The debate on tipping in Chicago is being waged, on all sides, by people who don't really understand the economics of how to eliminate tipping.



City Hall has no understanding that this will need to fundamentally shift how workers are paid /1wsj.com/business/hospi… Simply put, tips will be eliminated entirely and restaurants will eventually move to a service charge equivalent to the tips. This has benefits for workers:

• seasonal stability of wages
• less instances of gratuity discrimination
• better opp. for benefits

/2

It seems that no one understands the PE shop playbook on display with @elonmusk and Twitter. This is all pretty standard, minus the public nature of it all and the fact that he got locked in to a high purchase price.

But the rest, the rest is textbook if you strip away the weird @elonmusk Strip away the bloat, lock in on core functions, figure out what users and revenue sources (advertisers) need and want, double down on those, and then get back to being entrepreneurial again. $4M per day sounds like a lot of loss... but hell everyone who can read a quarterly.../

Now that restaurants are mostly open again - * Let's talk about the right way to book them *

This is a more complicated subject than one might think (warning: long thread). And a frustrating one for both diners and restaurant owners.

And me!

Because, well, we've studied it /1 How do most restaurants template reservations? Flex Tables.

Basically, you tell a system your turn times, number & size of tables, and hours of operation -- and you're done.

If the first diner takes a table at 7:30 and you have 2 hour turns, it offers up 5:30 / 9:30. Etc. /2

@kaushalvshah @lpolovets @tock Pretty simple answers, though maybe not satisfying:

Hours: some restaurants use carryout to supplement ordinary service and do not have the capacity to run both regular service and To Go. Staffing issue.

Online Menu: a) menus change on the fly with ingredients, demand, /1 @kaushalvshah @lpolovets @tock and day to day while... b) most apps make changing menus cumbersome and... c) most operators are so focused on service that they simply don't pay enough attention to their interface with customers.

Order Mods: two issues: a) bad apps [Tock allows this] b) restaurants do not /2

Restaurants in Chicago (and much of the northern part of the US) are going to go through a very hard time... beginning next week.

We've all known this is coming -- cold, wet weather combined with a spike in Covid cases means that both indoor and outdoor dining are untenable. /1 Add to that the usual holidays in November and December which effectively make those months 3 weeks in normal times -- and subtract out all of the holiday parties and busy weekends -- and it makes it actually worse than the April / May shelter in place. /2

Covid testing for restaurants -- a thread.

On June 1 The Alinea Group was notified by an employee that s/he had tested positive for Covid19. That employee had not worked in 8 days. No one else showed any systems

Nonetheless every person that worked on the same day was tested /1 In all, just over 30 employees voluntarily got tested, TAG reimbursed the cost (around $3k) and all tested negative.

Now, we fully understand the incubation periods and consulted with several doctors about best practices. But this is about all we can do beyond PPE protocols /2

This 'miss' by economists is reflective of the types of people who publish opinions on such matters. It's not astonishing at all. The US govt. gave small businesses ~$700B to hire people back -- and stipulated (until yesterday) that if they did so /1

yahoo.com/finance/news/a… that the loan would be forgiven. So guess what small businesses did? They hired everyone back. And doctors / dentists / hair salons could reopen.

Now... when PPP runs out or service businesses have to operate at reduced capacity guess what happens in a few months? /2

1/ A thread about what the current state of the hospitality industry looks like through the lens of bookings / cancellation inflows and outflows via @tock

Keep in mind that this is a statistically relevant slice of about 4% of GDP. Graphs represent millions of $$ and diners. 2/ The data is anonymous and represents restaurants/wineries/events in 30 countries and hundreds of cities around the world, not just the US.

Bookings via Tock look like this -- a nice even cadence by day of the week. Very predictable in every respect. 30 days trailing.

Back in the late 1950's or early 60's my father, Jim Kokonas, owned and operated a diner not far from where Next / Aviary / Roister / Tock are now - 853 W. Madison St. Back then, though, it was Skid Row not the West Loop. It was all he could afford to open. [thread w/ pics] ...this was from before I was born, I never saw the place. But I heard the stories.
One of the customers not only had a drinking problem, like many did, but was an accomplished cartoonist. I know him only as Paulson.