The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 19 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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 …”
Meyer actively avoided hiring New Yorkers when opening Union Square Cafe
“My hiring, if you were from New York, I didn't pretty much want to hire you. I was looking for, because I didn't think of New York as being a very friendly place back then. I wanted a place that, that was welcoming.”
Meyer: Service is technical delivery, hospitality is how customers feel
“I think service is a way to describe the technical delivery of the product. Did you do what was expected? Did you get the right food to the right person? And I think hospitality is a very different thing, which is, oh, by the way, how did you make the recipien…”
Shake Shack redefined the classic speed, price, and quality trade-off
“Whoever wrote the rule that it has to be one plus one plus zero, and what we found is that it was not as fast as fast food, but it was a lot faster than a full-service restaurant, and it was not as inexpensive as fast food, but it was a lot less expensive than…”
Meyer: Entrepreneurs are naturally blind to downside risk
“I've come to learn that a hallmark of being an entrepreneur is that you are upsided, as in, you can only see up. You don't see what could go wrong”
Meyer requires cooks to have six core emotional hospitality skills
“I don't let our chefs hire that pasta cook unless they believe that the pasta cook has those six emotional skills, meaning that now you've got someone who's really good at what they do and who is motivated to do that thing because they are happier themselves w…”
Meyer: Chipotle was the first national chain to offer real gastronomy
“Well, Chipotle, I think Steve and Chipotle really deserve an enormous amount of credit for really being the first national chain to break the barrier that fast food could not be It's gastronomic. There's real cooking that takes place in real time”
Keeping unprofitable businesses open unfairly deprives employees of raises and promotions
“In keeping it open two years longer than I should have, where we couldn't make ends meet, I was actually doing something incredibly unfair, which was to keep people on the team just because they were so loyal, and they were not getting raises, and they were no…”
Full-service restaurants require at least 80% occupancy to turn a profit
“The economics of a restaurant are such that you can really only turn a profit when you're at least at 80% occupancy”
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.”
Meyer structured early family funding as debt to retain 100% equity
“To my mom's credit, my aunt's credit, my uncle's credit, we all structured this as a loan, which was great, because they then put me in a position where I could actually own all the equity after I paid off all the loans.”
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.”