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US economy is so crappy sometimes. Eating out is so expensive. Servers can't live off their wages. The restaurants are not profitable. Where the hell does the

• horns4lyfe 5y ago
  To the landlords, mostly.
• Mikeb85 5y ago
  Landlords, suppliers, architects, engineers, municipalities. Also keep in mind that 'profit' needs to not only cover COGS and other variable costs like labour, it also needs to cover random fixed expenses, utilities, rent and needs to make up the initial capital costs within the duration of the lease.
  • Gibbon1 5y ago
    I think of the US economy as being saddled with a vast amount of 'private taxes'. The cost of everything entails paying rentiers without anything in return. The building my company rented was sold. According to our broker the new landlords mortgage had terms that required he raise the rents to cover the mortgage payment. So new landlord told us that after our lease expired the rent was going from $2/sqft to $4/sqft. Where is the value added for us paying double what we were? There isn't any. And the US economy is full of purely extractive rents like that. Real estate loans, something like 5-6 cents on the dollar actually goes to new construction or improvements.
    • imtringued 5y ago
      North America was the land of the free precisely because there was no preexisting social structure that inserted itself between the work you do and the compensation that you receive. Now that a few hundred years have passed the usual problems crop up. I personally have no axe to grind versus landlords specifically because I recognize that letting people rent out apartments and thereby provide housing fulfills a real need that people have. After all someone had to construct the building. What I personally despise is when people own a plot of land and abuse its location monopoly to extort people's money. I work and pay income taxes which funds public infrastructure yet I also need to pay the owner of the land a sum in proportion to the public infrastructure that is available to this location. If the government were to charge this amount directly on the land and reduce my income tax by that same amount then I would have no qualms about paying inflated rents because I know that a fair portion of that money is paying for the infrastructure I get to enjoy.
    • 1123581321 5y ago
      Theoretically the value is being enjoyed by the people moving near you who cared so much about their location that they drove up prices. In practice I’m less sure. Regardless, it’s a process that sucks for those already living there. Location/land/home stability are hard values to stamp out of humans.
      • kazen44 5y ago
        Also, it does not take into account that most people want to live in a place where they belong to a community (usually one they are familiar with). People do not stay in a place purely for economic reasons. Things like being around family, friends and a community is a reason not to move for a lot of people. Sadly, this is something which is hardly taken into account when discussing housing policy.
        • 1123581321 5y ago
          Agreed. Sadly, we will probably never learn to 'price' individual and collective preferences over multi-generational time spans.
• acchow 5y ago
  The restaurants are not profitable? I see successful restaurants often opening a 2nd location elsewhere in the city. Then a third.
  • ghaff 5y ago
    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.
  • pfranz 5y ago
    I've been told opening multiple locations is the most feasible way to be profitable so you can amortize many costs and get better deals ordering in bulk. Restaurants are also a notoriously tough business with thin margins.
• Ekaros 5y ago
  I have considered that issues is not money going somewhere. It is that it doesn't come from anywhere. Service economy works when you can extract money from somewhere. But service economy itself doesn't produce much of net goods. Food, housing, cloths, medicine, goods in general need to be made somewhere. You can't just live on cooking and serving food or financial services of moving money around, if someone somewhere doesn't do something actually productive.
  • imtringued 5y ago
    The service economy is about specialization. You let someone else cook because that person is a better or cheaper cook. You then get to do your own job instead of cooking for yourself. Electricians don't manufacture wires yet they provide more "value" than the wire manufacturer to me because I don't know how to utilize the wires myself.
  • bigodbiel 5y ago
    In a nutshell: you can live off IOUs when those IOUs are needed to buy oil! People remember Nixon for Watergate, but his legacy is really the Petrodollar Recycling
  • kazen44 5y ago
    I would agree with your statement to a point, but i would like to add something. vast area's of the service economy are very useful and actually do provide value. But the financing of the economy in modern times is totally out of whack, resulting in firms focusing on financial engineering to extract profit instead of providing goods/services to society. Things like hedge funds, vast consultancy companies who prop up these measures are also the ones extracting vasts amounts of wealth from the productive side of the economy without contributing anything besides driving up costs and increasing inefficiency.
    • Ekaros 5y ago
      And I think tech should share fair share of the blame. How much value does all the advertising bring to society? Ofc, there is some needed, but could it be that we are vastly beyond that point. And then we have the platforms like gig economy, that aim to extract vast cuts of any activity they are in. At least compared to true value they provide.
• spoonjim 5y ago
  The server stuff is a bit nonsense. Waitstaff in big cities make good wages, $50K+.