It’s far worse in the restaurant industry. We’re going to see a lot of really awkward concept restaurants and bars open and close in quick succession.

Yes. Although if we can get more robot sushi restaurants for a while I will not complain.

Yeah if software developers have anything to do with that, it’s providing the software or the money. Running a restaurant is extremely complex, specialized knowledge with a dizzying number of moving parts. Something like 40% of restaurants close their first year, and the large majority don’t make it 5.

Funding someone that knows how to run a restaurant and an engineer with food processing expertise, HAACP compliance and all that? Sure. But I was in that business in the Boston area and saw SO many tech geniuses blow through their funding before they even opened.

I'm sure there are many software engineers and similarly unqualified people in that 40%.

They don’t make up the majority of that 40%— it’s tough even for experienced people— but the majority of that crowd ends up in that 40%… or soon after if they’re good at convincing other people who have no idea what they’re doing to invest in it. The NRA (the other one) stats that I’m probably misremembering slightly are actually pretty eye-opening.

The problem is that the business requires showing the customer just enough of the labor, planning, etc that goes into their experience to make them feel like they’re getting a lot for their money, but not so much that they feel bad for enjoying it. Unfortunately, the customer doesn’t see most of that labor, and so often they think “well I’ve been to so many restaurants that I b know how they work… I could do this…” They’re almost always totally wrong.

Oh for sure. I worked in a restaurant for years through college: eventually the mildly famous chef/owner retired (staff found out by guests commenting on the newspaper story that night). Turned out he had sold it to an up-and-coming local star chef, a couple years past his “apprentice of the year award” and back from working in major kitchens overseas. We were convinced it would be dead within months: it was a 26yo chef who had never run a business, backed up by his wife (who was waiting tables for the first time ever as her second shift after a day job covering the mortgage), and his parents, who came across as thought they had never been inside a restaurant kitchen before that.

Turned out his dad had just been pushed into retirement from head of purchasing and logistics at a multi-state department store, so he ran the paperwork and it was a dream team. Mom was not my type of person but worked her ass off cleaning the whole place every day, very impressive. After about a year they were doing well enough that his wife got to quit working night shift there.