Donald’s also have food ordering kiosks, although neither serve
upscale mediterannean food.

------
lisper
This kind of complaint drive me nuts. It is manifestly untrue that
"restaurants are suffocating in San Francisco." San Francisco is chock-full of
restaurants, and the vast majority of them are not going out of business. The
author's real complaint is not that _restaurants_ are suffocating, it is that
_his_ restaurant suffocated. But the reason his restaurant suffocated is not
because there's a systemic problem with the restaurant business in San
Francisco, it's because the market didn't conform to the author's
preconceptions. If it were really true that there was some kind of systemic
crisis among San Francisco restaurants, they'd be closing left and right. The
survivors would then be able to raise prices to the point where the crisis
went away. That's how the market works. But this isn't happening because there
is no crisis, only a market operating just as it should by occasionally
weeding out businesses that, for whatever reason, don't conform to the
market's needs.

~~~
thebradbain
Sure, maybe the market is working "just as it should," but if it is: why is
that an excuse for all of the collateral damage done to
waiters/cooks/hosts/cleaners throughout the whole city? It's an objective fact
that the vast majority of the service staff cannot afford to live alone in or
near the city they work in, much less support their families. Is that success?
Is that fair? Should we really be content to let these people suffer the fear
of not being able to put food on their table and a roof over their head simply
because the equilibrium point of two lines on a graph says so?

Maybe the state of the restaurant economy is fine – I don't doubt that – but
what about the service staff who make it up and work there daily? Or is the
solution just to get a job in tech?

If we're advocating for market-based approaches, though: lower the cost of
housing by building more housing, and building it fast. Both affordable and
marke