Let’s say you went into a little seaside diner feeling peckish, and saw that they had a menu item that read: “2 slices of buttered toast”.
Sounds okay, yes? (I’m going with “normal-person peckish” and not “American peckish” which would apparently require the entire loaf to satisfy that hunger pang.)
Then you see the price: $5.00 for the two slices of buttered toast.
Ripoff? Let’s analyze the thing.
I’m going to give the diner the benefit of the doubt here, and allow their claim that this isn’t Wonderbread and store-label butter, but a “premium” offering. I’m also, for the purpose of the analysis, going to allow that they purchased the ingredients thereof at retail prices (they didn’t).
Our diner, by the way, would be located in the equivalent of coastal Florida, up in the Redneck Riviera.
So using my local gourmet store (Central Market) as a price guide, let’s look at the thing:
Let’s see what the unit cost is. Assuming you’re doing thick-ish (e.g. “not-quite-Texan”) slice size, you’re going to get about 16 slices out of that loaf, assuming that we discard the ends, of course. So: $5 / 16 = 31.25 cents ($0.3125) per slice; or 62.5 cents in total for the two.
Now the butter: even assuming you slather the butter on like I typically do, you’re still going to use about 1/32oz per slice, ergo ending up with (8x 32 = 256; 398 / 256 = about 1.5 cents per slice or 3 cents for the menu item.
Total “cost”: (31.25 + 1.5) x 2 = 65.5 cents ($0.655) for the two slices of buttered toast.
Now for the tricky bit.
Restaurants, from back when I still managed one, typically have had to mark up “cost” by 600% just to break even. (Don’t even get me started on whether that’s the case in NYfC or Califuckingfornia: it isn’t.) This takes into account fixed overhead like salaries, supplies & equipment, utilities, real estate and so on (i.e. what it costs your diner each day before you get a single customer in the door).
So the extended cost of that 2-slice item works out to (errr carry the six) $3.93, before adding a single penny for gross profit. (And just so we’re clear: $5 from $3.93 represents about 27% gross profit — I know, don’t make me laugh.)
Is $5, therefore, a total ripoff?
Not from where I stand, and this kind of analysis explains why you have to take your bank manager along to 5 Guys every time you visit them to get you and your wife a burger.
Here’s the article that prompted this post.
And Fuck Joe Biden, because about three years ago that $5 loaf of bread at Central Market used to cost $2.85, and the $4 butter about $2.75 (because I keep track of this kind of thing, even though the Gummint would prefer that I forget that the chocolate ration used to be 5 grams and not three).
[/Orwell]
