Rent is typically only 7% of total restaurant operations costs. See Chipotle's quarterly earnings filings for example, and any restaurant industry analyses.
Labor and food costs make up 60% of costs, with them being roughly equally divided. Restaurant margins are around 5-7%. I don't see how CloudKitchens is supposed to fundamentally alter the restaurant industry, making it cheaper. Maybe I'm missing something.
One of the biggest problems of a kitchen is having food go bad. Nightly we have to throw away food because we don’t have another purpose for it. When serving a singular cuisine it is tough to find ways to create new dishes that fit into the menu. Ghost kitchens become interesting because assuming you’re running 3-10 “restaurants” out of the space, the overlap in ingredients becomes large which allows us to reuse and repurpose ingredients easily. This plus the volume of orders allows us again to reduce overhead costs of purchasing. Often times, it takes the same amount of effort to cook for 50 covers vs 500 but clearly the latter yields more profit.
I'd like to see a willingness for restaurants to say "I'm sorry, but we are out of that this evening." This would help eliminate food waste by not having to make a batch of something for only 1-2 customers.
I know that in NYC a number of restaurants I liked have gone out of business because they couldn't handle the increasing cost of rent as building owners look at how much place like Apple are willing to pay for prime shopping locations.
Extremely dense areas like NYC are places where this seems like it might actually be the most cost effective not only because the high cost of rent but because you could have multiple kitchens to reduce the distance delivery drivers have to travel...and these kitchens wouldn't need to be in the prime shopping locations.
But I doubt it is going to be as big of a benefit in places like Oklahoma City, Omaha, Houston, etc.
This is true and has been going for most of the recovery post 2010.
However with the pandemic and a significant amount of people moving out of the city, coupled with retail closures and bankruptcies hopefully this rent gouging will come to a natural end.
The NYC real estate market is going to shed quite a substantial amount of value over the next 3-5 years and very likely prices will drop considerably. Perhaps 30-50% especially at the high end. The lower end will be a bit insulated because of demand and also because the prices there haven't seen as much of a run-up as the higher end apartments.
And if these kinds of kitchens really catch on I can see existing restaurant owners running more than one brand out of their kitchen to try and reduce downtime. Chuck-e-cheese and Chilies are already trying this.
I'm shocked by the lack of diversity of those who win Pioneer, given that this is supposed to democratize funding for anyone across the globe.
Right now, it's mostly peer recognition which is prone to favor projects the dominant demographic finds cool. But I could see the competition based on revenue be more democratizing.
How about what it's like to be Asian and apply to Harvard? Insisting on equivalency of outcome leads to collective punishment discrimination of certain groups to pre-ordain a grand social experiment outcome with an agenda. Instead, focus on merits and potential of individuals, not on identifying groups labels or physical attributes. Please stop mindlessly-aping rhetorical, happy-clappy feel-good-isms and abusing words like "democratizing" when you condone discrimination.
Fair point about my misuse of words, :). "democratizing" was a poor word choice.
"Giving opportunity" would be more appropriate, and is the vocabulary Daniel Gross uses. He specifically mentions that he wants to find more female founders. I hope he succeeds; I am just a bit shocked by the state so far. It would be great to know what is causing this imbalance, whether it is its avenues of marketing, the messages it sends through marketing, or something else. Because there is a lot of diversity out there.
Sounds like you are concerned that it would be a move towards a direction that is less fair rather than one that is more. Asians/Harvard is unfair. I think the point is making sure opportunity is given fairly so that individuals can be evaluated based on merit.
I think what this company is doing is great. Unlike all the other automated food startups, this one focuses on COST. I would definitely buy a $6 burger with great ingredients.
The founder cares about people's wellbeing, and seems to have a mission. He's been grinding this out for 8 years. It doesn't sound like the other automation food startups out there.
These bathrooms don't necessarily need to be targeted at households. It could make sense for office buildings, so that:
-costs/person can be kept low
-it is easier for the employer to handle connecting measurements to medical IDs (scan an app/employee ID)
-it is easier for employers to negotiate directly with providers to lower health insurance (I believe some companies already do this with Fitbits, e.g. John Hancock)
How is the pricing? Firebase Realtime Database is fairly expensive ($5/GB of storage per month), so it makes economic sense for developers to migrate to their own backend once they hit a certain scale. This is why third-party mobile backends are nowhere near the popularity of non-mobile backends with Google Cloud / AWS.
Do you think $0.18 per 100000 writes solves this problem?
If you're concerned about price per GB stored, Cloud Firestore will be much cheaper than Realtime Database (0.18/GiB/month). We evaluated many use cases when deciding on prices and we believe developers will be happy with the new model.
However since Cloud Firestore charges by operation, it's important to evaluate your use case when thinking about pricing. For example if you're running a fleet of IoT devices checking in a few times per second with very small payloads, you'd be doing a lot of write operations with very little storage and Cloud Firestore could be more expensive in that case.
firebase <-- presence, real-time editing, chat, in-memory things
firestore <-- things that have a save/submit button, transactional database
quick question:
So the real-time features in firestore are not ideal for real-time text editors and chats. But saving documents from firebase after to user has left is perhaps a good middle ground.
Would firestore charge read for each reader that's listening in real-time when a document is updated?
I wouldn't say the difference is exactly that clear cut. Presence is a clear example of a situation where you want to use Realtime Database over Cloud Firestore. And you're right, for something that you would otherwise do "in memory" or use memcached/redis/etc Cloud Firestore may not be the right fit.
In my experience both databases are totally appropriate for a chat app. Even though in Cloud Firestore you will pay a document write for each new chat message, that's only $1.80 for a million chat messages and you get all the rich querying from the Cloud Firestore API.
> When you listen to the results of a query, you are charged for a read each time a document in the result set is added or updated. You are also charged for a read when a document is removed from the result set because the document has changed. (In constrast, when a document is deleted, you are not charged for a read.)
Hi everyone, I just set up this site. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!
The site is a crowdsourcing platform for randomized control trials, where anyone can start and/or join an experiment. I do have plans to integrate health and fitness tracking APIs into the site, integrate more machine learning decision-tree models with confidence intervals, and the ability to automatically relaunch experiments for replicability. Thanks!
Labor and food costs make up 60% of costs, with them being roughly equally divided. Restaurant margins are around 5-7%. I don't see how CloudKitchens is supposed to fundamentally alter the restaurant industry, making it cheaper. Maybe I'm missing something.