It’s a sandwich and soup, fast casual.
Is it really so hard to imagine that their night and weekend crowd isn’t busy? Minimum wage is $14 bucks… so a 6 hours night shift with barebones staff is $400 ish in labor, plus lights, heat, prep, cleanup and waste. Figure at least $1000 bucks to keep it open per evening, 2500 per weekend day, and that’s before anyone makes any profit. If they aren’t doing at least 50 covers an hour, it’s losing proposition.
It’s funny how people are hand wringing over the lowering quality of a generally pathetic fast food system. Food is getting more expensive, especially the out of season items everyone thinks they are entitled to year round. Labor is getting more expensive. No one ever put any effort into quality of service anyway, and now the concept has basically evaporated. In the future, you may see better staffing levels at these joints, but two of three things will happen: prices will be significantly higher, selection will be much smaller, or quality in general will be pushed even lower, if that’s even possible, which you know it is.
Just pack a sammie and save 15 bucks a day. Or to put it another way, pack a lunch and earn $6000 a year.