The elderly keep many disappointing restaurants afloat.
There’s a place by my house that has aggressively mediocre food. Every dish on the menu is merely edible, nothing to rave about. The sphaghetti tasted like Chef Boyardee, the steaks are under seasoned, the fish is overcooked, burgers are decent but always dry, gyro platter and sandwich are served with watery tzatziki that ruins the otherwise pre prepared meat, and the entire breakfast menu is always served just slightly warm. This place has like 150 menu items and does none of them well.
The only reason I go there is because I take my grandfather out for dinner twice a month. I ask him where he wants to go, and half the time he wants to go there. I have taken him to good restaurants but he doesn’t like the selection. He wants to be able to pick from 200 choices in one spot, even if none of these are particularly good.
I think it’s mostly just that they’re cheap to operate. They don’t require fancy ingredients. Their menu is limited. They need a few people to run the fryers, take orders, and clean the tables, and that’s about it. They haven’t changed the decor in decades. The buildings were paid off ages ago. And the property taxes are dirt cheap because the only thing sitting on the land is a Long John Silvers. If they don’t cost much to operate, and enough people come in to keep the lights on, why not let them run their natural course? Sure, a LJS seems dead compared to the newest flashy restaurant in town, but that new restaurant has a ruinously expensive lease and a loan for hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment it needs to pay off. And the menu is 3x as complicated with much more expensive ingredients. The newer restaurant is hopping because if it’s not hopping, it quickly closes down. It’s only these dinosaurs that can keep operating even with low customer throughput.
The elderly keep many disappointing restaurants afloat.
There’s a place by my house that has aggressively mediocre food. Every dish on the menu is merely edible, nothing to rave about. The sphaghetti tasted like Chef Boyardee, the steaks are under seasoned, the fish is overcooked, burgers are decent but always dry, gyro platter and sandwich are served with watery tzatziki that ruins the otherwise pre prepared meat, and the entire breakfast menu is always served just slightly warm. This place has like 150 menu items and does none of them well.
The only reason I go there is because I take my grandfather out for dinner twice a month. I ask him where he wants to go, and half the time he wants to go there. I have taken him to good restaurants but he doesn’t like the selection. He wants to be able to pick from 200 choices in one spot, even if none of these are particularly good.
I think it’s mostly just that they’re cheap to operate. They don’t require fancy ingredients. Their menu is limited. They need a few people to run the fryers, take orders, and clean the tables, and that’s about it. They haven’t changed the decor in decades. The buildings were paid off ages ago. And the property taxes are dirt cheap because the only thing sitting on the land is a Long John Silvers. If they don’t cost much to operate, and enough people come in to keep the lights on, why not let them run their natural course? Sure, a LJS seems dead compared to the newest flashy restaurant in town, but that new restaurant has a ruinously expensive lease and a loan for hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment it needs to pay off. And the menu is 3x as complicated with much more expensive ingredients. The newer restaurant is hopping because if it’s not hopping, it quickly closes down. It’s only these dinosaurs that can keep operating even with low customer throughput.