SOCIAL MEDIA: Stages of the Avocado, Fake Butter, Golem Sewing, the New X-Men Movie, and More!
Welcome to May, everyone! In this week’s batch of restaurant memes includes the annoying stages of the avocado, grief stages with the help of “butter”, trouble falling asleep, the lies about sandwiches and more!
DID YOU KNOWS…
Instagram Reservations
Did you know that you can let guests book reservations at your locations via Instagram? We don’t blame you if you didn’t. IG hasn’t put a lot of marketing effort behind the feature it rolled out last year. The jury is out on how useful the feature is, but it may be worth it if you’re IG is your best social media account.
The Cheetos Cookie
Love Cheetos? Love cookies? Well, someone has invented the Cheetos Cookies, so you can have the best of both words. It even leaves your fingers orange like you’re eating Cheetos. The inventor calls this “most important” but we always thought that was its biggest drawback.
Fast Food Gone Wrong
Delivering food to hungry home-diners is a pretty routine and mundane task, but once in a while things go a little… sideways. Here are some of weirdest delivery stories – from swingers to stoners to so much nudity.
NYC SURCHARGE FEE
Why it matters to you: A group representing more than 100 restaurateurs are proposing a surcharge fee for diners.
New York is the big leagues for restaurants and restaurateurs. New York is also a very expensive place to have to pay rent, so it should come as no surprise when a large group of restaurants are proposing a 3 to 5% surcharge for diners on their tabs. The group says that this is a response to nine mandated wage increases over the past several years with one more (minimum wage to $15) in 2019. They’d like to impose a clearly disclosed surcharge to generate the revenue although NYC is already the most expensive city to dine in-in many categories. One other upside is that many in the group aim to use this surcharge to help implement the end of tipping. They claim that tips lead to sexual harassment, which we definitely see being part of the issue.
Will this surcharge keep these restaurants’ doors open as a whole and end sexual harassment? No. Will it help? Hopefully. Restaurants are a large part of the tourism industry in New York so they certainly must be helped to stay afloat though, if the prices keep going up, normal humans will be lucky to even be able to keep roofs over their heads let alone dine out at Nobu. Hopefully some middle ground can be reached.
There’s also nothing stopping these NYC restaurants from implementing the surcharge themselves, other than many operators fear of out-pricing themselves with diners. And in an all-ready expensive city, we can’t blame them. A city-wide surcharge accomplishes the same goals but keeps the playing field level among all restaurants.
LA FOOD: CAN’T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG
Why it matters to you: LA is planning to work out a compromise between business owners and street food vendors.
If you’ve ever been to Los Angeles (the real parts, not Hollywood), you’ve seen endless taco trucks, guys pushing around hand carts selling Mexican fruit salad, and many other options all over the place. You can find some truly great meals out of these carts if you aren’t afraid of street meat. We’ve had some of the best late-night food of our lives out of a burrito truck at a gas station. Strange right?
One of the biggest issues Los Angeles has to resolve is the street vendors stepping on toes and poaching the actual restaurants’ business. The city will ultimately have to side with actual tax paying vendors and restaurants if it hits the fan so in order to not completely kill the street food scene they must carefully craft the ordinance of compromise within the given 60 days. They must decide what this compromise will look like and they aim to try and please both sides if possible. We worry that this will put many out of business due to sanitation issues and ICE raids, so it will be up to those lawmakers to ensure that this isn’t just a roundabout way of deporting people and that it actually does aim to help them. Decriminalizing street vending is a great start though, it certainly shouldn’t make anyone be considered a criminal.
This fight is very far from over but hopefully will ease tensions between brick & mortar restaurants and street vendors. It would be a tragedy if the LA street food scene was majorly altered. We will always support the restaurants, but in a city with such a thriving and unique street food scene, the city and industry must reach a middle ground on these issues.
