Economics of Life in F&B

The relationship between service vendor, serviced customer, and support staff (read: managers) is one of an economic nature. One may humanise it by admitting that each must know their part, in order for the economy to proceed.

I prefer to be an administrator. But when service provision sucks, I must demonstrate superior service provision. And when the market is tasteless, I must demonstrate superior taste. I do not get to do what I want to do, because the market is weak. If I make the market stronger, maybe then someday I can get back to having fun.

On Turow's

"Why are millenials so obsessed with food?"

TLDR: the Internet changed how people communicate.

"You can’t get a job, you can’t get a date without branding yourself properly on, you know, whatever app you’re using. You don’t really understand how the Internet works or how your phone works, but food is something you can break down. "

Unfortunately, I have too much control. And that is why I still fall back to my lazy 10-year-old-self's plan of working in an "easy" industry, where my competitive advantage is magnified (the higher the complexity of the business, the better my competitive advantage, because I'm more willing than most to engage with complexities). And I still don't care about taste - foods, fashions, musics. I have preferences, but they are not a deep part of my identity. Closer to home is the ability to manipulate how people think about these things - that's much more interesting. But ultimately I'd just want to take profit and have a nice cosy place to study math.

I always wonder - if I am completely deluded, and we will burn up like a firefly. Psshht. The end. But we have not even begun.

Cafe Quips

what would you say are the three biggest lessons you learnt since starting this project?

Let's see now.

1. There's a particular plumbing design pattern that funnels all sinks in a shop through a single grease trap. Now I know how it gets done (it's actually just the most obvious, but time-consuming, way).

2. There are, easily accessible, a large number of materials engineering outfits ("workshops") that could support product R&D + manufacturing initiatives, to ride on the weak Ringgit. I'd like to find time to get into that.

3. I can vendor in the entire (coffee market leader) pastry fridge... they do wholesale. LOL

WTF summary:

Who puts 14.4 kiloWatts of air-conditioning in a front-of-house that's smaller than the kitchen of the outlet?!