To attract customers with the quality and value of its food rather than mere convenience. In effect, the harder a restaurant is to find, the lower the rent is likely to be, and the more the restaurant will be seeking There, restaurateurs can afford to experiment and take risks. Tyler Cowen, a George Mason University economist and prolific writer on food, argued in his book “An Economist Gets Lunch” that the best way to get delicious food at a good price is to seek out Visiting the mall - and more seem to be putting a bit more thought into their food. As people do more shopping online, fewer are Other fast-food chains may offer mediocre food, but their real estate strategies are less exposed to the epic decline in foot traffic in the nation’s malls. It means that owners of the real estate in question canĮxtract much of the value of the crowds they attract, not the restaurant chain. The company’s challenge highlights the underlying problem with a strategy built around selling mediocre pizza at the right place and right time. Individual landlords than it does to the supplier who provides the soda to enable Sbarro’s customers to wash back their greasy pizza. Six of the seven biggest creditors listed are entities to which the company owes lease payments. The story is told in Sbarro’s filing for bankruptcy protection early this week. That measures foot traffic at retailers, reported a 14.6 percent decline in the 2013 holiday season compared with 2012, continuing a pattern of double-digit declines. The company is in financial trouble because one of its big bets on real estate - that Americans will keep going to mall food courts en masse - has turned out to be wrong. The chart below shows the share of all adults in each group in February 2007, at the high-water mark for each The argument is easiest to explore by dividing people without full-time jobs into four categories. There is growing agreement that some of the damage from the Great Recession will endure. The economy is still about 11 million jobs short of employment levels before the recession – and it would take a few million more jobs to match levels at the end of the 1990s,īut these are not good times. The imminence of tighter labor conditions. For the first time in years, some Federal Reserve officials and private-sector economists are talking about They regard a measure of human misery now as the price of avoidingĪnd some of America’s central bankers are starting to fret about the depth of that labor pool. They want to keep the labor pool reasonably well stocked so that inflation remains under control. The late 1960s they fell to 45 percent by the start of the last recession in 2007 and have since fallen to 42 percent.Ĭentral bankers like a little unemployment. Wages and salaries peaked at more than 51 percent of the economy in The other trend is a long-term one: For four decades, even in stronger economic times, wage gains have not kept pace with economic growth. Higher corporate profits and higher stock prices have not translated Instead, it reflects the failure of most of America to recover at all, with real market incomes for the 99 percent rising just 0.1 percent a year. But this finding was not about the rich doing well their incomesĪre actually growing a little more slowly than in the last two economic expansions.

Last year, Emanuel Saez - an economist from the University of California, Berkeley - made headlines with the finding that 95 percent of income gains from 2009 to 2012 accrued to the top 1 percent

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