He’s no Jimmy Pesto.
It’s in the name of the show, you’d think he’d be good at it!
May is mental health awareness month. If you need assistance in finding help, or you would like to donate to help others get the help they need, visit https://mhanational.org/
SOURCES
Why Do So Many Restaurants Fail? (Episode 89) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVfBCqtje2A
Menu at Bob’s Burgers: https://www.zippia.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/bobs-burger-menu.jpg
Menu at Alamo Drafthouse: https://drafthouse.com/news/get-a-taste-of-the-bobs-burgers-movie
Complete Guide to Restaurant Profit Margins (With Industry Averages)
https://20somethingfinance.com/what-is-the-united-states-poverty-line/
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes: https://www.themarketinggateway.com
Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
One of my favorite TV shows is Bob’s Burgers, and if you’d asked me when it came on the air if I’d ever say that, I would have said, “no way,” because it really looked like a loser of a concept to me when it was first announced. A cartoon show about a perpetually failing family-owned business? Where’s the comedy in that?
Obviously, I was wrong, and I’m happy to have been, because Bob’s Burgers is still a consistently funny show today. If you’ve never watched it, the whole run’s available on Hulu and Disney+ if you want to get caught up. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
But assuming you have at least some knowledge that it’s an animated show about a dad named Bob Belcher, a mom named Linda and their three kids Tina, Gene and Louise, the latter of whom wears a pink bunny-eared hat and has aspirations to be a supervillain one day, and that this family runs a failing burger restaurant in a town next to a boardwalk carnival on the East Coast, I think today’s a great time to talk about something that really bugs me.
Why, after sixteen seasons and a movie, is Bob still so bad at selling burgers?
So today, we’re going to talk about what’s really involved in running a profitable family business and how all the Bob Belchers out there who are really making burgers for a living can ensure they’ve got enough money to send their kids to college. Or maybe even cooking school if things go really well.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
So the premise of Bob’s Burgers – the restaurant, not the show – is that Bob creates these really amazing burgers made from fresh ground beef and never-frozen ingredients. His menu is pretty simple: a standard burger with or without cheese, French fries, drinks and a burger of the day with a jokey name and some unusual toppings or side items.
For example, during the town’s Art Crawl event, Bob offers a Poblano Picasso Burger with poblano peppers on it. When Bob becomes infatuated with the town’s minor league baseball team during a winning streak, he offers the Take Me Out to the Burger, which comes with Peanuts and Crackerjacks. And when Bob’s trying to impress a food critic called the Moody Foodie during what can only be described as a hostage situation, he offers the Girls Just Want to Have Fennel Burger, which I’ll let you figure out for yourself.
That last example, by the way, should tell you something about Bob – he’s not very good at taking criticism. In fact, Bob is generally described as being smelly, surly, unconcerned about his appearance and resistant to change. He’ll do anything for his family, but he also constantly accuses them of ruining his hopes and dreams by being terrible employees in the family restaurant. His wife Linda is constantly preoccupied with a desire for adventure and drama and musical theater. His son Gene is an aspiring self-taught musician with an unusual idea of what entertainment is. His youngest daughter, Louise, is constantly conniving how she can make money off of suckers since she’s resentful of being poor. And his older daughter, Tina, is very responsible and eager to please, but clumsy and also easily distracted by her teenage hormones, which often cause her to be boy-crazy or to mope around a lot.
This sounds like a family that really shouldn’t be in business, and honestly, it’s amazing they’re able to make any money.
Sometimes, Bob or Linda have to work alone to handle the lunch rush and dinner rush, which often seem to just be a handful of customers. Bob is also constantly forced to close his restaurant to either do things for his family or due to disasters caused by his family. Bob’s regulars, particularly the Handyman named Teddy, also can create situations that wind up scaring other patrons out of the restaurant. And then there’s the fact that right across the street, a savvy businessman named Jimmy Pesto runs a pizzeria that serves terrible food, but which is so popular it’s always full and even has a gift shop. Clearly, foot traffic isn’t Bob’s problem, and Jimmy regularly points out Bob charges too little for his food, uses too high of quality of ingredients and doesn’t have a head for business.
Which is, more or less, correct. Whenever Bob starts to actually be successful, it’s often because he’s doing what someone else recommends to him. And he always winds up going back to the status quo because it’s what he’s comfortable doing.
OK, so I know this is a cartoon sitcom and the writers have contrived all of this so we can feel empathy for the characters and also laugh at the way their bad decisions lead to comedic situations. Let’s put that aside for a moment, because there’s truth in satire, and when I go off the beaten path and try restaurants that aren’t very busy, I often find that, yeah, they’re pretty much being run like Bob’s Burgers is.
Their pricing isn’t sensible.
Their menus are either too simple or too complicated.
Their food reflects an idea of what they think people should want instead of being matched to the customer’s wants and needs.
They develop friendships with their regulars and don’t really know how to provide good service to their new or occasional customers.
And they have to put up with sub-optimal employees because they can’t afford to pay good ones.
So back in Episode 89 of The Marketing Gateway, I talked about why restaurants fail and shared the statistic from the National Restaurant Association that 30% of restaurants fail within one year and 60% fail within three years. That’s more or less held true over time, though of course the rate is higher during recessions or when food prices are going up.
But Bob’s Burgers, and these other restaurants like it, aren’t failed concepts. They exist and they hobble along, barely making it until one day, the owners decide to shut it down and close up shop. We can presume that they’ve covered a lot of their fixed costs like restaurant equipment, tables, chairs and fixtures, and they’re basically just trying to cover their variable costs, maintenance costs, rent and overhead, which is actually still a pretty good chunk of change.
Bob’s Burgers, according to the menu on the wall that’s featured regularly in the show, charges $5 for a burger, add 50 cents for cheese. The Special is $5.95. Fries are $2, a side salad is $2.50, a soft drink is $2 and beer is $4.
Bob also seems to serve coffee and also experiments with soft serve ice cream and cappuccino in some episodes. The coffee can’t be too much since it’s the old diner style stuff that sits on a burner all day. The menu board doesn’t say how much the ice cream is, but Bob rarely seems to sell it and is annoyed by customers asking for it. And the cappuccino machine winds up at a pawn shop thanks to Bob’s wife needing money and is never seen again.
So let’s assume that the average customer spends about $10 on a burger and fries and drink. According to the same data I cited earlier, the average restaurant should take in around $600,000 a year in revenue, or about $1,700 a day assuming they close on major holidays. That means Bob needs to serve 170 customers a day to hit that goal, which seems to be many multiples of the number of customers we see patronizing his restaurant during the show.
And $600,000 is a lot, right? So why is his family complaining all the time about how poor they are? Well, the average net margin for a full-service restaurant is in the neighborhood of 3-5%, which is the amount of profit you make on top of your costs. For Bob, that’s somewhere from $18-30,000 if he’s pulling in $600,000 worth of burger sales a year.
But since Bob isn’t paying any employees and is instead just hiring his family, he really ought to be able to keep about 25-35% of that revenue, in labor savings, which would give him a six-figure salary. Bob’s clearly not pulling in that sort of revenue, but instead seems to be living right around the poverty line of around $39,000 for a family of four, which means Bob is probably pulling in closer to $150-200k a year in burger sales, or about $400-500 a day, or 40-50 customers.
That seems more like it.
So, Bob has several strategies to make more money. Some of these he’s not going to consider, like Jimmy Pesto’s suggestion to use cheaper or frozen ingredients. But there are three he really ought to try, because all of them will help him to be more successful.
The first is to raise prices, and this is honestly the most sensible suggestion. $5 for a burger was cheap even when the show first aired in 2011. When The Bob’s Burgers Movie came out in 2022, the Alamo Drafthouse ran a special promotion where they charged $17.50 for a specialty burger and $13 for loaded fries. That’s probably a bit high for a local restaurant, but Bob should definitely get his prices up into the double digits given the price of beef today – I’d say $10 for a regular burger and $12 for the special at a minimum, and probably $3-4 bucks for fries and $3 for a soda. That would probably bring his average ticket price closer to $17-20 per customer, which would boost his income significantly.
And, since the show is constantly reminding us that Bob makes these incredible burgers people really love once they try them, that seems like a fair price!
Even so, raising prices lowers demand, and Bob needs more customers to offset that effect. But therein lies the second problem. Bob does a really lousy job of getting the word out. He relies on his kids to do his marketing, mostly with fliers they lose or dump in the trash or online with social media posts that make him look bad. He barely participates in community events or even shows hostility towards them, but he also tries to run events in his own restaurants and doesn’t require people to buy food or pay a cover. He also regularly makes mistakes like buying ads that do nothing for his business, adding to his costs by buying up extra seating he can’t fill or running a food truck that doesn’t break even, but which does break down a lot.
Bob’s problem as a businessman is that he knows what success is supposed to look like, but he doesn’t have any knowledge or understanding about what actually works. Sending one of his kids to college to actually learn how to market is business is potentially a good long-term strategy, but in the meantime, he really ought to consider a real marketing strategy like partnerships with the local amusement park, which is owned by his landlord, or using social media and digital advertising to draw in tourists, who are likely to consider his restaurant a local treasure and post reviews online. This makes a lot of sense for a restaurant like Bob’s. After all, the locals don’t seem too impressed by it, but the foodies generally love it.
Well, not the Moody Foodie. At least not at first. But he does eventually come around to enjoying one of Bob’s burgers.
The third thing Bob could do is to try to grow sales among his own customer base by offering additional products. This advice is actually given to him in the show several times, like offering more imaginative appetizers or having products like tea onhand. Bob also has a recipe for a special burger he calls the “Meatsiah”, which is a beef tartare inside a burger medium-well inside a Beef Wellington, but he only makes it once in the show as a giveaway item rather than selling it to his customers.
Remember how I mentioned Alamo Drafthouse was offering loaded fries? Bob could do that. He could also make chili with some of his leftover beef or offer other products like hot dogs, onion rings or milkshakes.
Bob could also consider bundling his burgers with meal deals that include a side and drink for $15 and then push add-ons like cheese, specialty toppings, ice cream or salad to get his average ticket price up.
Speaking of specialty burgers, Bob could do a Burger of the Week instead of a Burger of the Day so he has more time to build buzz about his fun ideas and also more time to develop them and ensure they’re his best efforts. He’d be able to bulk-buy special ingredients to keep his food costs down. He could use the weekly change to promote his business on social media to his existing customers and even give a discount on his special burgers on his slowest days – that’s often Monday or Tuesday for many restaurants – to get more people to come in and try them on a regular basis as a habit or ritual.
And there are of course many other things Bob could do that we see other restaurants do in the show, like offering order and delivery service or providing ambience with music or a theme or even using his alcohol sellers license to offer a better drink menu.
But the most important thing Bob could do?
Actually focus on his customers.
See, in the show, Bob seems to take a dim view of his customers and is overwhelmed by being too busy, by having to take orders or by having to interact with them, so he delegates most of those tasks to his wife and kids. But the place is called Bob’s Burgers. People expect to meet Bob when they walk in, and if Bob is a surly, smelly, sarcastic cook who doesn’t know how to treat people well, never mind those low prices or great burgers – people are not going to stick around. And indeed, Bob’s regulars are an annoying handyman and a mortician, not exactly the sort of buddies most new customers want to make.
We so often think of marketing as being what happens outside our business. But quite often, what’s happening inside is what holds us back.
And the lack of service is what’s holding Bob back too, and while he blames his family for that, he really ought to blame himself, because if he made the experience of eating at Bob’s Burgers less about his own needs and more about his customers’, he’d be as packed as Jimmy Pesto’s across the street.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
Leave a Reply