Why do dinners cost more than lunches at the same restaurant?

Well, I am glad that my book Freedomnomics mentions a couple of those explanations (I don’t have the one about the A-team). The competition explanation doesn’t seem right. You can see this phenomenon in DC with a whole row of restaurants right next to each other. Lunch might compete with “in-house cafeterias, the dirty water hot dog cart, chain restaurants, and delivery businesses,” but for dinner you are also less likely to eat right near where you work or live. Jonas M Luster has this discussion:

. . . Some things are static, such as my lease, power, linens, licenses, etc. Other things vary between lunch and dinner:

Lunch isn't prepared and served by my A-team. Many times waiters and cooks have to prove themselves during lunch before being allowed on the dinner line. This means I pay less in payroll.
Lunch doesn't usually serve a full menu. The menu is optimized for faster production and oftentimes smaller portioned. Smaller menu means less storage, smaller dishes mean less storage, and faster turnaround means less secondary storage costs (hot/warm holding, etc.)
Lunch diners spend an average of 45 minutes from entry to exit, dinner guests take over twice as long. This means faster turnaround during lunch hours, which either means more covers or less staff needed. Both saves me money.
Lunch guests don't want/need candles and expensive bottles of water. They want food. We cater to this by dropping down to the bare bone of fine dining hospitality, removing fluff.

Last, but not least, lunch is a competitive market. We compete with in-house cafeterias, the dirty water hot dog cart, chain restaurants, and delivery businesses. By pricing ourselves competitively we ensure good covers every day of the week (low day is Tuesday, high day is Thursday, by the way) and a hot, pre-stocked, kitchen for dinner. That saves us money (I don't have to pay someone to come in at 3pm and set up stocks and sauces, for example, I can have the lunch crew do those during slows and as part of their prep) and time, which in and by itself is money. . . .

Newest Fox News piece: Fast and Furious Scandal Cries Out for Answers

The way my newest Fox News piece starts:

The "Fast & Furious" scandal is getting messier and messier. New e-mails finally released late this past Friday reveal that the Department of Justice personal viewed the then-secret operation as a way to push for more gun control laws. Despite administration promises to the contrary, whistleblowers have endured "isolation, retaliation and transfer."
Meanwhile the operation's managers have done pretty well, some have even received promotions.
Thursday Attorney General Eric Holder admitted that the operation was "wholly unacceptable," but he still offers absolutely no explanation to explain why the program was instituted.
What's going on here? Let's see...
- You have a government agency ordering gun dealers to make sales to suspected criminals that the dealers didn't want to sell to. - You have government agents testifying that the guns being purchased were not being traced. No attempt was made to even alert the Mexican government that the United States of America was given guns to drug gangs in their country. . . .

$3.42 for the Kindle version of the third edition of More Guns, Less Crime

‎$3.42 for the Kindle version of the third edition of More Guns, Less Crime! The third edition came out last year and it has about 200 pages of new material over the second edition (2000) and about 300 pages over the first edition (1998). I am going to have to give them a call tomorrow a find out what is going on because at that price I am getting a royalty of a couple of dimes. At least a lot of people will hopefully final get a copy at that price! The book is available here.

Newest Fox News piece: What the New Unemployment Numbers Are Telling Us

My newest piece starts this way:

The new unemployment numbers are a lot worse than the headlines indicate. The news media breathlessly reports that 120,000 jobs were created in November, but the working age population increased by about 160,000 people. But with job creation not even keeping up with the number of people entering the work force, how is it possible for the unemployment rate to fall from 9.0 to 8.6 percent?

The explanation is actually pretty simple. People are only counted as unemployed as long as they are actively looking for work. The obviously good for it to fall is from people getting a job. It is bad reason is if people simply give up looking for work.

In November, the numbers could hardly have been worse -- 487,000 people simply gave up looking for work and left the labor force. It is the 6th worst report since the recession started 48 months ago. Even more startling, 5 of those 6 worst reports have occurred since the “recovery” supposedly started in June 2009 (See this link here). . . .