Try bumping up the wages and advertising the fact that you do pay a living wage, that might have some impact. My fiance and I try to choose restaurants that are locally owned and are known to treat staff well. (We have friends in food service, locally. Word gets around.) I doubt we're unique in this.

It does depend a lot on location and other factors - you're going to find more people willing to spend more in some areas than others. Other people are perfectly happy to go to restaurant X knowing they fuck over workers but have the cheapest menu.

There's also a lot of... this is how much it costs for me to make, so I should charge a little bit more. Where I think it should be... this is how much it would cost my customers to make in groceries and time.

When I eat out I almost only get food that is too inconvenient to make at home. I don't get spaghetti at the Italian restaurant, I get lasagna or stuffed shells or something that would take me hours of work at home. Yet, for a restaurant these are fairly easy items to cook because the time is less of a problem and are in many ways simpler for them to prepare because they are cooked ahead of time and reheated when ordered.

So for the restaurant, it makes sense to price a big plate of lasagna the same or lower than a plate of pasta they have to do more work on to serve. But to me the lasagna is worth more because it would take me at least 2-3 hours to make. So the restaurant sees it as a cheap thing while I see it as a valuable thing.

Your competitors would love it if you set your prices like that.

But I do think that they're subject to the pressure to under-price what they produce because to them it's easier. It's easy to discount your own labor when you think the job is easy.

Usually that perception of whether the job is easy is wrong.

In any case, I can't imagine a small restaurant having any way to seriously or accurately measure what their prices should be better than maybe a dollar. There's just not enough business to tell, and if you hit a bad region the place shuts down.

You can try setting it based off nearby businesses, but even then it's probably not better than a dollar of correct.

Why do you think companies don’t just raise prices by $1, since jimmaswell won’t even notice it or care?

I’ve never heard that increasing minimum wage will be the end of small business, I’ve just heard that it will be incrementally harder to put those wages and number of jobs at the low end of the wage increase will go down. (And that’s what happens) Again, that’s a supply and demand thing.

Are you arguing that prices don’t have an impact on purchases? Again, how do you explain companies just increasing prices arbitrarily? What do you think stops them from doing this?

I'm not sure what their reasons are for raising their prices so much compared to 5-6 years ago, but it will probably be a long time before we go back, the prices are just too high compared to other options.

Likewise with items moving on/off the dollar menu at fast food places.

If there are 4 people in your family, that's an extra $4 at least, which is ~30 minutes of minimum wage, or about 1.25% of a week's pay before taxes. I'm not going to try to guess what portion of that hypothetical family's income is expendable, but if it's 1.25% of their total weekly earnings then it's probably a much higher percentage of their weekly disposable income.

If you've got $40 a week left over as disposable income, an extra $4 starts to seem like a lot more. In an economy where most people can't cover a surprise $200 bill, $4 means something to a lot of people.

So a 33% change in labor increases prices quite a bit. And if everyone increases labor costs, then that drives up food and other materials.

So you will easily see price increases of 15-25%. If my local Mexican restaurant increases prices by that much, I and many other customers will not go as much.

This is super simple Econ101 stuff. Your example is flawed as there’s more than just cooks and there’s not a profit of $1/item.

> a National Restaurant Association publication that said the average restaurant runs about a 29.9 percent labor cost without taxes, benefits and insurance, and about 34 percent with taxes,

So your 40% number is way off. Also hourly rate doesn't effect other labor costs

You know society is doomed when a wage supporting a middle class lifestyle is deemed "rich".

I think the root problem is that most restaurant dining experiences are not worth the $30+ per person for enough people compared to cooking and eating at home.

I would like to see more places where you order at a register and bus your own food with minimal overheard and maximum investment in the quality of the food rather than the whole waiter and ambiance schtick.

This is currently a cultural non-starter except for niche markets, but once an economic crisis of sufficiently large and long duration is established, that model might work. Maybe. Look up any number of formerly-wealthy-now-poor nations, and I'm hard-pressed to recall any that adopted this model in the mainstream restaurant industry in that nation. Human culture changes are slow to arrive, and carry immense inertia.

I suspect the hyper-rationalization of markets is leading to continuous spectrum K-selection strategies that ultimately prove adverse to the overall market. All the monetization optimization (aided by the gradual incremental gains our industry delivers, however somnambulantly) is attaching a price to every factor that is priced, but under-pricing all non-priced factors (generally those on a long timeline like sustained incentives for young families to support future demographics, pollution, energy, etc.).

This optimization is blunted by currently-stronger cultural norms, especially those tangential or central to mating. It remains to be seen which force remains stronger over the long run (my personal bet is on the cultural norms).

Having said all that, I wouldn't mind at all patronizing a "meal plan" model-based co-op that lets me select 2-4 months in advance how many breakfast/lunch/dinner/brunch I want for a month, in a setting like you describe, a 1-3 minute walk from where I live, with online seating reservations, that operates 24x7x365, serving the locality's "home style" cuisine plus lots of greens. The business only lets in a dynamically-selected number of walk-ins, based upon seating availability and ML-projected food waste at that moment. The value proposition is trade off the customer-skin-in-the-game, fixed commitments for fresh ingredients freshly-prepared at near-home-prepared prices, with aggressively-amortized costs of running the co-op and its costs, thus able to pay fair wages for bare bones staff.

But I would be very surprised if there are enough potential customers like me in sufficient densities in even major metropolitan urban cores to make such a model feasible.

Somehow they managed to not raise their prices, or raise it insignificantly enough to where I didn't notice it (50 cents across the board maybe?).

For sit-down places, I frequently see price hikes of 20-30% since early 2020 and mandatory gratuity for parties of 4 now, which is frankly ridiculous, because the food quality stayed the same or has gotten worse. Not to mention that the whole experience of sharing an indoor space with an unknown demographic is dubious at best.