Multimillion-dollar chain-restaurant companies can survive the shutdown — for all the wrong reasons. cathyerway writes
Photo: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images The COVID-19 pandemic has upended every aspect of life. For the restaurant industry, which has been decimated, it means head chefs now make home deliveries, while other operators transition to meal kits and pantry items. It used to be that customer preferences were the driving force behind these kinds of sweeping changes, and that will, one day, be the case once again.
Independent, neighborhood restaurants are a bit like small, local farms: They don’t rake in millions in profit; they don’t have the advantage of big lawyers or lobbyists working on their behalf, seeing to it that even government assistance is working on their behalf, yet they’re often the only outfits that offer good products of any real value to people. That’s proven especially true now, as restaurants hang on to the life support of their adoring communities.
The bellyaching over most of these chain restaurants is and always was warranted. I don’t mean to yuck anyone’s yum, but the very concept of publicly traded restaurants — which pull in millions and can spend more on marketing and advertising than most small businesses can spend in total — should be a clue that they’re selling mostly smoke and mirrors.
Are chain restaurants any more likely to commit wage theft, sexual harassment, food-safety violations, other safety violations, or fraud? Maybe not. But the owners of independent restaurants are more incentivized to serve superlative food to keep their customers happy and to keep their employees happy, and have little bandwidth to advertise beyond planting themselves on a good piece of real estate.
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