> But the restaurant industry fights to limit food trucks. On average, food trucks must handle 45 separate regulatory procedures and spend $28,276 on associated fees.
Lets napkin-math this. If we assume a food truck has margins at the upper end of the fast-casual industry of 9%, then each $18 burger-and-fries nets 1.62 in profit.
$28,276 / 1.62 = 17,454 burgers-and-fries.
If you were open every day of the year and assume no seasonality, that means your first 49 orders every day go just to regulatory fees.
And that doesn't cover any of the other fees and expenses a food truck might have.
Those are brutal economics. I'm impressed it's only $18!
> If you were open every day of the year and assume no seasonality, that means your first 49 orders every day go just to regulatory fees.
This looks crazy because it is incorrect. In your premise, that 9% profit margin includes the regulatory costs for a brick and mortar restaurant already. The only way your logic works out is if truck regulations are on average $30k more expensive than a regular building, which they almost certainly are not.
You can’t even begin to do the calculation without knowing the breakdown underlying the profit margin you cite.
Yea, if people are thinking you can just grab a truck and park it wherever you like, they are in for a big wake up call. The last city I lived in had the brick restaurant owners lobby and fight like hell to stack up every regulation they could on food trucks.
Dude when industry wide margins are considered it's net margin. Gross margin on food is typically 70%. Of course, that margin does still get eaten up by a million things and the business is still brutal but they're definitely making gross margin of way more han $1.62 on burgers.
I think you missed the whole point of the story about being able to open up a micro-eatery in front of your home. You know, where you live and want to build up a community. Back when we used to be great, didn't we idolize the local bar where everyone knows your name? That's what these neighborhood shops are.
No one wants to go where you'll be poisoned through food contamination. Food safety regulations are a good thing. But when you try to apply the same regulations to a 150-patrons-per-hour fast food operation as you do to a 4 seat neighborhood micro-eatery, well, you're claiming they all have the same 1-size-fits-all risk profile and the end result is you make an entire class of entrepreneurship unattainable. That's not freedom, that's restriction.
Having lived in 3rd world I do find food safety regulations to be a bad thing. You can get sick as rarely as you do in regulated countries by following some simple rules in places without regulations. I go to places where I can watch the food being prepared. And make sure it is hot when you eat it. Simple things like this.
I have not gotten sick in places like Syria, Iraq, Philippines, etc any more than I do in the US by following simple rules. Yes you have to pay attention but to be honest, you should be applying these rules in USA too, because food inspector and zoning mostly there to protect big business through barrier of entry; they don't actually do that good a job of inspecting or enforcing the rules.
The plus here is in places without these regulation the street is full of these tasty food vendors, even more than Japan. It is well worth the lack of safety regulations.
Usually there's a bodies-in-the-streets phase... guillotine was theatrical, bolsheviks called it the red terror, nazis were well the nazis, italians strung em up on meathooks, tienamin used tanks (after the famines), baltics did straight up ethnic cleansings, last week iranians gunned down thousands corralled in the squares.
Luckily we're still only in the "kidnap and beat-up by the secret police" phase, haven't had the mass executions yet. Only a singular execution here and there.
> I’m glad to be a bystander and not participant, that’s for sure.
Hope that's because you're not in the USA. USA-based bystanders is how this shit happens.
It's "eh, we haven't gotten to this problem yet, lets just see where the possibilities take us (and our hype) first before we start to put in limits and constraints." All gas / no brakes and such.
Safety standards are written in blood. We just haven't had a big enough hack to justify spending time on this. I'm sure some startup out there is building a LLM firewall or secure container or some solution... if this Cowork pattern takes off, eventually someone's corporate network will go down due to a vulnerability, that startup will get attention, and they'll either turn into the next McAfee or be bought by the LLM vendors as the "ok, now lets look at this problem" solution.
Yeah, I was thinking it definitely needs to be correlated to geopolitical tensions in some way. Polymarket data might be helpful in this case- and provides incentives for putting this kind of data together.
US car companies became banks that happen to make cars.
How much would you like to pay for that 80k new truck? Sure, we can give you that monthly payment, lets just structure it as a 10-year loan where you end up paying twice that on a rapidly depreciating asset. Boom, we've just sold two cars and only had to manufacture one.
right. I stopped reading at "ENSUE_API_KEY | Required. Get one at [dashboard](link to startup showing this is an ad)"
First thought: why do I need an API key for what can be local markdown files. Make contents of CLAUDE.md be "Refer to ROBOTS.md" and you've got yourself a multi-model solution.
Main objection to corporate AI uptake is what are you gonna do with our data. The value prop over local markdown files here is not at all clear to even begin asking that question.
> But the restaurant industry fights to limit food trucks. On average, food trucks must handle 45 separate regulatory procedures and spend $28,276 on associated fees.
Lets napkin-math this. If we assume a food truck has margins at the upper end of the fast-casual industry of 9%, then each $18 burger-and-fries nets 1.62 in profit.
$28,276 / 1.62 = 17,454 burgers-and-fries.
If you were open every day of the year and assume no seasonality, that means your first 49 orders every day go just to regulatory fees.
And that doesn't cover any of the other fees and expenses a food truck might have.
Those are brutal economics. I'm impressed it's only $18!