This is a tragedy in its own right. Small businesses create richer communities and help stave off cultural homogeneity. They can be a source of pride for locals. They help de-centralize economic power. I hope we can find a way to rebuild what's being lost here.
Are you buying only local? As I agree with you, most people I know just order from Amazon even though the local places deliver too (the owners often drive themselves; or their children). Or, if not a Covid spot, go there ofcourse. Still, why pay a cent extra right? Not saying you think like that but most people do.
Restaurant/fastfood chains are preferred over local ones as well. I have no clue why (outside money, but cooking yourself is cheaper and nicer): if I wanted to eat plastic, I could just eat a garbage bag. But it is what it is.
Same goes for wine, beer etc; you fav craftbeer is probably owned by Heineken, while the local brewers are going out of business, even if their beer is far better.
Stimulating local businesses starts with completely cutting out the companies that own everything. People will never do that though for many reasons. It starts with money; without subsidising local companies by the gov, there is no way they can compete.
Why does your wife not like it? Mine is a brewer, so i'm curious.
Edit: as I get downvoted, let me reformulate as I guess it reads different than I meant (not native English). I am curious why she doesn't like; my wife being a brewer has nothing to do with it.
The joke is that he is enjoying local brewers so much that he has gained a lot of weight or has some behavior changes due to increased alcohol intake that bother his wife :)
There are 563 calories in a Big Mac, and the average price across the US is $5.71. You could get the same number of calories from ~190g of cooked white rice. At Costco prices that's about 38 cents. You could spend $5 on things to put on top of the rice and still come out ahead.
Obviously there are cheaper fast food options than a Big Mac, and I've used average prices which doesn't help you, and I've assumed you're in the US, and I haven't accounted for things like fuel and water, but there's something seriously wrong with the market economics of where you live if fast food is really cheaper than cooking for yourself.
I do not count calories so I don't know about that. I don't know why anyone would unless you are either very underweight or very over weight (the latter, cooking yourself will definitely help). I live in the EU and my fav foods are egg fried rice, pizza & curries; all of them are vastly cheaper to make myself (with smart shopping); far healthier, tastier/nicer (matter of taste for sure!). I see a pizza at NYC Domino's will cost you $7.99 with a coupon; mine, including wood + ingredients comes to around half of that.
Ofcourse not counting time; counting time makes all cooking crazy costly, but yeah, it does so with a lot of other things as well; actual eating (fastfood or otherwise; why not a nutrients drip next to your computer?), going to the gym, shopping, cleaning, showering, going to the toilet and most people probably did not optimise any of those either.
That much cooked white rice is a very high glycemic load. I'd rather get my diabetes from candy, thanks.
I think you missed a subtle point though: Cooking takes time and energy, which you should not value at $0, unless you really enjoy cooking, in which case you probably don't eat at McDonald's a lot.
Not the person you were responding to, but I made the point in another comment; the optimizing of time for one task over another (as example; eating fast food (in the example a big mac which is not considered healthy by any standard) to save time but going to the gym because that's healthy) seems not really relating to valuing your time in money, but just valuing your time in subjective ways. There are many people who make > $100 / hr who clean their own house. Why? I don't know, but if you say you don't cook because it costs money then that goes for all things you do. There are people who like cleaning, but anecdotally speaking anyway, I don't know any of those and yet I know millionaires who clean their own house because 'that's how you become a millionaire'. But real sense it does not make. They all (the ones I know that is, to be specific) love to cook (hours / day) though.
Cooking takes time and energy, which you should not value at $0..
If you're not being paid for your time then the value is $0. Most people on HN are on salaries where the hours we work have no direct impact to what we earn.
I'm not suggesting there's no value in choosing what you should spend your time on, but rather that using some imaginary hourly wage to define it is stupid. There are much better ways to choose how to spend your time than dreaming up a threshold of "things that aren't worth $x/hour" vs "things that are worth $x/hour" because it will always end up being the boring, tiresome jobs that fall below that threshold even if they're actually useful or important.
I know a lot of people who claim they don't have time to cook or clean their houses or do gardening, and use the dollar value of their time as a reason. Most of them seem to have time to watch the latest Netflix shows or play videogames though. For some reason watching Stranger Things is apparently worth $100/hour.
> If you're not being paid for your time then the value is $0.
Is it that simple?
When deciding whether to do something myself versus paying somebody else, I factor in the time taken multiplied by the pleasure or displeasure of doing the task myself, probably sometimes multiplied by the probability of the outcome being above or below ideal.
I’d therefore argue that my unpaid time does actually have a dollar value: it’s the amount I’d be willing to pay to not perform a task myself in that time. It’s complicated by the other factors, but a relationship still exists.
You're conflating the time you can use for work and the time you must use for leisure. I have about 5 very productive hours in the day, plus maybe another 5 less productive ones. I must replenish my energy in the remaining hours.
Now, if you like cooking, perhaps it is like leisure, perhaps it actually replenishes you. Otherwise, you might as well put a dollar value on it, because you are effectively working overtime.
Another way to look at it is that you're really using dollars as a way to better manage your time. Let's say you work 8 hours a day, but you put in another 2 hours into learning something new, maybe a side business, anything that isn't just leisure. Of course that doesn't translate directly into a salary, but the expected value is not zero dollars.
A lot of local restaurants in small town USA source their ingredients from Sysco. While ownership of the venue might be local, the actual food is hardly different from that at chains.
Unpopular opinion: I'm not convinced of small local businesses. Where I live, it feels like "that shop has always been here, it must remain here" without looking at whether it's really still providing the same service. I believe it's fine for shops to close, others to open, or to reinvent themselves.
There's always the argument "the town won't be the same if they're gone". That's true, but change isn't bad, it's just different.
We keep talking about small businesses largely because of political conditioning.
Small businesses struggle because people are too poor to afford anything more than cheap crap at Walmart and McDonalds. We should focus on providing basics to all americans instead of getting upset when the pop-up barbecue ice cream truck doesn't make any money and went under when people's health became more important than someone's life long "dream" to become a barista at their own cafe.
Is there a marketplace for easily buying closed businesses?
As much as it may be unpleasant, it may be beneficial for employment to help hedge funds with a lot of cash snap these up to prevent them and the associated jobs from disappearing entirely.
They failed for a reason, but who hasn't gone into a shop that doesn't run well and thought "I know how to fix this", that'd be the chance.
If I was rich, I'd personally buy a super market, simply because they do so many things that annoy me as a customer and I'd like to try and change them and see whether one can do better.
I know just such a store. I looked into opening a competitor, but the margins were extremely ugly and there were other complications. Years later by pure chance I became friends with someone who, another year later, I learned had worked at the store. He confirmed not only what I discovered for myself, but also that this particular store was basically a rich person’s hobby and probably didn’t actually make money.
"Doesn't run well" but maybe not for the reasons you think.
Yes your local coffee shop might have some quirks compared to a local Starbucks but their lack of efficiency is not on the store per se, rather than Starbucks has: a) bigger leverage in rents b) effective lower corporate tax c) more streamlined supply chains
And then you think, why are not people buying mom and pop shops and running them independently with high efficiency? Because it is hard
I was less thinking about the side hustle and more that community members might (in rare cases) band together to buy shares in them or hedge funds could be convinced to buy them in bulk in appropriately packaged.
Depends on their position. When my restaurant went under, we had a pretty hard lease with the landlord, and he wouldn't budge one iota. After 6 months of paying the lease, we were finally able to negotiate 15% off the remaining term.
What does your average closed small business have of value? “Value” in the economic sense. Most are barely profitable and even then it’s only because the owners work ungodly hours.
A package of equipment, a database of customers, already set up supplier relationships, etc.
And barely profitable includes businesses that would have spent a ton on capital expenditures. If those expenditures can be had for cheap, profits can increase.
For most small retail and restaurants, the customers are ephemeral; the value of their info is nil. Supplier relationships aren't of much value either. Equipment? Especially in the restaurant business, there's a well-established used equipment industry.
I've wondered if part of the discrepancy between the stock market and the broader economy, is that the pandemic is going to disproportionately crush small / private / not-publicly-traded businesses who don't have any financial buffer to weather a downturn.
Like, maybe Starbucks traffic is down 20% or whatever, but if 50% of their competition (independent coffeeshops) permanently close, they'll be better set up for success in the 5 years to come, and this accounts for their current relatively strong valuation.
(obviously even stronger in the case of AMZN, but even Target and Wal-Mart are benefitting from being allowed to stay open, while a lot of their competition was shut down -- speciality stores like salons and clothing stores were closed, but big-box stores selling everything stayed open)
> if 50% of their competition (independent coffeeshops) permanently close
indie coffee shops will come again. Starbucks coffee is basically the mcdonalds of restaurants - no real flavour and too much sugar imho. It's good, consistent, but not top notch quality.
Indie coffee shops are usually run by people who are passionate about making the best cup. This downturn will kill some of them - but i'm sure they will eventually return.
Sure, nothing is forever. But starting a business takes a lot of time and energy. 5 years or so of minimal competition gives Starbucks an edge, time to retrench or pull in a profit.
Old data, but a decade ago, I saw an independent coffee shop for sale for around $50k. Obviously, not everyone can afford to open one, but the barrier to entry is relatively low. Boeing and Airbus are too big to fail for the same reason: they're strategically important, no one else has the knowledge and expertise to build large passenger jets (Embraer and Bombardier might be able to do it in a pinch), and redeveloping this would take too long.
I think my retirement project is to start a traditional bread bakery somewhere, with a coffee shop in the front of the house. Bakeries typically peak hours are 4-7am and then coffee shops are 6-9am with a steady trickle of business 9am-7pm.
You're right, to run a coffee shop you need a table, two chairs, a cash register and an espresso machine. While traveling I ran across a coffee shop in an outdoor market that was just a wood-fired espresso machine on a cart hauled around with a donkey. The donkey didn't look super happy but the owner looked like they were doing ok for themselves.
Big businesses can increase their efficiency through lobbying, scale, money, and political favors. Most people in a broken economy will look for the cheapest than the best value. This will surely kill many indie businesses - just not completely destroy the term.
Not everyone though. It will always be easier to find a starbucks than a local coffee shop, but there will still be local coffee shops, because some people are always willing to pay a bit more for a heightened experience.
> Most people in a broken economy will look for the cheapest than the best value. This will surely kill many indie businesses
if the indie business has no value proposition, then market forces says they can't exist. It's not as if they are entitled to exist just because they are "indie".
As for coffee shops, if they can't make a latte better than starbucks, then they weren't going to survive anyway.
There's this one purely catering (Vietnamese) coffee "company" that has entirely pivoted to pop-ups the past few months, and using donations from customers to fund deliveries of coffees to hospitals and other front-line worker orgs.
I'm sure that not _every_ business can do this, but I've definitely enjoyed supporting this business in particular because I like their coffee, and I know it's supporting them and the community at least for now.
I think for some businesses they just won't be able to survive unless they can pivot. One way that I've seen is by giving up a brick and mortar location, moving to a shared/communal kitchen, and then doing pop-ups.
If this economic downturn helps put extortionist companies like Yelp out of business, bring it. The companies that survive or resurrect will be better off without them.
That's the free market. When things are booming, pigfuckers like yelp are free to seek rent and extort. When things go bad, hopefully yelp and yelp-like things go down with everyone else.
I don't wish unemployment on anyone who actually works for a living. But the C-suite and investors of companies like Yelp can take a dive, as far as I'm concerned.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadRestaurant/fastfood chains are preferred over local ones as well. I have no clue why (outside money, but cooking yourself is cheaper and nicer): if I wanted to eat plastic, I could just eat a garbage bag. But it is what it is.
Same goes for wine, beer etc; you fav craftbeer is probably owned by Heineken, while the local brewers are going out of business, even if their beer is far better.
Stimulating local businesses starts with completely cutting out the companies that own everything. People will never do that though for many reasons. It starts with money; without subsidising local companies by the gov, there is no way they can compete.
Edit: as I get downvoted, let me reformulate as I guess it reads different than I meant (not native English). I am curious why she doesn't like; my wife being a brewer has nothing to do with it.
The joke is that he is enjoying local brewers so much that he has gained a lot of weight or has some behavior changes due to increased alcohol intake that bother his wife :)
Cooking for myself costs me more per calorie than fast food, probably even more per meal, especially if I want it to be nicer.
Obviously there are cheaper fast food options than a Big Mac, and I've used average prices which doesn't help you, and I've assumed you're in the US, and I haven't accounted for things like fuel and water, but there's something seriously wrong with the market economics of where you live if fast food is really cheaper than cooking for yourself.
Ofcourse not counting time; counting time makes all cooking crazy costly, but yeah, it does so with a lot of other things as well; actual eating (fastfood or otherwise; why not a nutrients drip next to your computer?), going to the gym, shopping, cleaning, showering, going to the toilet and most people probably did not optimise any of those either.
I think you missed a subtle point though: Cooking takes time and energy, which you should not value at $0, unless you really enjoy cooking, in which case you probably don't eat at McDonald's a lot.
If you're not being paid for your time then the value is $0. Most people on HN are on salaries where the hours we work have no direct impact to what we earn.
I'm not suggesting there's no value in choosing what you should spend your time on, but rather that using some imaginary hourly wage to define it is stupid. There are much better ways to choose how to spend your time than dreaming up a threshold of "things that aren't worth $x/hour" vs "things that are worth $x/hour" because it will always end up being the boring, tiresome jobs that fall below that threshold even if they're actually useful or important.
I know a lot of people who claim they don't have time to cook or clean their houses or do gardening, and use the dollar value of their time as a reason. Most of them seem to have time to watch the latest Netflix shows or play videogames though. For some reason watching Stranger Things is apparently worth $100/hour.
Is it that simple?
When deciding whether to do something myself versus paying somebody else, I factor in the time taken multiplied by the pleasure or displeasure of doing the task myself, probably sometimes multiplied by the probability of the outcome being above or below ideal.
I’d therefore argue that my unpaid time does actually have a dollar value: it’s the amount I’d be willing to pay to not perform a task myself in that time. It’s complicated by the other factors, but a relationship still exists.
Now, if you like cooking, perhaps it is like leisure, perhaps it actually replenishes you. Otherwise, you might as well put a dollar value on it, because you are effectively working overtime.
Another way to look at it is that you're really using dollars as a way to better manage your time. Let's say you work 8 hours a day, but you put in another 2 hours into learning something new, maybe a side business, anything that isn't just leisure. Of course that doesn't translate directly into a salary, but the expected value is not zero dollars.
There's always the argument "the town won't be the same if they're gone". That's true, but change isn't bad, it's just different.
You have no idea. The impact on the US small business market will dwarf corona, and last for decades.
Millions of small businesspersons will either lose their stake (the capital to maintain or start a business) or just retire.
This is an existential crisis for US society and culture - really the death of the American Dream.
TARP saved the small and medium auto suppliers, but I don't see any easy way to get out of this spiral.
At some point, the system will run out of suckers who put their lifeblood into a venture rather than a cozy job.
Small businesses struggle because people are too poor to afford anything more than cheap crap at Walmart and McDonalds. We should focus on providing basics to all americans instead of getting upset when the pop-up barbecue ice cream truck doesn't make any money and went under when people's health became more important than someone's life long "dream" to become a barista at their own cafe.
As much as it may be unpleasant, it may be beneficial for employment to help hedge funds with a lot of cash snap these up to prevent them and the associated jobs from disappearing entirely.
I’d love to have a side hustle brick and mortar biz alongside my day job.
But it would be fun.
If I was rich, I'd personally buy a super market, simply because they do so many things that annoy me as a customer and I'd like to try and change them and see whether one can do better.
Yes your local coffee shop might have some quirks compared to a local Starbucks but their lack of efficiency is not on the store per se, rather than Starbucks has: a) bigger leverage in rents b) effective lower corporate tax c) more streamlined supply chains
And then you think, why are not people buying mom and pop shops and running them independently with high efficiency? Because it is hard
Great TV show.
Closing business have creditors most of the time. You can't really buy them.
And barely profitable includes businesses that would have spent a ton on capital expenditures. If those expenditures can be had for cheap, profits can increase.
Like, maybe Starbucks traffic is down 20% or whatever, but if 50% of their competition (independent coffeeshops) permanently close, they'll be better set up for success in the 5 years to come, and this accounts for their current relatively strong valuation.
(obviously even stronger in the case of AMZN, but even Target and Wal-Mart are benefitting from being allowed to stay open, while a lot of their competition was shut down -- speciality stores like salons and clothing stores were closed, but big-box stores selling everything stayed open)
indie coffee shops will come again. Starbucks coffee is basically the mcdonalds of restaurants - no real flavour and too much sugar imho. It's good, consistent, but not top notch quality.
Indie coffee shops are usually run by people who are passionate about making the best cup. This downturn will kill some of them - but i'm sure they will eventually return.
Old data, but a decade ago, I saw an independent coffee shop for sale for around $50k. Obviously, not everyone can afford to open one, but the barrier to entry is relatively low. Boeing and Airbus are too big to fail for the same reason: they're strategically important, no one else has the knowledge and expertise to build large passenger jets (Embraer and Bombardier might be able to do it in a pinch), and redeveloping this would take too long.
That… feels like a better explanation of Boeing’s recent quality issues than the other excuses I’ve heard on HN.
You're right, to run a coffee shop you need a table, two chairs, a cash register and an espresso machine. While traveling I ran across a coffee shop in an outdoor market that was just a wood-fired espresso machine on a cart hauled around with a donkey. The donkey didn't look super happy but the owner looked like they were doing ok for themselves.
Big businesses can increase their efficiency through lobbying, scale, money, and political favors. Most people in a broken economy will look for the cheapest than the best value. This will surely kill many indie businesses - just not completely destroy the term.
if the indie business has no value proposition, then market forces says they can't exist. It's not as if they are entitled to exist just because they are "indie".
As for coffee shops, if they can't make a latte better than starbucks, then they weren't going to survive anyway.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23923172
I'm sure that not _every_ business can do this, but I've definitely enjoyed supporting this business in particular because I like their coffee, and I know it's supporting them and the community at least for now.
I think for some businesses they just won't be able to survive unless they can pivot. One way that I've seen is by giving up a brick and mortar location, moving to a shared/communal kitchen, and then doing pop-ups.
You can't really compared a startup with a bakery.
That's the free market. When things are booming, pigfuckers like yelp are free to seek rent and extort. When things go bad, hopefully yelp and yelp-like things go down with everyone else.
I don't wish unemployment on anyone who actually works for a living. But the C-suite and investors of companies like Yelp can take a dive, as far as I'm concerned.