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I worked for a large restaurant retailer in the corporate office. It's a mistake to call it a restaurant company. These companies are marketing companies and

• mhneu 8y ago
  Yes. So much of our economy is driven by marketing. Many of the smartest young people in our economy used to go to Wall Street, now many get MBAs and go into marketing. Same thing with Google, Facebook - marketing and advertising control our economy. (And the danger western democracies face: It’s a natural switch from marketing to political influencing. Tools and methods are the same and the same infrastructure can be used.)
  • corey_moncure 8y ago
    I don't think it's about the political system so much as the economic system. Any economic system is an attempt to solve the core problem of how to best distribute resources to consumers of resources. But what happens at the point when ideal distribution is attained, and all consumers are satisfied? If the economy just shut down, it would be a social disaster, so instead it enters this kind of degenerate state you mention where marketing and advertising predominate over production and distribution. Like a star going supernova- all the useful fuel is burned up, but we must sustain the reaction somehow, so we have to turn to heavier and heavier elements.
    • Retric 8y ago
      There is an upside to this, actually order the money losing items at fast casual restaurants etc and it's a great deal. PS: Also, look for companies that defect from the marketing game which allows them to sell very high quality products for cheap. Think store brand items etc.
    • TeMPOraL 8y ago
      > But what happens at the point when ideal distribution is attained, and all consumers are satisfied? I don't think we are anywhere close that, nor that we can ever get there. What happened is that most low-hanging fruits of actual value got picked, to the point that sales & marketing started to have much better ROI than trying to invent and build better things. It's a gradual shift towards a zero-sum-game economy.
      • CamTin 8y ago
        The reason we can't ever totally satisfy consumer demand is because of marketing itself. As much as the profession likes to pretend it's about informing consumers of available choices in a free market, it is more fundamentally about creating demand. If we had spent the last two centuries fulfilling the consumer demands of 1818 consumers, we'd have been "done" decades ago, worldwide, if not sooner. Instead, before we ever get to the "demand satisfied" state, our demands are manipulated by marketeers so that we never reach this equilibrium.
  • cm2012 8y ago
    You do realize that engineers make much more then marketers as a rule, right? Marketing careers start at like 30k a year and are competitive. You can make a lot of money later in your career if you're good at it, but same is true for engineers.
• zeveb 8y ago
  > These companies are marketing companies and marketing drives everything. This is a huge problem with our society. Marketing is important, but when it takes over it destroys companies, people and eventually society itself. We see it with restaurants. Once, a restaurant was simply a place which served food; now it's a brand, an experience, a carefully-crafted image which imparts all the right feelings but only some of the substance — if any. We see it with food. The produce we buy isn't the healthiest or the most nutritious: it's what looks healthiest & most nutritious, by metrics which no longer come close to making sense (e.g. the redness of a tomato doesn't signify ripeness in a world with artificial pseudo-ripening, and the shininess of an apple is meaningless in a world with vegetable wax). We see it with relationships, with entertainment, with hardware (c.f. speculative execution & caching), with software (c.f. shiny effects), with political parties, with 'news' — in a word, everything. Our world is being destroyed by marketing, by appearance with no substance to back it up. I can only identify the problem; I don't know what the solution is.
  • corey_moncure 8y ago
    Right, it's this quote from the article: >“Asian food no longer has a health halo merely by existing,” the manager explained as I cleared away plates of mangled spring rolls. “The once ‘healthy’ perceptions of brown rice and lettuce cups aren’t believable anymore. Today, guests are linking health to nutrient density. Ancient grains. Avocado. Micro-greens.” The experts' domain here is not what is actually healthy. Actual health doesn't even enter consideration. It's what "guests" are "linking" with health, that is, only perception matters because the operational goal is personal profit above doing right. Our food industry at large is suffering from a total preoccupation with orthogonal concerns, of which our insane food culture is the natural consequence.
    • beat 8y ago
      Michael Pollam has written about this extensively... the proliferation of "magic ingredients" that confer "healthy" status on the same old food. "Ancient grains" are just starch. Omega-3 fatty acids are just oil. Etc. The fashion changes, but the structure stays the same. Chain restaurant food relies on year-round availability of ingredients of consistent quality (although "seasonal menus" exist, they're more about marketing than availability, the illusion of freshness again). Lots of white flour, vegetable oil, refined sugar, factory-farmed meats. Restaurants are more factory than art. Raw ingredients go in, get turned to finished products and sold on-site.
• mtberatwork 8y ago
  > These companies are marketing companies This is also the case for the majority of businesses that produce consumer goods these days. Companies are now purely design and marketing shops (for example, any company involved with sporting goods). Engineering, manufacturing, materials, warehousing, the "boring" parts...all farmed out with added markup.
• patja 8y ago
  This highlights the ultimate irony in the modern convention of referring to those with a career in marketing as "creatives".