. “The good restaurants in my area.” That implies a much larger selection than the typical small town, where there’s likely a McD’s but not a chipotle.
And as was already stated, the buying power in these towns tends to also be lower, maybe fluctuating due to tourists but nowhere near a city’s average. Your “people keep coming” and “doubled prices”comment suggests a much higher level of disposable income.
And throwing out corporate chains as part of this? The franchises are just tiny pieces of the whole. There’s a whole massive machine watching each limb, supplying it, and sometimes amputating it. Which, yet again, compare that to a mom and pop, it is nowhere near the same.
If you haven’t been to a small town, you should visit a few. Your disposable income would be welcome in a lot of great restaurants that are still struggling. A lot of not so great ones as well.
Some people don't like other congregating in front of their stores and not buying anything but the most vocal opponent are restaurants. They feel like by paying substantial money for a restaurant lease, they shouldn't be subject to competition that can operate with far lower costs / standards. Think about if you owned a nice Mexican restaurant and then a taco truck parked outside during your rush hour. They have almost none of the fixed costs that you do and could undercut you pretty easily.
I'm not convinced it's worth regulating their hours/locations, but I do sympathize a bit with the brutal economics of restaurants.
Rent, other than the amenities of the dwelling itself, affords access to a location, which is likely far more valuable in the minds of those making the decision than dining out.
In addition to the issues with high cost of living that affect other big cities like New York and DC, the restaurant market in the wider Bay is somewhat distorted due to so many firms of high earners offering food on site. This shifts sit-down restaurants further towards the discretionary, incidental end of spending and away from daily needs.
Lunch hours typically have a lower proportion of high-income customers than dinner hours, but this decreases their share further. A common solution is to raise dinner prices to be a higher multiplier above lunch prices, but that only makes sense if the pricing won't drive away business to competitors. For most of these restaurants, attrition and consolidation will continue to happen, while a few will try to move further and further upmarket and focus on branding and an intangible experience, to remove themselves from pricing pressure.
Shouldn't this be a part of a healthy functioning economy?
Shouldn't labor be free to move where demand is? Demand represented by fairer compensation.
I have a hard time believing these people are permanently quitting work. Rather think of it from the point of a business trying to attract new customers.
I can see the inflation affecting me in my purchases and it's not breaking me. Restaurants are charging more and it's making me re-evaluate how important dining out is if it means trapping people in a low wage job they hate.
Do I really wish for someone not to move up the ladder into a better position just so I can choose from some 50 restaurants in my area? Would my life still not support the indulgence of being able to eat out with say 25 restaurants instead of 50? And with a heftier bill but less frequently going out to eat?
I think America is finally exercising some of the benefits of capitalism for the lower class and not just for the elite.
But then your observation isn't really about restaurants at all, and is instead a general complaint that mixes various amounts of:
1) "the rent's too damn high"
2) too much renting going on, not enough <something else>
I'm not sure I disagree with either, but it doesn't seem that can explain the situation in restaurants, since it affects huge chunks of the population and the economy.
I’d like a lot of restaurants to exist though, I don’t want being able to find workers to be the limiting factor and have 4 choices for food instead of 40. Plus it lets a lot of business owners start up their own businesses and support a lot of workers.
I’m arguing that the restaurants aren’t especially profitable and their margins are thin. It’s a bit like a rental property, in the sense that you have to have more than a couple in order to make much money at it.
Many or not however. Probably in part because a lot of small businesses are not good businesses.
Personally though and this may be an unpopular opinion but eating out even at cheaper restaurants is largely a luxury compared to eating at home. Certainly not in the same category as childcare when parent(s) are working.
The result of this is extraordinarily poor service at some restaurants. And some restaurants are downright scary. Business is brisk at most places that I've been to - quality of food and service seems to have little to do with how much business they do. Some places have fantastic service and great food. For the most part, I think it really is a matter of competing for the right employees. Chains don't do well in the area outside of the Stanford Shopping Center. (For instance, I stay away from Cheesecake Factory even though I really like them outside the area).
I find it strange that the New York Times would print something about Palo Alto restaurants. I'm sure the same scenario exists in several areas of NYC. High rents make it tough to bring in good employees for service jobs. At least PA has a student body to work with.
Are these restaurants just not that good to start with? If they were good, couldn't they increase prices and then increase wages they offer to staff?
The article implies that the fast casual $10-15/person places are doing fine. My impression of PA is that the fancier $30+/pp places are also busy. It's possible there's simply less demand for the places at a price point in between (although there's not really evidence of this in the article).
It feels like building owners capture basically all of the excess profit of restaurants, which is to the significant detriment of the quality of a neighborhood.
1) Allow non-local demand? Do people fedex overnight the food?
2) Significantly increase infrastructure load? Do people live at the restaurants when they're not serving food, and thus require schools, police, parking, roads, jobs, etc?
Even then, restaurants do create demand on the city, and they are managed via zoning laws.
A more accurate analogy -- claiming that high density development will bring more restaurant patrons, resulting in more restaurants opening, resulting in restaurant prices dropping.
I'm honestly not sure how to even begin explaining how unlikely it is that the entire service industry gets priced out of a wealthy area.
if a huge amount of restaurants close, there will be a sudden increase in demand for tables at the ones that remain. the remaining restaurants can then increase their prices a lot and afford to hire servers. if that doesn't happen and all the restaurants actually leave, it implies that the residents didn't value dining out very highly in the first place.
Unfortunately when minimum wage and mandatory benefit policies are implemented along the lines of this kind of thinking the reality is that sure, high visibility efficient and scaled businesses like McDonalds and Starbucks can afford to pay more, but family restaurants who can't either have to take on unsustainable debt gambling at becoming the next one-of-a-kind Katz's Deli or go out of business. Then people look at their city streets and wonder where all the mom & pop stores and restaurants went.
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