Subway surprise!

[ceagle]

Holy Moley..! Subway December special ... TWO DOLLARS for a Cold Cut Combo!! 8| *boggle* Isn't that what it was, like, 20 years ago??

Comments

[torakiyoshi.livejournal.com]

The problem is, it's not the restaurants that are dictating the prices. I worked in a locally owned restaurant where the customer base was dwindling because he had to raise prices. I asked him about it, and my boss explained why he did it. In order for a restaurant to survive, 25% of its daily income should go to food costs. The remainder goes to paying staff, purchasing non-food items like service containers, cookware, paying the rent, insurance, utilities (which are much higher for commercial entities than individuals), license fees, permits, security systems, delivery costs, taxes (income tax due monthly for businesses, and wage taxes for employees), support services like accounting -- and somewhere in there, he has to have his own income, too, so he can pay for his home, utilities, insurance... you get the idea. A good restauranteur will take home around 10% of his daily income, but since the recession has gone on long enough that it finally is effecting restaurants, usually one of the last businesses to really feel the impact, most of them are doing well to bring home 5%.

As for food cost, again, everyone complained about the price of the chicken going up, so that a chicken breast was $3. Mind you, these were chicken-zilla breasts, each one weighing in at a pound or more. Bob was buying them at a rate of $3 per pound, so when you add in the cost of wages for the cook and cashier, utilities for the friers, oil to fry in, and all of those other daily costs, how much money was Bob making on that chicken breast? And could he really afford to lower his prices any?

Where we need to change things, is it needs to go back into the hands of local farmers. Food prices are driven up by these megacorp farms and their genetically modified, growth-hormone enhanced, semi-synthetic food supplies, who are driving the farmers out of business. Don't believe me? Go to the farmer's market and see the prices for veggies, then go to the grocery store and see the prices for the same item, from Con-Agra or Monsanto (or a private farm controlled by the same). Farm subsidies are being modified by the megafarms, and seed stocks are being replaced by GMO seed owned and licensed by the same, so guess what local farmers have to do with their prices, to pay for the expensive new seeds, which, by the way, are specially hybridized to be sterile, and even those that aren't, there are laws in place that farmers can't set back seed from copyrighted hybrid strains! So it's raise the prices or die, and most farmers are dying. In India, which is ahead of us in the same game thanks to none other than Con-Agra, that's literally the case where the suicide rate among farmers has skyrocketed by thousands of percent.

All of this to say that the price of raw food is the major contributor in setting prices at restaurants. Subway and Round Table would love to lower their prices-- but if they do, they'll be closing their doors. They, too, have to raise their prices to survive.