If the siren call of data is followed, restaurant offerings will be influenced by airline yield management techniques. That won't lead to happy customers.

The pre-theater menu, which offers a discount if you eat and leave before a specific time. I could also imagine that tables booked for a less desirable time window are sold cheaper than when you want it on Saturday, 8pm.

Airline yield mangement gets a lot a flack, but I really don't get what's inherently wrong with the process.

As far as whether or not this constitutes "big-data", it might if they can hook into enough POS-systems.

POS' are a goldmine if you can acquire data from huge numbers of them (unfortunately that's hard).

Iirc it was an NCR XT based system.

The dashboards are probably way prettier now though.

I know that I've been recognized by employees at places I go to frequently, and media depictions of people being asked if they want "the usual" seem to predate widespread computers.

Slightly dystopian in that regard: let's take something that used to be part of being good at your job and building a rapport with your customers, and outsource it to a machine.

Here's one in the New Yorker, from 2012: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/05/dining/what-restaurants-kn...

Here's another from May of this year: http://nypost.com/2017/03/30/the-incognito-way-this-restaura...

Increasing wealth inequality in the US means the data collected about most people isn't going to be worth much in absolute dollar terms. For now, the data is being gathered and brokered for the promise of its future value. That is to say, the market is largely speculative.

FB and Google (and all the miserable adtech invertebrates in between) REALLY NEED advertisers to believe that this data is worth something. They need advertisers to believe that the ads are working. There is little to no objective, verifiable auditing of online ads. There is massive, rampant fraud.

There's a reason why tech CEOs like talking about basic income. If nobody has any money, nobody can spend; if nobody can spend, brands won't advertise, and FB/Google go broke. Unfortunately, in the political climate of the United States, BI is a fart in a stiff wind.

Speculation + fraud + shrinking middle class = one major shitstorm on the horizon...

Given these generous assumptions: * That all these purchases are trackable, by the same advertiser, with definite certainty * That you're even buying online in the first place, so you can advertised to * That you'd respond to advertising at all, because thus far their recommendations have been purely reactive, not predictive of what you'd buy * That an eventual purchase could be directly tied to the advertisers work

After all of that investment of time, money, and energy, if they somehow managed to secure a sale of say, knee pads, how much do they actually make? And how much did the knee pad company pay to acquire that lead which led to a sale?

My basic question is: How is any of this profitable? It seems like an absolutely massive ecosystem of enormous firms all trading money back and forth and trading data back and forth, to at best, make marginal bumps in otherwise happening sales.

This boggles my mind and I would love an enlightened HNer to weigh in if they happen to read this.

I highly recommend reading this[1] article for a very good explanation about how this works.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h...

It's like a college bar that serves to underage people. It closes amid controversy, changes ownership and reopens with a different visual theme and the same business practices every few years.

You can do this with all sorts of businesses. It's more common in places where people have a lot of disposable income and you can run a bad business for a few years before people smarten up, word gets around and the place folds. Tourist areas, college towns, whichever town is seeing an influx of tech industry money or an oil boom, etc are the places where you can run a bad business the longest before folding.

I love to eat out and this isn't a common enough problem for me to think automation is the answer. Times are tough for restaurants because competition is intense, rents are high in desirable locations, margins are thin, and the industry is labor-intensive.

Franchise restaurants like Applebees have already industrialized the production and delivery of hot food, and nobody with a choice likes restaurant franchises - hence all the articles for investors about millennials killing things off.

"Tough Times" is what Lean Manufacturing calls just Draining the Lake - when the lake is drained you can see the rocks on which your business will scrape. The skill is to examine the lake before it gets drained.

- actually eating the food from time to time

- checking orders before they go out

- checking orders after they are done, to see if food remains

- checking yelp and other reviews

- being a chef and doing chef-like things

It's tough if your food is just average or merely good, as there are plenty of places with good food at more or less the same price. I suppose the tough thing is understanding the threshold to "great" food and what constitutes a "reasonable" price.

One was bought, moved, and closed a few months later. Another eliminated dinner. A third, open 24x7 for 40+ years, reduced their hours and then closed entirely, although that appears to be as much poor management as anything.

Quite depressing. I like supporting local restaurants, but painful to get attached to something that's likely going to die.

also, salaries don't count toward margin so i wouldn't be surprised if most owner/managers make a reasonable living (albeit with long hours) even if their businesses aren't very profitable on paper.

Lots of beloved spots have closed down here and have been replaced with condos and drug stores.

Even aside from this, and as others have pointed out - restaurants operate on razor thin margins. A large confluence of variables, some more controllable than others, need to come together in just the right way for a restaurant to have a chance of succeeding.

The issue with most of restaurants is that they do not operate like businesses: people who own them think there's something special about service that they offer.

Restaurants fail because their product sucks or the restaurants overcharge for the type of product that they have. That's why a $3.50 for a quart of noodle soup Chinese place manages to stay open in the high-rent area of Manhattan while a place with a $22 burger that comes with a sprinkle of attitude from an "artist" who just happened to wait tables flops.

They went out of business though.

Their food sucked.

I mean, I can imagine the food being "just good" (not great). But sucky food? With such a great wine list?

Something sounds terribly off with the.management of that buisness.

Can you share the name? Or is it something like a chain restaurant?

It might be. Didn't think about it that way.

Right, so tough times means you can either do the great food or the reasonable price, but not both, and it's very hard to choose one of the two.