Restaurant Pricing Pressures
Discussions center on restaurants facing rising costs like labor wages, rent, and supplies, debating whether to raise menu prices amid low margins and competition from tech company cafeterias providing free employee meals.
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Genuinely curious: what if your local restaurants raise prices too?
The market sounds a little imbalanced. If they were competing with other restaurants then that would be an option. But they aren't competing with other restaurants. They are competing with companies that give the food away free to their employees. Those companies can afford to pay the chefs, and kitchen staff more because they don't make money selling the food. They make money on high margin digital goods. The market will only sustain so many $500 a meal restaurants. The casual dining
Likely because cost of living has been inflating, and yet the restaurants aren't raising the wages of their workers.
> Imagine your favorite food spot of 10+ years suddenly trash and expensiveDid you try to talk about it with the food joint's owner/server/cook? I'm interested in their take. Maybe, they've a new chef who's not that good.Oil is expensive, which has cascading effects. Also, the increase in minimum wage has to come from somewhere, hint - customer. I understand: it may not be applicable here directly, but there are so many vendors involved in the restaurant s
Yes, but that’s like a restaurant complaining that it’s extremely expensive to provide food.
In US urban areas, rent is a dominant cost, so low end/casual restaurants are trying to keep purchases in the $10-15 range. A Chipotle in a business district may only be able to handle a fixed number of customers, so its difficult if people purchase items a la carte. The 'solution' is to provide larger portions than the average customer wants even though there's diminishing returns. At the low end burger restaurants struggle when people are purchasing off of 'value menus
Restaurants, Fast-foods and bars are already quite expensive. That's why they are competitive: customers are very sensitive to price, and have limited budgets. It's like airlines.Raising the prices would not work. If it did, some of them would have already done it.
Funny because supply/demand should be working both ways... the restaurant prices should be coming down.
Don't you mean restaurant customers now have to pay higher prices.
why not just raise prices by 20%? or remove the "restaurant wage" and force them to do minimum wage?