Having invested in this business before, the margin is entirely in alcohol. Typical drink costs <50p and sold for >20x. Food has nowhere near those margins given the labor and materials required.
Yeah no idea what that part is about. The margins are absolutely in the alcohol, and the food is to get you to spend longer sitting there drinking with friends.
Some pubs successfully transition into a sort of trendy, highly publicized concept restaurant which charges a premium for food and essentially attracts well off restaurant customers who tend to drink more than average. I think that might be the model he had in mind. Most pubs won't be able to do this however as the market for it is only so big and it will tend to alienate their regular customer base.
Doesn't it depend on the absolute amount of profit per customer per hour?
For instance, if a person goes out and has 3 beers over two hours at $6 each, say the profit is $5 per beer or $15.
Instead if that person comes in and orders a meal for $30, with a 50% margin, he's made the same amount and likely didn't stay as long. Basically food is more absolute profit per customer per hour. And you get the benefit of not dealing with drunk people. That's why they they often don't let you take a table if you're not ordering food.
A 50% margin on a meal is enormous. Expect single digits. Food requires someone to cook it, a lot more storage, a lot more tools and dishes and what not.
I've worked in serval bar kitchens where the food was a loss leader and basically only there to allow the business to more easily aquire a liquor license.
Fair enough. The customer may order some soft-drinks or alcohol drinks at the bar. Also I hear deserts are high margin. My point is that relative margin is not the thing you would want to optimize on. You'd want to maximize profit per customer per hour.
His point still stands. Your original estimate of the margin was just not realistic.
This obviously varies depending on many factors, but when you factor in labor, ingredients, equipment etc. 10% is a good margin on food. In your hypothetical example the customer who came in, had a meal and nothing else, and then left earned the pub $3 in profit. Someone who has a few drinks in the same amount of time will usually generate more profit.
A bit OT but American English is becoming very popular over here in the UK. It's very common to see z instead of s in words for example. I wouldn't be surprised to see the u dropped at all.
I grew up here in the US saying "zee". It's only now, in my wiser years, that I'm realizing the obvious: with "bee", "cee", and "dee" (amongst others) all sounding similar-ish already that we really ought to embrace "zed" for clarity.
Why add another consonant to the name of a consonant? Literally the only letter that's like that.
Americans and the British (and a couple billion other people) share a language that is spelled like shit. We should steal simplifications from each other as much as possible.
It's because the English alphabet is not a phonetic lettering system. If I were American I'd:
a) start saying "t" in the middle of a word as a "t" instead of a "d", and
b) vastly improve the standard of my spelling and those around me
before telling anyone, especially British people, that words shouldn't be spelt "like shit".
Personally, I'm with the Arguments against reform section of Wikipedia[1]:
> English is a West Germanic language that has borrowed many words from non-Germanic languages, and the spelling of a word often reflects its origin. This sometimes gives a clue as to the meaning of the word. Even if their pronunciation has strayed from the original pronunciation, the spelling is a record of the phoneme.
Which is how I can usually guess the correct pronunciation and meaning of an unfamiliar word while I see highly educated Americans butcher the pronunciation of anything outside the common vernacular. These "simplifications" are doing anything but.
However:
> Another criticism is that a reform may favor one dialect or pronunciation over others, creating a standard language
If I could force North Americans to speak better then I might be persuaded.
> a) start saying "t" in the middle of a word as a "t" instead of a "d"
Americans do not have a distinction between intervocalic /t/ and intervocalic /d/. (Though you have to be careful - that analysis requires you to commit to a "syllabic /n/" model of words like "kitten".)
But while /t/ and /d/ are pronounced identically in that context, you can't say that /t/ is being pronounced "as /d/". They are both flapped, which is a sound just as distinct from [d] as it is from [t].
I'm an American, but I use "zed" over "zee" in some contexts (such as ham radio) because "zee" is too easily confusable with the other letters it rhymes with: bee, see, dee, gee, pee, tee. It's definitely an advantage. And you don't have to drop into NATO phonetic with its multiple syllables per letter.
More people in the world say “zee” than “zed”. I’m surprised to hear a British person wants to sound like they’re French. (I’m just kidding as I hope you are about beating children)
Whatever the internet tells you about what is "standard"... as someone who has spent his life in New Zealand, I can assure you the majority of under-30s usually use "zee". "Zed" is on its way out.
It probably started with the popularity things like Sesame Street and Dragon Ball Z (Dragon Ball Zee).
However, interestingly, the one time everyone uses "zed" is when we acronymise the country name -- NZ, or N-Zed.
You've given a figure that is around a third of the entire population of the United States, so I think I'm on safe ground, even taking into account the Indian government's well known inability at accurate record taking, but thanks for the list, Pakistan has "187,758,480" under English speakers. No chance of them saying "zee".
Thanks to India, more people in the world say "w" like "v" but I feel safe knowing that Indians have a better accent and better spelling than anyone in North America, and I would never joke about anything this serious.
> Maybe adapting to internationalized (American at this point) English.
I suggest that in the highly unlikely event this is true that we (the rest of the properly educated British) hunt this person down and dispose of them. After imposing a number of spelling tests first, of course.
As an expat Brit who has been living with ESL speakers for over a decade and gotten sloppy on many of these things, some part of me lives in constant fear of exactly this eventuality.
Tamade doesn’t sound in anyway like a Chinese username (maybe Japanese phonetically, but that could easily be a coincidence), but I would let them speak for themselves.
> Tamade doesn’t sound in anyway like a Chinese username
Context is pretty much everything; the only Chinese username I can more or less reel off from memory is '基妮真特么老油条... sabibibi', and I may be forgetting parts of it, but certainly there's plenty of swearing.
Not that I can claim to understand the business model at all, but usually people that buy food are buying drinks too. You ought to happily make a loss on food if it is guaranteed to be exceeded by increased drink sales.
That's how it used to be, but from what I understand, cheap alcohol from supermarkets has shrunk volumes to levels where overall profits are thinner than in food.
