Saving Local Restaurants
Local restaurants are facing endless battles. Rising product costs, rising labor costs, and rising rent. All while trying to not alienate their customers.
I’ve been noticing a trend recently with local restaurants on social media. People have been complaining about “rising costs” of eating at these restaurants. Most of the time, these are happening straight in the comment section or they are leaving reviews on Google or Yelp, where others might be deterred by these comments.
Local businesses, especially restaurants have always struggled. The profit margins are razor thin, and you have to constantly battle rising costs of food, labor (both from a cost perspective and just battling finding labor in general), and rent. The typical restaurant owner doesn’t own their own building, so just like regular Americans, they too face the fear of skyrocketing rent putting them out of business.
The one thing these owners will always strive for is, doing what ever they can to not increase the cost of the product onto their customers. For large chains, they don’t care near as much about this because if they have to increase their burgers $1 at Chili’s, no one is going to bat an eye. If you have to increase your burgers $1 at your local burger joint, residents in the area will be in an uproar. You can’t afford to lose customers as a local entrepreneur.
Let’s look at two live examples that I’ve seen over the last couple of weeks.
Two Farmers from Mt. Carmel, Illinois, took to Facebook to tell their customers that they would have to increase the costs of their burgers by 20 cents and their fries by 10 cents.
First of all, major kudos to the owners for really breaking down the reasoning behind the increase in the cost of their food for consumers. Going into the details of how their recent cost of goods sold increase of $5,000 to $6,000 a year will help build the empathy with their customers.
While 10 and 20 cent increases probably don’t seem like it should affect customers too much, there are always people that will find something to complain about. They’ll post on social media or leave a review saying how “this place is price gouging. I use to pay $4 for a burger 20 years ago.” However, posting visibility into what’s driving those price changes is critical in showing the common person why restaurants are struggling right now.
Here’s another example from Joe Brewski Coffee in Evansville, Indiana. Recently, the owners posted a very transparent post on Facebook discussing how their physical retail shop was actually hurting the profitability of their business. They produce quite a bit of wholesale revenue with their cold brew products, so they were contemplating closing down the retail store to focus on their wholesale model.
From the screenshot above, you can see that they’ve been providing constant updates over the last four weeks to their customers. They had set a goal to rally the community that would allow them to deem their retail shop “profitable”. Their original post reached over 28,000 individuals where they broke down the information behind their need for help to keep the retail local open.
For Joe Brewski, they announced yesterday that they had hit their target to keep the shop open. They put the call out for help, shared the transparency about the costs they needed to cover, and the community rallied around them.
For people who aren’t or haven’t ever been a restaurant owner, it’s hard to understand how small the margin of error is. On any day, week, or month, something could blow up and sink your business. These two businesses are taking the right path, the path of transparency. Building the empathy with their regular customers and potential new customers to help support local and save small restaurants.
If you find yourself wanting a nice smash burger or a cup of cold brew today, make sure to go to your local joint.
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