Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Hope the meal is satisfying in more ways than can be described. Pictures of my own thanksgiving will be following.
Happy eats!
Follow Fridge to Food in various social media. Help us spread the word!
Monthly Archives: November 2010
Support Your Favorite Restaurant: Reserve a Table the Old Fashioned Way
November 23, 2010 – 6:24 pm
If you eat out a lot and are tech literate, you’ve probably heard of a service called Open Table. In fact, chances are you use that service to make restaurant reservations when you go out to eat. On the face of it, it seems like a brilliant idea. You don’t have to call the restaurant, you can just turn on your smart phone or go to opentable.com to make a reservation. It’s easy, straight forward and fast. And it’s free!
Well, it’s free to you. But it isn’t free to the restaurant. In fact, it’s very expensive for the restaurant — to the point of being harmful.
Most restaurants run very thin profit margins. The average marginal profit for a full service restaurant in the United States is about 5%. That means that if you go to a restaurant and have a $50 meal, the restaurant makes $2.50.
Open Table charges restaurants for its service. That’s why it can offer it to us — the consumers — free of charge. There are startup fees for software installation. There is a monthly subscription fee. And finally there is a charge of $1 per diner who books through opentable.com or the mobile app and $0.25 per diner who books through the restaurant’s own website. A recent study of the Open Table fee structure discovered that when you take into account the start up costs, the monthly subscription fee and the average number of tables Open Table actually fills for restaurants, the actual average cost per diner is more like $2.60.
That means that if you book through Open Table and eat a $50 meal, the restaurant doesn’t make any money from you. Zero. All of the profits go straight to Open Table. If you eat a substantially cheaper meal, it’s possible the restaurant could actually lose money from your visit.
So why on Earth do restaurants agree to this? Why do so many use Open Table? Well, because of us. Their customers who use Open Table. Because we don’t want to make that phone call. We pressure them. So much so, that some of the restaurants that don’t use it feel the need to explain themselves.
They’re afraid that if they don’t use Open Table, they’ll lose our business. Even though they don’t gain anything from our business when we book with Open Table. They hope and pray that next time we come, we won’t book using Open Table and they’ll actually be able to make some money. But more often than not we don’t. We book on Open Table, every time.
So what can you do? You can help out the restaurants who’s food you love by making a reservation the old fashioned way — calling! And you can spread the word to your friends who use Open Table — when you book with Open Table the restaurant loses.
Name that Ribbon
November 12, 2010 – 4:26 am
Ribbons are part of the game nature of Fridge to Food. They are little prizes that are intended to reward and encourage participation in the site in certain ways. The current ribbons encourage voting and posting recipes. The rainbow ribbons are intended to be earned as a matter of course if you’re fully participating in Fridge to Food. The white ones require some dedicated participation, but should be pretty achievable if you’re moderately active. The red ones are supposed to be pretty hard to come by and take some serious dedication. And the blue ones are intended to be rare and hard to get. They are all meant to be worn as badges of honor. They show that the foodie who has earned them has contributed in a serious way to the Fridge to Food community.
This batch covered adding recipes, voting on recipes and having your recipes voted on. I have a bunch more in mind, but I need help naming them. The photography ones especially, I’m having trouble with. I’m the first to admit I know little to nothing about photography. The ones I have in mind play out like this.
First there are the ribbons for adding photographs:
- white: added photographs to 25 recipes not posted by you
- red: added photographs to 100 recipes not posted by you
- blue: added photographs to 400 recipes not posted by you
Then there are the ones for having your photographs voted on:
- white: photograph with 10 upvotes
- red: photograph with 25 upvotes
- blue: photograph with 100 upvotes
I am at a complete loss for names of these ribbons. Anyone have any ideas? Also, any one have ideas for ribbons that they might like to see on Fridge to Food?
The Day of the Ribbon
November 12, 2010 – 4:01 am
Today’s update included two major changes (and a bunch of little ones that don’t bare mentioning). The first is that users may now upload a profile picture (once again) by clicking on their current profile picture (or lack thereof). The second is a page to view all existing ribbons and the addition of many new ones. Check em out!
Climbing the Roller Coaster
November 8, 2010 – 4:37 am
We all know the feeling. The dread and excitement in those big moments. You can hear the clink of the chain that is steadily pulling you up that first big hill of a roller coaster. The ride is only just beginning and you have only a vague idea what you are in for.
So I’ve done it. At the end of last week, I officially handed in my resignation as it were at the school where I work. This morning they had a potential replacement in to interview, so it looks like I will be free with in a matter of days. In a few short weeks, I will be headed home to the states. My relatives have agreed to give me living expenses while I throw myself into Fridge to Food. At least for a few months, after which I’ll either be looking for additional funding or trying to make Fridge to Food self-supporting.
Michelle, my girlfriend who provided much of the inspiration for the site, will be staying in Thailand. Traveling abroad and living in foreign cultures has been her dream since she was a kid. My dream has always involved starting a software startup and living on a farm. Don’t ask me how those two go together, I haven’t completely figured it out yet. But I’d say Fridge to Food is a great start in the right direction, wouldn’t you? Shel and I are going to try to do the long distance thing. That’s how people do it these days, right? We’ll take it a day at a time and see how it goes. Hopefully Skype, Google chat and e-mail will make a half a world of distance feel like much less.
I’ll most likely be living at home, working out of my mom’s house. At least in the beginning. Living the stereotype. Oh yeah. I don’t know how fast I’ll be able to work once I can truly devote my full effort, energy and time to the site. Hopefully faster than it has been on part time. There’s going to be about a two week period where I’ll be working on it sporadically while I finish up the job here and get ready to head home. Followed by a week or two of traveling to find my way back to my childhood home in Indiana. Wish me luck, here goes nothing.