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Comment by wil421 | Hacker News Reader

A bit of advice from someone who was in the restaurant industry for 7 years. Don’t start a restaurant especially if you work in tech. 80-100 hours a week for managers and owners is mandatory.

Tech is easy money compared to what it takes to create a profitable restaurant from scratch. The author made the same mistake I’ve seen people make before.

This guy did no research at all and sadly this is extremely common.

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I've done both restaurants and tech. I had to think for a really long time which one to focus on. It just so happened that the startup hype kicked in around that time.

Tech is mentally exhausting. Really short but painful hours. Food & beverage is not exactly tiring, but the hours are very long. With tech consulting, you might be working 4-6 hours a day, with restaurants, expect around 14 hours/day. One involves a lot of slow, deep work, the other involves lots of rapid, shallow work.

With tech, you can get away with 0 employees, and everyone you hire is smarter than you. With restaurants, you regularly hire idiots who sleep while at work, don't show up, can't read simple instructions, steal from the charity jar. It's highly frustrating. It also drains a huge cut from your daily sales, which might seem like a lot until you look at profits.

It's really tempting to do a restaurant, because it's sort of "stable" source of income. But tech is much better and once you get tired of it all, you can just sell everything off at a higher price.

> With tech consulting, you might be working 4-6 hours a day

... huh? Which tech company is this?

I assume he’s subtracting the “work” time spent on long lunches, web browsing, and general BS.

Most software companies. And 4-6 hours is optimistic. Actual productive time for most people is more around 3-4 hours per day.

Breakfast prep starts at 6am, maybe 4am if you are baking. In a restaurant lights out might be midnight, later for a bar. Which staff do you trust with free access to the thousands of dollars of liquor, food and property? Do you stay closed for two days a week?

It doesn't help with inventory loss, but these days I think I would try to run a non cash business - credit cards only.

Can you elaborate on why?

To keep employees from walking off with the cash.

Is this really that a factor with 24/7 surveillance and legal repercussions for theft? I mean...you're making it sound like it is, and I believe you but it's just so hard to people employees are that stupid.

Yes it's a big factor. Walmart employees, watched by 37 cameras from right over their heads, will still steal cash from the purchase flow. For an organization their size, it's a big problem. You can guess the kind of people you often get for $11 per hour, when you need a million of them (ie 1% stealing means you've got 10,000 people stealing from you).

Not much has actually changed regarding this structurally, the surveillance has been there for 30 years and the legal aspect forever. Desperate and or stupid people, do desperate and stupid things. What has changed, is Walmart now has dramatically less cash flowing through it at the point of sales (due to cards or Walmart Pay et al). Merchandise theft is by far the bigger problem these days for Walmart. The same goes for places like liquor stores (which used to be an extremely cash heavy business, but now are mostly cards).

What if Walmart paid more than $11/hr to decrease the immediate incentive?

This should be easy to study in Seattle and other "Fight for $15" cities as the higher minimum wage is phased in.

If you increase everyone's wages the quality of employees across the board won't change. If you increase your wages, while other employers' wages stay the same, you'll get better applicants.

I think the argument is if you raise someone's income above a living wage, you reduce their incentive to steal.

But if you raise all wages, all prices go up, so you never get there.

Not sure where you got this idea. Has that ever happened?

In a word: yes.

I'd run a virtual restaurant, sell only on Grubhub/Doordash/etc, at least to start with.

I know a lot of really experienced bartenders, waitstaff, etc and was in the industry for years. No one you'd want to hire would work at a place that didn't do cash tips, unless we're talking super duper fine dining black tie stuff. And possibly even then.

EDIT: I've also known of places that switched to cashless have all their good staff quit, and be stuck with only completely useless people

Every study I've seen shows that people spend and tip more when they are using credit cards than cash. Do high and mid income earners walk around cash and use it a lot at any place but strip clubs?

Depends on whether it's a bar or restaurant.

I'd tend to agree at restaurants (anecdotally). But, when I tip at a bar with cash, it's a buck a drink, even when it's a 2 dollar coors light. If I pay with credit card, the 20% thinking kicks in and that's what I tip. 40 cents on a 2 dollar beer.

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