5 ms·

You would hope the economies of scale of cooking large amounts of food at a restaurant would help bring down the costs though.

• bruce511 4y ago
  Labour in restaurants does not scale well. Servers can only serve x tables, chefs and cooks can only make x meals per hour. Valets, barmen, bussboys all scale pretty linearly. Plus rent doesn't scale well either. More meals translates to more staff, more staff translates to more space. And that's also linear. Food-scale happens in factories, think frozen meals in your supermarket not restaurants.
• db48x 4y ago
  I’m not sure that there are economies of scale, except perhaps in special situations. Someone has to chop all the vegetables, slice all the fruit, bake all the desserts, fold all the napkins, mop the floors, clean the restrooms, etc, etc. The staff often begin work hours before opening, and leave hours after closing. Those costs don’t go down if you have more customers, they go up. Batch cooking only works in some cases: you can bake a whole cake and then sell it by the slice, so there is an economy of scale there. Do the same thing with spaghetti noddles, on the other hand, and half your customers will get overcooked noodles. I suppose buffet–style restaurants benefit more from economies of scale, since they can cook a whole tray of something and take it out to the buffet all at once. Or cook a whole roast or ham and then carve some off for each customer. But then I suppose you have to pay someone to stand there and carve, so perhaps not. Thanks, now I’m hungry, and there’s not a Luby’s within a thousand miles of here.
  • selimthegrim 4y ago
    I think Luby’s exited stage left pursued by a virus.
    • selimthegrim 4y ago
      Ok I stand corrected it’s still around.
      • db48x 4y ago
        Good. I would be sad to learn that they had closed.