The Ledger, every show
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks, across all 44 shows. Pick shows below, then mix any filter with any other.
shows 
every show 44 of 44
Shake Shack was the first public company to return its PPP loan
“Within 36 hours of understanding the government had run out of money, the company and its board made the decision to return it, and it was the first of any public company to do so, and that actually began a cascade of, What I'm told is well, well north of two …”
Danny Meyer: Restaurant prices will rise as tipped wages disappear
“And as cities, states, and now the entire country move to a higher minimum wage, and then perhaps one day, one wage for everybody, as opposed to a second-tier For tipped employees, which I believe is not gonna last forever. Can't. You're gonna start to see res…”
Danny Meyer never intended to scale Shake Shack beyond a single cart.
“That implies that I ever decided Shake Shack was going to be a scaled concept, because I didn't. I won't go into the whole story but it started as a hot dog cart. This was the summer of 2001. We didn't open a second Shake Shack for five years.”
Danny Meyer offered all Shake Shack employees pre-IPO shares at $21.
“A hundred percent of everyone on our team at that point got a chance to buy stock at the strike price, which was 21 dollars. The first trade happened at 46 dollars.”
Gramercy Tavern's launch caused Union Square Cafe's first Zagat rating decline
“So I opened Gramercy Tavern, and the very first year that it opened, we got horrible reviews. Union Square Cafe, for the first time ever, dropped in the Zagat survey.”
Danny Meyer: USHG once held 4 of NYC's top 10 favorite restaurants
“I'll never forget, there was a year where we had four of the top 10 of New York's favorite restaurants, maybe five.”
Meyer: Shake Shack Remained a Single Unit for Its First Five Years
“We didn't have a second Shake Shack for five years, by the way. We had one Shake Shack for the first five years, and, you know, the next 300 plus Shake Shacks have all happened in the 16 intervening years after that. Or maybe the 11 years after that. Yeah, I t…”
Meyer spent $240K on lease and $500K on Union Square Cafe buildout
“240,000 dollars. For the 14 years, and then I spent 500,000 dollars building it, and that was it.”
A two-star NYT review tripled Union Square Cafe's business overnight
“That two-star review that we got. I think it tripled our business overnight.”
Meyer's original Madison Square Park hot dog cart lost $5,000 initially
“Well, what we had done was to offer to give all of our profits back to the Madison Square Park Conservancy, and that was pretty easy because we lost about 5000 bucks that first year.”
Meyer: 95% of Shake Shack's menu stems from his original draft
“And I just sat down one day, just scribbled on a piece of paper the menu, and the menu I scribbled that day is kind of 95% what we serve at Shake Shack to this day”
The original Shake Shack kiosk served over 1,000 customers daily
“You know, we were serving over a thousand people every single day and learning, learning the business, learning how to do it.”
Shake Shack cuts roughly 70% of fine-dining restaurant operating costs
“There's about 70% of the cost taken out. There's not a, if you look at any Shake Shack, there's not a chef or three sous chefs or a pastry chef or a maitre d' or a reservationist or a florist or a linen company, and I, you know, that's probably only half the c…”
Shake Shack locations average over $4 million in annual revenue
“Today they're grossing on average, A little bit more than four million dollars per shack. There's 278 of them in the world.”
The original Madison Square Park Shake Shack pays up to $1M rent
“That one Shake Shack in the original Shake Shack in Madison Square Park Pays in rent, depending on the year, anywhere between half a million and a million dollars per year right back into the park.”