

Things You Didn't Know About The Restaurant Industry  - arst829
http://feefighters.com/blog/ff_infographic/15things-you-didnt-know-about-the-restaurant-industry-infographic/

======
tjic
"Infographics" these days tend to have graphics so bad that it's hard to pull
any information out of them.

This one was horrendous; it hurt my eyes and I immediately clicked "back".

There's an art and a science to presenting information well.

#include Tufte

Gathering a bunch of boring statistics and then "tying them together" with bad
graphic design creates no value for anyone.

~~~
neuroelectronic
For example:

[http://happenupon.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/resume-
infogra...](http://happenupon.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/resume-
infographic.jpg)

------
crikli
I've been involved in the restaurant business in almost every aspect, from
barback/bartender/waiter to manager to owner/investor in high volume bars,
fine-dining, burger joints, food trucks, and pizza parlors.

There's a pretty solid delta between this information and reality when it
comes to the "Restaurant Profits" section.

38% is WAY too high for CoGS; reality is closer to 25% to 35%. You won't see
38% food cost unless you're a seafood place that's not selling enough
pasta/rice based dishes.

Net profits are typically between 4-8%. I'm not going to say a 13% net margin
doesn't exist, but I've never seen anything close to that. Best I've seen was
almost 10% in a food truck operation that had 35% food cost and almost no
facility overhead.

There's a reason I'm now in the software business. :)

~~~
silencio
Actually, I can find 38% food cost believable right now. Buying, selling and
running food service and similar businesses is a side interest of mine, and
I've noticed that the reported food cost of businesses for sale in the LA area
have been rising in the past couple years. What used to be as low as 25% or
lower is now much closer to 38% than to 25% and businesses that report lower
tend to be omitting their 2010/2011 invoices from the calculation (like
someone's not going to notice?). Rent and wages and people not spending as
much money aren't what's cutting into profit today, it's the food cost.

For example the other day, a family friend that runs a small burger/sandwich
joint raised all her prices by $2 ($5 hot sandwich -> $7, combo meal $7 -> $9)
because the meat she buys went from costing $40 a year ago to $100 today for
the same amount of meat. That's just an extreme example, but the prices she
pays for cases of lettuce and tomato and such have risen and every little bit
ends up counting towards that percentage.

------
thesis
Wow, that graphic is impossibly hard to read.

Neat info, and I got a great neck workout swiveling my head around to read it
all.

~~~
pitdesi
Totally agree... We're trying to figure out how to manage infographics...
We've been contracting with infographic designers we think are good (based on
their portfolios) and giving them a try, sometimes not having much success :(

It especially sucks because we give so much detail to every design at
<http://feefighters.com> ... so it hurts when we put something like this out
there which gets dissed on (though I totally agree with the design comments
made here)

OPPORTUNITY: if you are a good infographic designer (will design things that
won't hurt my head), please email me with samples!

Or- if you've had success with infographics, can you share tips?

~~~
albedoa
I think it is correct for you to specifically solicit infographic designers.
Some astounding artists just don't know how to gracefully represent data in an
aesthetically appealing way.

Check out <http://www.informationisbeautiful.net> for some wonderful examples
and hopefully some leads.

~~~
allwein
And then there's the converse, like me. I've got a good eye for infographic
design, but I can't paint pixels worth a damn.

------
lucasjung
Very interesting stuff, but I'm always very skeptical of claims along the
lines of "Every _x_ dollars spent on [good/service] generates _y_ additional
[jobs/dollars/other good stuff]." First, I'm highly dubious of the ability of
economists to isolate such complex relationships down to single-single input,
single-output relationships. More importantly, there's never any analysis of
opportunity costs to provide context: what if that same money, spent on
something else, provided an even bigger economic benefit?

~~~
seiji
Check out multipliers: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplier_(economics)>

~~~
Schultzy
I agree with lucas, but more because of the faulty Keynesian economics
described in that article.

Innovation and productive activity "generates" money, not consumption.

It doesn't make any sense to say that if I purchase something off of the
McDonald's Dollar Menu, I have somehow generated and additional $2.08.

~~~
seiji
Shaffer's rounds of spending chapter explains it better than the wikipedia
article: <http://www.rri.wvu.edu/WebBook/Schaffer/chap05.html> (not sure why I
jumped to wikipedia first).

