Field library
Patterns, math, and pull-quotes from three years of operator conversations. Curated by the Editors.
Showing 18 field notes.
Field notes · Operations
Menu inflation eased toward its historical norm this summer even as labor stayed structurally elevated and food-service quits accelerated again. Six independent signals, read side by side, tell a more useful story than any one of them alone.
Thread · Restaurant operations
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Field notes · Delivery
DoorDash and Uber Eats can deduct 25% to 100% of an order for a customer-reported error — and the dispute window closes in as few as ten days. Evidence habits determined who got the money back.
Thread · Delivery commissions
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Field notes · Margins
Menu inflation is running near 3.6% for full-year 2026 — a calm headline hiding beef and coffee still climbing while eggs and fats and oils reverse course. The operators who held margin recosted by dish, not by average.
Thread · Restaurant margins
Read →Field notes · Delivery
A second delivery-only brand out of the same kitchen can multiply orders — or quietly divert them from the higher-margin brand next to it. Few operators ever measure which happened.
Thread · Delivery commissions
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Field notes · Operations
Operating surface grows roughly twice as fast as revenue with each new location. The operators who scaled without drift replaced memory and judgment with documented, repeatable systems first.
Thread · Restaurant operations
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Field notes · POS
Two of the three layers in every card fee are fixed by Visa and Mastercard and cannot be negotiated. Operators who understood the split negotiated the one layer that was actually theirs to negotiate.
Thread · POS systems
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Field notes · POS
Every "future-dated" requirement in PCI DSS 4.0 became mandatory in 2025. Multi-factor authentication, network segmentation, and quarterly scans are no longer optional for a restaurant that takes cards.
Thread · POS systems
Read →Field notes · POS
Modern cloud POS platforms keep selling through an outage — but a stored offline payment can still be declined once the connection returns. Operators are responsible for that gap either way.
Thread · POS systems
Read →Field notes · Operations
Median labor cost has drifted to 36.5% of sales at full-service restaurants. The recurring fix was not fewer hours — it was scheduling against the actual forecast instead of the manager’s memory.
Thread · Restaurant operations
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Field notes · Direct ordering
A guest who reaches a fourth visit returns roughly 95% of the time. Most loyalty programs never get anyone there, because they were built to collect sign-ups instead of engineering a second visit.
Thread · Direct ordering
Read →Field notes · Direct ordering
Independent research puts one full star at 5% to 9% of annual revenue for independent restaurants. Response rate and review recency did more work than any single flattering review.
Thread · Direct ordering
Read →Field notes · Margins
Restaurant turnover runs 70% to 130% a year, and the federal quits rate for food service climbed back to 4.5% in June 2026. Operators who priced the true cost found a leak often larger than their annual profit.
Thread · Restaurant margins
Read →Field notes · Margins
Break-even math, setup friction, customer-relationship tradeoffs, and the direct-order patterns that persist after launch.
Thread · Direct ordering
Read →Field notes · Delivery
The recurring direct-ordering models, the costs hidden behind "zero commission," and the operating fit that determines what survives.
Thread · Direct ordering
Read →Field notes · Direct ordering
The recurring pattern is not an overnight marketplace exit. It is a deliberate shift of repeat demand toward a channel the restaurant controls.
Thread · Direct ordering
Read →Field notes · Operations
What operators wish had been sequenced earlier: menus, modifiers, printers, training, parallel runs, and the first live services.
Thread · Restaurant operations
Read →Field notes · POS
What survived actual service, what created new friction, and which implementation details kept returning in operator conversations.
Thread · POS systems
Read →Field notes · POS
A neutral comparison of restaurant depth, operating simplicity, contract structure, and the switching costs that matter after the demo.
Thread · POS systems
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From the Editors
One useful note from the room each week. No feed noise, no vendor spin, and an unsubscribe link in every edition.