According to Business Week, restaurants have a 25% dissolution rate within one year, rising to 60% within in 3 years. This is apparently in line with other small businesses. http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/apr2007/sb20070416_296932.htm?chan=smallbiz_special+report+--+getting+started_special+report
Other small businesses:
Firms can dissolve for many reasons: most closures do not involve formal bankruptcy.
There’s an Inn, in the beautiful countryside, that has been a restaurant for decades. It’s changed hands half a dozen times and the last incarnation was moderately priced French cuisine. Being this town is a red-sauce-on-pasta town, we had never HAD any French food and planned on going there for a weekday lunch. I looked for the website to get directions and found it was CLOSED, with an explanation. I can’t recall the exact wording, but basically it was a great, big, snotty, petulant, foot-stamping EFF YOU to the public, thanks for nothing, and they were taking their ball and going home. I felt kind of bad, for them for folding so soon, and me and my friend who had planned that lunch…closest I’ve gotten to French food is a can of Progresso, with broiled cheese bread in it…
It’s not on me to support my market. The market exists to serve MY needs, if it cannot do so then I will find the market that can. I would suggest the former manager look up the definition of the term “Up-sell”.
I’ll jump on the egg bandwagon: Unless those eggs have actual gold in them, I’m not paying 8 bucks a dozen for them.
Amen. And they need to look up “basic capitalism” too while at it.
I might be willing to pay that much; I don’t eat that many eggs. Usually, I wind up throwing away the last three or four of a carton away after two or three months. At that price, however, they’d better be the best eggs I’ve ever had in my life, and the other diners at my table should be wondering why the carton’s legs are sticking out from under the tablecloth and I’ve an odd smile on my face.
(BTW, this is the exact same sentence of the Birdseye spot where Orson Welles bit the engineer’s nose off)
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[QUOTE=spark240]
's a difference you can see from the color of the yolks.
[/QUOTE]
Nope. The color of the yolks depends on what the poultry was fed with, and producers have long ago figured out what to add to the feed (regardless how crappy it is) to get a nice orange-colored yolk, for instance.
It’s true that tastier yolks exists, but I rarely have found any, free range or not. I’ve even once tested up to five different eggs (from the lowest priced to the “high end”) and didn’t notice much of a difference in taste.
The almost unique exceptions have been eggs from people raising, say, a couple dozen hens eating tasty earthworms in the meadow behind the house along with maize or such things.
YMMV
You fucking selfish douchebags and your unwillingness to pay three or four the going price for something that some hard working person is bringing into your neighborhood. You should be ashamed of yourselves. Next thing you know you’ll be clipping coupons and shit like that.
I believe the important part of that post was that the person was a long time store owner who had actually tried to stay open, but, due to the changing market, could not do so. The age only comes in because you can’t really have owned a business for very long and be in your twenties. (At least, I don’t believe a kid is allowed to own a business.)
I think the store manager was unable to make the distinction between selling quality goods and selling expensive goods. You can run a business charging more than your competitors but you’re going to have to deliver more than your competitors. People aren’t going to pay higher prices just for the sake of paying them.
It’s not a scientific study by any means, but it still convinces me enough to believe that there isn’t a whole lot of difference:
Yeah, the Chicago Tribune featured a blindfolded egg taste test, and the results were all over the board. The tester interviewed a poultry scientist, who said that hens are masters at processing damned near any food and producing the same egg out of it, barring some color changes in the yolk if they’re eating marigolds or something. Buy eggs based on your purchasing preferences, but the taste almost certainly isn’t going to be affected much, if at all.
This is what I was trying to say earlier. Thank you. You can also get away with selling higher priced goods if you offer service, for some customers. I have mentioned my love for The Container Store (chain) and my local comic book shop. In both places, I get assistance to find whatever it is that I’m looking for…and I also get assistance in finding things that I wasn’t looking for, but which will appeal to me. I can get the same products in other stores. However, by making it easier for me to find things, and by helping me decide which products/books might fit my needs, both places have ensured that I’ll return. I enjoy shopping at those stores, it’s a pleasant experience for me. And both places carry a variety of things that I’m likely to need or want.
Yes. And a natural, healthy diet for chickens, which necessarily includes plants and insects they find for themselves outdoors, results in darker and richer colors, and better flavors, than factory-farm methods.
Have they? Well, they’re not doing it for most factory-farmed supermarket eggs. Every time I have occasion to see one of those, the difference is unmistakable, to my eyes accustomed to the good ones. (I had hens myself until three years ago, and buy local farm eggs now.)
In any event, no feed additive is going to make factory eggs taste like good farm eggs.
It is a matter of the conditions. Antibiotics are used in factory systems to keep down the infections which are pervasive when thousands of animals are kept confined together without enough sunlight, fresh air or activity. After standard initial immunizations, well-kept chickens usually don’t need any other medicine in their lives. If a fluke infection appears, the most cost-effective response is usually to just kill the afflicted birds immediately.
But that’s exactly what I’m talking about. That’s what real free-range is. Birds that don’t have such routine access to the outdoors and the ability to find food for themselves aren’t genuinely free-ranging, and thus aren’t natural, healthy chickens.
There are farms that produce on the order of a thousand eggs a day by such methods. Salatin’s Polyface Farm, described in The Omnivore’s Dilemma is one such, here in Virginia.
clairobscur, what you call a “unique exception” is a real egg. Accept nothing less.
“If you came in only for baguettes, the occasional piece of cheese, the occasional dinner . . . you can not tell yourself you were a supporter of our market."
Wow, the ungratefulness of this statement is more palpable than those $8 a dozen eggs they were selling. If they would have taken care of the customers who came in and bought the occasional treat, then some of these customers would have begun shopping there for more of their grocery needs.
It is on the business owner to breed customer loyalty. No one can just be expected to be loyal to a business. You have to give them a reason to shop there - something you offer that is beyond and above what other stores offer. Otherwise, why would they come back?
This lady is ridiculously delusional, jaded, bitter, etc.
And in the particular case of this shop, they had to compete with better foodie shops in the neighborhood. Formaggios, for example, isn’t run by assholes. It’s well-liked, long-established in the area, and has a mix of expensive fancy imported bits along with some more reasonably priced stuff. When I was in the area it was where I went to blow money on ingredients for a nice dinner. And because most of their basic groceries weren’t overpriced, I picked some other stuff up to save a trip to the regular grocery store.
Free range chickens often fall victim to free range hawks, not to mention free range snakes that love to eat free range eggs that are laid in free range nests. Of course, if you have free range chicken shepherds to lead your free range chickens out to the free range every morning, protect them all day from free range predators and drive them home and into their air conditioned hen house every night, the yield of free range eggs might increase slightly, as might the price of such eggs, say to around $15.00 per dozen. Of course, one way to control predation is to kill a few hawks and tie their bodies to posts driven into the ground in the free range of the chickens; hawks will generally avoid areas that give rise to dead hawks. Or, one can simply build very large pens that include wire ‘roofs’ for lack of a better term which necessarily limits the size of the free range available to the chickens. And free range snakes will continue to be a problem; snakes aren’t deterred by standard size wire fences. I seriously doubt that one receives what one thinks one is paying for any time the words ‘free range chickens’ and/or ‘free range eggs’ are used in the sales literature. And in any case, I seriously doubt the nutritional value of said eggs and/or said chickens are much improved over the factory farm produced versions. I dislike chickens on a personal level and that dislike was incurred as a result of forced childhood association with the damned smelly fowl.
What? 
$8 a dozen eggs are laid at the store. You get to watch them lay the eggs going into your purchase.