Chain Restaurants Are at an All Time Low

Get this. We have a car wash here called Mister Car Wash where you can tip the guy who asks you what car wash you want. You pull up to the station/machine. He is standing there asks which wash you want, he presses the button on the kiosk and then you hand him your card. Then he asks, would you like to leave a tip? LOL. :rofl:

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Agreed, the tipping is getting out of hand. If it’s a waitress making $2.51 an hour, then fine. But having to tip the donut lady seems a little outrageous. Most likely she’s already making $15 an hour in today’s age. So if she could make an extra five dollars per hour with tips, she’s going to be making $40,000 a year for handing out donuts. Somethings not right.

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Pretty soon the self checkout robot machine is gonna be asking for a tip. And I’ve got just the solution for it when it does.

GIF by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment

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Maybe we need to show the AI bots that video. They might be able to shut off my utilities and ruin my credit, but I can bash their brains in. We’ll find out who’s ■■■■■■■ crazy around here.

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Right! We have a local Italian place that makes good pizza and you can buy frozen ones to take home. So I drive to the restaurant, walk into the take out area, walk to the freezer, take out the pizzas myself and then it wants me to add a 15 percent tip on the debit machine. Ridiculous.

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Be careful with the permissions you give your bots.

Do not be like the AI Director of Safety and Alignment at Meta.

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Tipping- that’s a topic for you.
I feel you should base your tip amount to your server based on time serving you. I never understood why spending an hour at a diner or an hour at a fancy place merits a bigger tip for the more expensive food place server, they do the same work as the diner server. Why should they get a larger tip?

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So I like to know how the sausage is made (which I only eat my sausage I make…hehehehehe). I am super curious and love learning from people who do the thing. What ever the thing is it is worth learning it.

I also do my own brakes…I like saving the money but also it is pretty easy and interesting. I do not change my own oil though because who likes oil on them.

I reality is I like to deal with people who have some passion for the thing. What ever it is, they tend to just give you more info and insight. We buy most of our cheese from Devries in Eastern Merket.

You want sausage spices and stuff and real intestine to stuff em – Ferrari and Sons in Mount Clemens (cool little spot, super cheap spices and funny enough pizza tools) ooops they also sharpen knive :man_dancing:
You want strange ass meat (rabbit, crock, bisen, elk…) hit Butcher Boy in Warren

It is cool also looking for the spots.

I buy pitistis (Maltes pastry) from a women’s house…LOL

I did not realize how crazy about having a guy I was until I talked to someone and they were like - “you literally have a dude for everything” and I was like I guess I do.

I thought I had a coffee bean spot but the person up front was a dumbass. I mean if you can not go into the fine details you can not be my guy.

I like coffee a lot and make it 6-7 different ways at the house. But I have yet to find a small roaster. I have dabble in finding smaller places on line that have good prices but I want to find someone I can look in the eye and discuss the finer points of roasting and beans.

I may have to buy a small roaster and see how that goes.

I also smoke meats…but I am now looking for a real offset wood smoker. I know what I want but I have yet to find it. And maybe the issue is that my biddy has it but it is custom made. Which I have thought about learning to weld so I can make one…yeah that seems crazy but I feel I may have no choice. 2 birds one event. Learn to weld and make a smoker in one move.

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I go to my local bar every Monday and Wednesday. We try to help them out as much as we can

Phenomenal scene for anyone who has ever dreamed of biting the corporate hand that feeds them

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I’m on the west side of the state so we are a lot thinner on specialty businesses, but I’m able to get my meat and eggs from real people. My contractors are all individual owner operators.

A long time ago now, our country decided that economies of scale should be the end all be all. This is not optimal for all purposes. The joy in finding those people who are passionate about their little niche and who really love to see their customers happy is a wonderful thing. Not to mention the quality you can get from small scale operators.

Distributism is sorta the name for the way to look at things on a smaller scale and it’s worth a little research.

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PC Load Letter!? WTF does that mean :smiley:

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I literally picture you as Mcfly so it would be a major shock if you were a big dude :rofl:

Im not tall. But taller then MJF. Little over weight but thats age, and I drink so i got a nice beer gut

Damn it Marty I’m just going to ignore that!

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Another one that went downhill: Red Lobster. Used to be able to get decent seafood for a reasonable price. But their prices lately would make you think you’re going to a fine dining establishment. No, you’re not. Fridays did the same thing. No, you’re a chain. Stop it with the $29 entree’s.

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The worst in my small personal experience is Hopcat. Used to be amazing–like craft beer heaven, and clearly, intentionally, designed from the ground up as an act of love. Since they got acquired… not so much. I don’t know if the GR spot is still good, but the two I’ve been to in the last couple years were absolute garbage.

I was there when they opened their spot in Ann Arbor–like literally waiting in line with 100 other people for the grand opening, to try all this amazing stuff. They had like 50 rotating taps–with selections made by people who know and love beer–and the food was incredible, like just an endless selection of the best kind of bar food. Went back there for the first time in a while to watch a football game last fall, and everything just sucked. Like, they literally seem to have fired everyone who knew or cared about beer, stopped selecting interesting stuff to rotate, stopped focusing on quality first in their food (clearly using a smaller menu of stuff they can order and microwave), just really a bizarrely terrible experience, as if someone was intentionally trying to create the exact opposite of what it used to be.

Oh, and they have like 20 TVs around the bar? None were tuned to any of the good college games, and despite the place being half empty, the bartenders claimed they couldn’t change the channel because they didn’t know how. In a bar that allegedly caters to college football fans! In downtown Ann Arbor! On a Saturday!

I’m sure some finance bro can explain to me why this is actually a rational business model but I do not get it. (And I don’t expect the Ann Arbor Hopcat to be around much longer–clearly nobody at any level of employment there will care!)

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When they changed the name of the crack fries to “cosmic fries” because crack was too traumatic for some high minded asswipes, I knew they were going to faceplant.

Went there once after the change. Fries sucked, menu sucked, sandwich meh. Beer list meh. That was like 5 years ago. Mark Sellers, who started it, got his bag….but to his credit, opened Max’s South Seas Hideaway on the former McFadden’s footprint in downtown GR nearby the Hopcat. He apparently is a tiki heavyweight collector, like millions of $ worth, and put most of it in the restaurant. (See video in link below)

This is my very favorite restaurant on the Earth. You are completely transported outside of normal time and space in there. Seriously. I brought my college buddies for our every other month hangout. We got a secluded 1st floor side lounge and started chopping it up.

5 hours later, we had no idea 5 hours had passed. The cocktail menu is tiki/tropical history heaven/royalty. The food is great, but it’s the atmosphere on both the main floor, which is tiki heaven, and the 2nd floor Atomic Lounge ( 60s tiki) and the surfside bar that draw people from around the country, and tiki artists from around the world to create limited edition decor and mugs for merch.

Absolute Must Go To

Menu - Max’s South Seas Hideaway https://share.google/wWwP7rDlhFb0Iyvzk

Max’s South Seas Hideaway Max’s South Seas Hideaway - Matterport 3D Showcase

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PE really ■■■■■■ Red Lobster over. They are picking that carcass clean like a swarm of locusts.

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