Large Chain Restaurants v. Family Owned Restaurants

Hello readers.

Today I will talk about a topic that I feel I know enough about to discusses in this blog. That topic is the differences and similarities between large food chains like the Olive Garden and Pizza Hut and smaller family owned operations such as Zio Johnos and Bob’s Your Uncle Pizza Café (located in Iowa City). I tried to pick restaurants that served food that was similar to each other to help keep one variable the same, the type of food.

The first difference that comes to my mind would be the budget for décor. When you walk into these two different types of restaurants you can immediately tell if you’re in a nationwide chain or not. The large chains tend to have more of an identity, by that I mean their name is on everything and with Pizza Hut for example the color red seems to be everywhere. Also the little things have more detail in them, everything from simply have higher quality menus to having nice booths/chairs and decorative things on the walls. With the smaller restaurants they may have booths that aren't attached to the floor, or a less strict dress code for their employees, or perhaps a color scheme that doesn't seem to work as well. 

Another very important difference is the food. With the larger restaurants there are normally more options to choose from and in some cases those options are more competitively priced. This is because, as you may expect, they sell more food which in turn allows them to lower their prices. Also, because they are serving a larger number of people it makes it more economical to serve things or add things to dishes that wouldn't make sense financially for smaller operations to serve. For an example, let’s say the large chain serves one thousand people per day (I am making these numbers up) and ten people order the special dish and at the smaller chain they serve one hundred people a day, but only one person orders the dish a day. Even though the ratio of people being served to people ordering the dish is the same (100:1) the larger chain has ten times the reasons to keep that item on their menu.  

Throughout this post I feel as though I have made to small of an arguments in favor of the small family owned restaurants, and that’s not what I intended to do. Typically I feel like I am a more valued customer when I go to small restaurants and I think the people who work there are nicer and make me feel like family. The food in some cases is even better than the large chains, it has more of a home feel. And if those aren’t reason enough, it is very important to patronize local businesses.  If people stopped going to the family owned stores then all we would have to eat would be the large chains and we would miss out on all of the great things that I mentioned before. A similar situation has happened with Walmart, they have become so large that no ma and pop store can compete with them because they can always be under sold. This is good for the consumer to get the best price possible, but it eliminates diversity and I think that would be a tragic thing to happen to the food industry.

So in conclusion, I think that large chains offers better prices, more options and a more complete décor, small restaurants can still compete. This, in my opinion, is because of the food, and the friendly feeling you get when you arrive. Even if you prefer the large chains, it may still be a nice change of pace to try a local place, and also it is a great way to support your local economy. (649 words)