We all face tradeoffs. Some of these tradeoffs seem like universal laws where we must choose one end of a spectrum. Such a position is quite bleak. In a world where we are at best picking between alternatives it can be hard to conceive of any kind of progress or growth. All our decisions become a matter of aesthetics, and quite boring aesthetics at that.
In the restaurant industry there appears to be such a universal tradeoff between quality of food and scale. You can either have high quality and remain small scale or you can lower your quality and get to a larger scale. As a diner you can experience this by going to your nearest fancy restaurant then stepping next door to a large fast food chain. Both products can be consistent and delicious but the freshness of ingredients, complexity of recipe, and care of preparation will be completely different1.
There are some models people have tried to get around this. One of the most successful has been the various flavours of franchising. In a franchise organisations the onus for quality rests to varying degrees on individual owner-operators. In a world like this you can generally achieve a much higher quality than in a massively centralised model, while still being able to scale. Nonetheless, the tradeoff fundamentally remains obvious to every observer who visits one of these locations.
There may still be a way to get achieve both ends. It may be true that any one restaurant faces a choice between quality and scale but we can tell that the restaurant industry as a whole does not. As a diner I have ready access to both kinds of meal. By increasing the scope from one restaurant concept to multiple we encompass both sides.
For an individual restauranteur what this means is that if you can generate a portfolio of restaurants you can can serve both ends of the spectrum. The best example of someone achieving this is Danny Meyer who has built restaurants that include one-off local coffee shops, Michelin starred fine dining establishments, and an international burger chain2. Where tradeoffs exist maximising diversity and increasing scope can let us have our cake and eat it too.
Likewise in the other direction the brand recognition, ease of purchase, and cost are barely comparable.