[911]

(06-04-2017 05:43 PM)Enoch Wrote:  

Could also be that Millenials are concentrating in cities / college towns which typically have fewer chains than shopping malls in the burbs.

The competition from ethnic restaurants is also a huge factor. Immigrants run
their restaurants as family businesses and slave away as working poor business
owners, going into debt to keep their eateries alive or trying to survive with razor-thin
margins. The majority of these restaurants go under but others come in to
replace them so there is always a turnover. The chain restaurants competing
against losing businesses are therefore at a significant structural disadvantage.

I would guess that the ethnic restaurants that do thrive are a
small minority, maybe 10-20%, and another 10-20% do OK as long
as they rely on family labor, while the rest fail sooner or later.


There is also a cultural factor. Chain restaurants that did well
elsewhere have always struggled in places like San Francisco,
even when the local economy was thriving. There's not going to
be as many chain restaurants per capita in SF or NYC as in KC
or Indianapolis, and as many have noted, that demogrphic has
been declining in blue states and even red state big cities.

In those big cities, chain restaurants gave trouble penetrating
city cores and ethnic urban enclaves but might do well in whitebread
burbs or middle class neighborhoods.



The Pences at Chili in NYC