Winesday

Restaurants operate on razor thin margins. The costs of a restaurant include, just as an illustrative list: rent, labor, insurance, supplies, food, inventory, china, glassware, equipment, telephone lines, websites, marketing personnel, and one of those open/close signs. These costs are not reflected in your food, really, but in the price you pay for booze. Restaurants have to do this, otherwise your scallop entree would be closer to $65 a plate instead of $25.

OK, so in general if a restaurant can buy a bottle of wine for $12 from their wholesaler, it will list the bottle on their wine list for between $36-$48. You can buy this wine at your local wine store for $18. The markup does not seem justified. And maybe it is not.

But that got the old noggin going. Living in New Orleans, roughly 40% of the property is not assessed taxes. That means if 100 dollars in property tax is needed, that amount will attach itself to only 60% of the property. Therefore, as a property owner in New Orleans who is neither a church nor governmental agency, I pay more than my fair share of the taxes.

When I go to eat, 9 times out of 1o we order booze. This means that I, and likely you, are paying for more of the restaurants overhead than a couple that drinks iced tea or worse water. So how do we fix this?

Well, there are two proposals. First, raise food prices and lower wine prices. That won't happen, so on to number two. What if 40 or so restaurants in town decided to cut their wine prices in half for one night only (you can exclude bottles over say $200, as we call those "The Papal Selections"). And not on some night like Tuesday, when people do not dine out. But on a marquee Friday or Saturday night. Wine, if you choose to drink it at a restaurant, should not be an indulgence or cost shifting burden.

Then, take a look at the numbers. My guess is that people who don't normally order wine would, and those that do would order more. Listen, economists I ain't, but even making 200% profit on wine and alcohol sales is doing pretty good. And if you sell two bottles of wine rather than one, you have made the same revenue over your cost. But the diner is happier, your inventory is moving, and likely your staff gets a bigger tip.

This article is fraught with missteps and assumptions, granted. But what are your thoughts?