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The OP starts to make clear why my home cooking is so much cheaper than restaurant food: The ingredients in my version of pizza cost less than $1 per pizza. F

The OP starts to make clear why my home cooking is so much cheaper than restaurant food: The ingredients in my version of pizza cost less than $1 per pizza. For pork BBQ, that's about 25 cents per ounce, final, cooked, lean, ready to eat, with a meaty sandwich having 3 ounces. So, I save on the money that otherwise has to go to paper shuffling, city bureaucrats, likely also lawyers, etc., all before hiring any workers to get the food ready for customers. I like to think of current progress in computing and the Internet technology as keys to greater economic productivity, but tough to see easy applications of this technology to the context of the OP, other restaurants, many small businesses, etc.

tzs 4y ago
> So, I save on the money that otherwise has to go to paper shuffling, city bureaucrats, likely also lawyers, etc., all before hiring any workers to get the food ready for customers. Those costs to start up the restaurant add almost nothing to the cost of your pizza. What makes a restaurant pizza cost so much more than your home made pizza is the restaurant's ongoing costs, such as rent, wages and benefits, utilities, insurance, advertising, delivery, and many I've probably left out. Doing a bit of Googling, I get that Domino's averages around 100 pizzas per restaurant per day. When I've went there there are typically maybe 3 employees visible plus drivers coming and going. Let's call it the equivalent of 5 employees at any given time. They are open 14 hours a day. If they are just paying Federal minimum wage that's a tad over $500/day in wages. That's $5/pizza right there. More Googling tells me that the rent for an average sized restaurant in the US is about $5000/month, which would be about $160 per day, but a Domino's doesn't need as much space so let's call it $100/day. There's another $1/pizza. That was assuming they are in one of the 15 states where the minimum wage is just the Federal minimum, and that rent was about average. I'd guess most on HN are in states with a higher minimum wage and higher rents.
- graycat 4y ago
  Right. I didn't say, suggest, or believe that the extra cost of restaurant food was due just or mostly to the initial, one-time costs of the startup. Instead I wrote > all before hiring any workers to get the food ready for customers. So, those are the on-going costs you illustrated. Also my main lament and summary remark was quite general covering both times and categories of small businesses: > I like to think of current progress in computing and the Internet technology as keys to greater economic productivity, but tough to see easy applications of this technology to the context of the OP, other restaurants, many small businesses, etc. Sure, small gains in "economic productivity" are visible, so I would revise that lament to "tough to see the desired big gains ...."

tzs 4y ago

> So, I save on the money that otherwise has to go to paper shuffling, city bureaucrats, likely also lawyers, etc., all before hiring any workers to get the food ready for customers. Those costs to start up the restaurant add almost nothing to the cost of your pizza. What makes a restaurant pizza cost so much more than your home made pizza is the restaurant's ongoing costs, such as rent, wages and benefits, utilities, insurance, advertising, delivery, and many I've probably left out. Doing a bit of Googling, I get that Domino's averages around 100 pizzas per restaurant per day. When I've went there there are typically maybe 3 employees visible plus drivers coming and going. Let's call it the equivalent of 5 employees at any given time. They are open 14 hours a day. If they are just paying Federal minimum wage that's a tad over $500/day in wages. That's $5/pizza right there. More Googling tells me that the rent for an average sized restaurant in the US is about $5000/month, which would be about $160 per day, but a Domino's doesn't need as much space so let's call it $100/day. There's another $1/pizza. That was assuming they are in one of the 15 states where the minimum wage is just the Federal minimum, and that rent was about average. I'd guess most on HN are in states with a higher minimum wage and higher rents.

graycat 4y ago
Right. I didn't say, suggest, or believe that the extra cost of restaurant food was due just or mostly to the initial, one-time costs of the startup. Instead I wrote > all before hiring any workers to get the food ready for customers. So, those are the on-going costs you illustrated. Also my main lament and summary remark was quite general covering both times and categories of small businesses: > I like to think of current progress in computing and the Internet technology as keys to greater economic productivity, but tough to see easy applications of this technology to the context of the OP, other restaurants, many small businesses, etc. Sure, small gains in "economic productivity" are visible, so I would revise that lament to "tough to see the desired big gains ...."