I am thinking about replacing an oven and doing some remodeling. I am trying to anticipate where this economy and in particular the pizza business will be in a few months. I read about hyper inflation, food shortages, difficulty in finding enough employees and interruptions in the supply chain in general. I read about diminishing fertilizer production for farmers in this country and around the world that has the potential to extensively damage crop yields. A canned response might be "well, people have to eat and pizza is still economical.
People have to have the money to eat and at some point the government is going to run out of our money to give out to other people and countries.
What are your thoughts? Do you think this the time to buy new equipment, remodel, expand? Do you think we can just plow through the obstacles? Do you even believe there any obstacles out there to be concerned about?
I would be much more worried if I ran a steakhouse and if I was dependent on a dining room. I am putting the finishing touches on my 1500sf delco/sliceshop with fast casual seating for 20 that I started working on about a year ago when I lost a tenant and the wheels started turning. I am walking away from my 150seat and plan on leasing that space. The higher costs that we will pass along like everyone else is does not worry me. The labor crisis is more of an issue and we are constantly plugging holes. I am thankful that we have scaled back our services, menu items, etc that have helped us somewhat control these labor issues.
no…we have been doing it over the years starting with calamari and all the saute dishes but since the pandemic we added burgers, gyros, soups to the no more list
I noticed that when we tried to maintain our whole menu our service dropped somewhat and we were undermining the quality. The reason was, obviously, the lack of enough employees but it was also because we have hired some people that are too young. It is difficult to train them because they are not experienced enough or maybe better said they have not been exposed to enough to the realities of the work place. I was bouncing back and forth between two of our locations this evening. I walked into one where we had several people pausing, if not completely stopping, what they were doing to discuss going camping. One customer waited way to long for his order and another order was not properly topped. They do not understand that there is a time to kind of relax and a time when you have to bare down and concentrate. In the face of this I felt it is better to remove some of the things from the menu to allow us to make sure the rest of the menu is being prepared properly. Our customers are not
coming in because we are fast (that is not our number one priority) they are coming in because they appreciate the effort we make to ensure quality. We can go to our customers and explain why their food may be a little late but we cannot go out to tell them why it will not be as good.