TheAntiGates wrote: Paul Milenkovic wrote: the question is whether the government should be subsidizing some higher level of service beyond some utilitarian function. . FWIW, I think that is the most practical answer anyone has offered. Makes perfect sense
Paul Milenkovic wrote: the question is whether the government should be subsidizing some higher level of service beyond some utilitarian function. .
the question is whether the government should be subsidizing some higher level of service beyond some utilitarian function. .
FWIW, I think that is the most practical answer anyone has offered.
Makes perfect sense
Paper plates and plastic flatware to you, too!
It would make sense if it actually reduced the business deficit. Ponder this. Would you pay $10 to $20 for a meal served to you on plastic? More than once??
"We have met the enemy and he is us." Pogo Possum "We have met the anemone... and he is Russ." Bucky Katt "Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future." Niels Bohr, Nobel laureate in physics
There is a general rule of thumb for the restaurant business. The revenue/cost ratio are 1/3 for food and beverage costs, 1/3 for labor and 1/3 for spoilage, rent, utilities, miscellaneous expenses and, out of that slice, profit. Keeping the labor cost at 1/3 of revenue is accomplished by having the service staff at the "wage plus tips" wage rates, which, last I knew, was at $2.35 an hour.
Amtrak is faced with different cost ratios. The biggest difference is in the labor cost. I don't have exact numbers, Amtrak dining car personnel are paid somewhere around the wage rates of the other non-operating on board personnel, somewhere around $15 per hour. In addition, Amtrak covers the lay-over expenses, covers the cost of a very good benefit package and pays the rates for Railroad Retirement coverage that are higher than Social Security. I don't know how the numbers work out for the cost of the dining"facility", but it isn't hard to imagine that the "rent" and other facility costs for a rail car are much higher than those for land based restaurant of comparable seating capacity and style.
The numbers I have seen indicate that the labor costs for Amtrak's dining operation take most of the dining revenue. The obvious obstacle to reducing the wage rates is that they are the result of a collective bargaining agreement. (Darn unions!) But even absent that constraint, how far down could the rates go before Amtrak would have to deal with the kind of labor turnover experience of the restaurant business.
I suspect that the efficiency or cost savings of using plastic comes from the elimination of the labor for dishwashing. The dining cars are equiped with dishwashing machines, but there is still labor involved.
My bottom line is that I could accept a hard plastic plate, but plastic knives and forks suck. Beyond that, if I want to eat on the cheap, I'll stop at the local fast food place.
The bottom line is that I suspect that the savings will be chicken feed and, while there is no way to measure the overall result, no doubt it will result in more "Amtrak? Never again!!!"
I don't think that dining cars ever made money in and of themselves and this includes the so-called Golden Era of heavyweight equipment. That being said, most passenger departments viewed dining cars as an amenity that helped bring customers to their service and were willing to eat the operating loss on dining cars. Dining car service also had its quirks, one of which was "verbal orders not accepted", the patron had to write out his order on the check. Northern Pacific was one of the few roads that accepted verbal orders.
Is this the long-planned conversion to pre-plated meals? If so, my understanding was that the quality was to be pretty good and menu variety was to be equivalent. It's just that grilling would be discontinued and dining car crew reduced from 5 to 3.
It's not like the food cooked on board was always the best, anyway. I had a rather lukewarm "hot" breakfast on the Cal. Zephyr out of Denver last Spring.
Hardly the end of the world.
-Don (Random stuff, mostly about trains - what else? http://blerfblog.blogspot.com/)
Cutting off the nose to spite the face.
Not the first time someone has taken one portion of an operation out of context with the rest of the operation. People need to eat on a long-distance train. People might be attracted to take the train by good food. But good food doesn't make as much money as (or loses more than) the rest of the operation, so we'll cut that out. Now we lose the business of the people for whom the food may have been part of the appeal.
They'll kill Amtrak yet.
Larry Resident Microferroequinologist (at least at my house) Everyone goes home; Safety begins with you My Opinion. Standard Disclaimers Apply. No Expiration Date Come ride the rails with me! There's one thing about humility - the moment you think you've got it, you've lost it...
Datafever wrote:You mean to say that with the hefty prices that they were charging for food, that they were losing money on it? Unbelievable!!
......Don't forget to install the microwaves in both places in place of all the prepare kitchens too......
Quentin
OK by me. As long as they take the china and silver flatware off the Beech Grove.
Maybe the White House and the Congressional Dining Rooms should also go to paper plates and plastic forks. Now we're taking big money.
By the way, Alex Kummant's salary is $100,000 a year more than Dave Gunn's.
.....And after 36 years no one has been able to decide what and how we should be running these trains....In fact, no one has been able to fund them properly yet to run decent full service trains...Too bad.
The trend line as it is running now with equipment damage and breakdowns and refurbishing going undone it's only a matter of time until they run out of equipment and will have to continue to downsize and then literally stop.....
I guess the problem is that Amtrak, the people who operate, support, and fund it, are not quite sure what kind of operation they want it to be. While Amtrak is not the government, it is its own kind of organizational thing, it gets considerable funding from the government and hence is subject to governmental kind of thinking.
It is not so much that Amtrak loses money operating trains with white-linen tablecloth dining cars or will continue to lose pretty much the same amount of money with paper plates and foam cups food service, the question is whether the government should be subsidizing some higher level of service beyond some utilitarian function. Government money finds its ways in some measure to the arts -- an activity which is thought of for the betterment of the society as a whole but one which appeals largely to a cultural and in some measures socio-economic elite - and there is criticism of that kind of funding in that it only services elites.
I can see the government supporting long-distance trains as a kind of national heritage matter, much like the National Parks, especially the Western long-distance trains which cover such broad sweeps of parts of the country that are scenic for their low population density and mountains -- mountains are very scenic but not much use for practical real-estate development although they try in California to some bad effect on people losing everything to wildfires.
I am told Canada went through a meltdown in funding for Via, and they are down to one long distance train, but some friends who have taken it said it is rather expensive but quite nice and a worthwhile experience. I believe Canada runs the one long-distance train that covers the vast expanse of the Western part of Canada. As to complaining about the shortage of Superliner cars, that train is all "Heritage" cars -- I imagine bought for cheap from Amtrak in many cases - and F40's. The train is also very long -- if you are going to operate the one train, you may as well get the economy of scale of running as many cars as you can.
Then we are back to the infamous Inspector General's report that argued, the long-distance trains are primarily life-line service to the small communities up and down the line and that most trips are partial distances of the route, then fine, operate these trains as lifeline service - a P-42 with four Superliner coaches -- no diner, no baggage car, no sleepers. Back in the day, there were all manner of trains -- there were the name trains with the luxury service and there were the versions of the P-42 with the four Superliner coaches. I guess since we are down to so few trains, we want to serve the lifeline function along with the luxury train function all in one and are doing badly at all functions.
If GM "killed the electric car", what am I doing standing next to an EV-1, a half a block from the WSOR tracks?
ABC News reported in World News Tonight with Charles Gibson at 6:30-7:00pm EST on January 8, 2007, that all Amtrak overnight luxury trains with dining rooms except for the Empire Builder have converted to paper plates and table cloths, and microwave food. This happened apparently because of required budget cuts. (a.k.a. Amtrak didn't want to make this change)
How do you all feel about this?
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