Letter to the Motley Fools on restaurant pricing

Letters to the Editor
Motley Fool
123 N. Pitt Street
Alexandria, VA 22314


Dear Editor:

On behalf of the nation's 878,000 restaurants and their 12 million employees, I take issue with Dayana Yochim's December 17th column ("Great Meal Steals") on the Motley Fool Web site. Yochim provides a extremely simplistic view of menu pricing and operating a restaurant. The restaurant industry strives to provide Americans with quality meals at the most affordable prices possible and to imply otherwise is not only unfair but downright insulting.

Restaurants play an essential role in Americans' lives and serve as the cornerstone of the economy, career and employment opportunities and community involvement. In addition, a 2002 Gallup poll showed that Americans rate the restaurant industry as the most highly regarded business sector in the country.

Yochim's insinuation that restaurants over-charge their customers for menu items is a mischaracterization. She fails to point out that 96 cents of every dollar charged goes into running the restaurant – from compensation for all the staff that obtain, prepare and serve the food, to the cost of the establishment's equipment and maintenance, occupancy costs and similar expenses—making average profit margins in the single digits. Further, the vast majority of restaurants do not obtain their supplies from a local grocery store (the quantities needed are in most cases much too large to make grocery-shopping for them highly impractical), making Yochim's comparison of store and menu prices moot.

I am disappointed by the poor judgment exhibited by the Motley Fool in publishing Yochim's article and hope that, in the future, the Motley Fool will take more care to assure the articles published on its Web site are fair and accurate.