Dear Santa,
Sorry we’re leaving you only half a cookie this year, but inflation is killing us, Big Guy. Plus, Mrs. Claus says the Ozempic isn’t working. Two reindeer are refusing to haul the sleigh if your suit has to be let out again.
But enough about you. Let’s talk presents for us. We need a really special one after the year we in the restaurant business have slogged through. For the first time we can remember, people are saying, “Oh, hell, I’ll make dinner myself and save a few bucks for indulgences like rent and heat. Who needs restaurants?”
It’s more worrisome than the time a typo had the elves cranking out millions of Pickle Me Elmos.
And that’s not where the pain ended for the trade. Your business model is a little different, but almost every other enterprise aims for something called “profits,” a function of having “margins.” Try delivering either of those essentials when costs are soaring higher than Rudolph’s nose.
It gets worse. Because of those aforementioned margins, the bar can be the most important part of a restaurant, and not just for editors. Alcohol is where the money is, yet young adults have been drinking less every year since 2001. A huge source of profits is waning. The industry is trying to stem the loss with pricey booze-free libations, but it’s like assuring a kid on the Nice List that a Skipper doll is every bit as good as a real Barbie.
That’s not the end of our woes. You don’t hear that much about it, but landlords were apparently all sucked aboard alien spaceships during the pandemic and not released until last Tuesday. Why else would they be so oblivious to the struggle for survival many of their restaurant tenants are facing in the post-COVID world? Given the rent increases they’re seeing, you’d think restaurants’ biggest challenge is how to count all their money.
Looking at the whole mess, it’s obvious what the industry needs: A time machine. We could zoom back to the days when mom and dad were both too pooped from commuting to and from work to think about cooking. With the prices charged back then, they could afford to let a restaurant function as their kitchen, morning, noon and night.
Could you leave us some sort of gizmo that’ll get us back to those days? Given what that new Tesla truck looks like, it could probably do the trick.
That’d also give us a break on labor. Since the pandemic, we’ve been squarely on prospective hires’ Naughty List, just because we laid them all off and then brought ‘em back when they didn’t always want to go. Talk about splitting hairs. It’s not like we forced a Pickle Me Elmo on them.
Geez, those days look great in hindsight. Who wouldn’t go back to a time when casual dining was supposedly dying, family dining was clearly flat-lining, the white-tablecloth sector looked like it was aging out of the market and legacy fast-food brands were worried about a trampling from fast-casual upstarts? Ah, the good ole days!
On second thought, Man in Red, we’ll still take the time machine. But maybe we could use its go-forward function and zap ourselves out of this stretch where everything feels so hard for the restaurant business. And there’s plenty of reason to be positive. Science has advanced significantly since high school bio class—we hear there’s now even proof the earth isn’t flat. But as even we can tell, people still need to eat.
We just have to figure out how to oblige them in ways that also allow a business to prosper. We’ll get there, but it’ll clearly take some time and brainpower.
If a time machine won’t fit on the sleigh, especially with the new weight restrictions set by the reindeer union, maybe you could tide us over to better times with a big gift of optimism. Give us a reminder the industry’s been down before, along with the confidence it’ll get up and reinvent itself this time, too.
Oh, and be especially generous to the readers who’ve made covering this business a privilege and a pleasure, even in these challenging times. Where else might a slightly off columnist and his, um, unique colleagues find such color, creativity and social generosity?
We wish each of them a happy and prosperous holiday season and the most lucrative of a New Year.
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