Good points. On top of that you might also argue that restaurants are very consumption oriented. Fast food can save you time by letting you focus on other thin

Good points. On top of that you might also argue that restaurants are very consumption oriented. Fast food can save you time by letting you focus on other things than cooking. A pastry chef will take more time to make something special. During that time you might be entertaining potential clients or business partners, though on the global scale of restaurants, most people are probably going out to dinner to enjoy dinner. There is of course nothing inherently bad about this. People like going out to have food, and restaurants oblige them. But they can only really do this when their guests are in their restaurants. They cannot create more value than they do now. All they compete on is status, atmosphere, service, food quality, price. I personally see limited innovation potential here, therefore a somewhat limited market. Therefore, sort of like you said, lots of competition in many aspects besides pastry chefs, all for the limited food dollar. Now compare that to your average software developer. There is new software I come across on a near daily basis that attempts to improve work flow one way or the other; trying to make me more productive. There is more value in a rather basic tool MS Word alone than there is in lots of dinners. If Excel didn't exist, I'm not sure if I would have the time to go to restaurants. But software development also differs greatly to restaurants, on the developer's side. They can produce a game once, and people can purchase it and play it without the developers having to directly entertain at most a few number of people. But what I am most surprised about is that you make it sound as if a daily $4 latte is that normal. It isn't, is it? (Sorry for the mess, the screen kept scrolling oddly, so I could only see the last few words I typed.)