The problem is, most of these retail spaces are actually vacant, despite massive job and housing growth. But why? Because the retail spaces are simply too large. These spaces are big enough to seat 100-200 people, but most restaurants, even popular ones, will not seat that many people most of the time, so they end up paying rent on real estate that is not being fully utilized the vast majority of the time, and then they go belly up because they can't afford the rent.
One recent trend that has kind of taken us back to the roots of small restaurant square footage is the food hall, where many small setups share one large communal seating area. Another is the food truck, with no seating, minimal rent costs, and the entire operation fits in a parking space. There is a great irony when I've been to a food truck serving food out of the parking lot of an under-occupied strip mall, because the strip mall spaces are simply too large.
It also doesn't help that mom-and-pops are not exactly the most attractive tenants for commercial lending; better to ink a long-term contract with a sure bet like a bank branch or a national chain.
Every large space can be trimmed down to a small space. If there are too many vacant shops in an area, and there would be a market for smaller shops, I would assume that tenants add walls and rent out the smaller space. Even if that walled-off space is unused, tenants would make more money than not renting out at all.
The oft-cited counterexample to US restrictive zoning, Japan's permissive zoning, works because in Japan zoning type is decided at the national level and there are only 12 types of zoning that define maximum nuisance (so a blacklist). US zoning gets extremely nitty-gritty and is functionally a whitelist.
You can't just throw up some false walls and call it a day. Even if you could, your landlord's lease terms probably don't let you sublease like that.
For the odd meal at a festival or park or whatnot - sure. But every day? not so much.
Food trucks were really meant to make use of an empty lot while the owner waited for development opportunities but they took on a life of their own. Here in Portland people are very attached to them, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.
The way forward is not by enabling people who can serve 500 people/day to exist when we can have a robot serving 5,000.
We want automation, we want people doing what they choose to do because we've automated away things they had to do, such as work for a living.
The way to get there is more automation.
Restaurant cooks/servers are the equivalent of hand washing clothes. We have washing machines - technology has enabled humanity to do a great deal more with their life, let's move in that direction please.
The other piece of the puzzle is this - technology alone is not enough - technology alone is why we have nuclear weapons and idiots with nuclear codes. The time will come soon, when we have to have a frank conversation about the number of idiots inhabiting this Earth and that it's not climate change, it's idiots, that will be the end of all of us if this keeps up.
Anyhow :)
> Restaurant cooks/servers are the equivalent of hand washing clothes
Both are a skilled trade. Can you not tell the difference between the best meal you’ve ever eaten at a restaurant and a cup of fried cheese balls from Sonic? If not, then your post is entirely logical.
> technology has enabled humanity to do a great deal more with their life
More than cook good food for people? Are you surprised that there are people who dream from a young age of cooking, or cutting hair, or working on a construction site? That people have different skills, aptitudes and interests?
I’d rather see people flourish while doing what they love to do - especially if that thing is as central to the human experience as preparing a good meal.
That said, it's very possible healthy choice employs very skilled chefs to either do small batch production or has figured out a way to do large batches without sacrificing quality.
Their microwave steamer container technology also factors in, since most microwave meals taste bad due to excess moisture.
I don't think automation and quality have to be mutually exclusive. The same goes for spirits. Some small batch Icelandic vodka I had was absolutely horrible compared to the mass produced Grey Goose, despite costing more.
I see the benefits of covid. Culling the inefficiencies in our markets. Shale fracking, unnecessary luxury services like mid-tier restaurants, etc..
One of those things is doing 20 covers of handmade tagliatelle every night.
Automation alone certainly does not guarantee this.
Maybe you might as well drink Soylent. Washing clothes or dishes is a chore. Cooking food is a social event and lots of people like cooking and creating food.
If anything automation of mundane tasks will lead to more food being cooked by humans. I’ll also eat my hat if you can get a robot to cook an 8 course degustation.
The robot restaurant is for lunch during work - you care about price and speed and nutrition. That is it. Self service checkout is fine. SittIng close to other people does not matter.
For date, meetups with friends, celebration or filly dinner I want calmer, more intimate place.
There is powerful stuff in sharing lunch. Especially if you pay.
(I understand the expense arguments, but I think it's a false economy, without specific goals, and isn't worth much regard on software engineering salaries.)
Date, familly dinner, celebration and similar all take time. You are comfortable being there for two hours. With lunch, you want be shorted then that.
I strongly suspect that if the most tedious jobs were automated away, so long as people had their needs met, they’d find something much more meaningful than the work they were doing before. I know I sure would!
“So long as they have their needs met” is a big assumption, though, and one that wouldn’t hold up in our current society.
But the machine doesn't take up that much space. If the zoning requires you to rent 200 times that much space, the economics go away. So you still have to solve the original problem.
You may notice that in Europe, Asia, the demographics of restaurants are noticeably different from the US. There are far more hole-in-the-wall mom-and-pop restaurants in those places compared to the US, running a small and seemingly profit-thin but subsistence restaurant for the neighborhood. Think of a suburban neighborhood in Madrid or Rome, where a small restaurant is just as common as a tabacchi / corner convenience store.
I believe (have not seen a careful study yet) that the rent-seeking / zoning policies of our cities in the US increase greatly the cost of running restaurants. And incentivize / prohibit anything but large commercial / chain places from surviving as a rule. It makes it very hard for small experiments or small-time mom-and-pop shops to survive and stay in a community for decades at the low profits those places are willing to accept. There may also be something about the small square footage of typical shops in such cities being unfavorable towards chain restaurants which seem to require a certain size (like hotel properties).
The landscape of our policies for cities, neighborhoods, plus the way they interact with our corporations, directly translates into the kinds of restaurants that we get as a result.