Restaurants are closing, payrolls are being slashed by the tens of thousands and people are dying. A drinking-straw supplier figures this is the ideal time for us to write about its products’ superiority over competing brands. Given that insensitivity to the global meltdown, we have our own take on which straw line truly sucks, and we’re not talking suction.
I shouldn’t single out one party for tone deafness. We’re routinely getting news alerts and pitches from parties that apparently were just thawed out of a glacier after weeks of iced incoherence. Why else would they be hawking goods or services for recruiting employees, training staff or upgrading bar operations? And is this really the time to promote catering? Or to sell franchises?
My colleague Heather Lalley fielded a pitch on how to hail-proof a restaurant. We get a cheery email almost every day from a company pushing high-end chefs’ knives. Often it’s while we’re writing about operations furloughing staffs in hopes of stretching their cash.
Those are just annoyances. The boil-overs come when we’re confronted with employers falling way, way short. A number of readers have reached out to see if the operation where they or a relative works is really shutting. They can’t raise anyone at headquarters or the unit. Should they show for their shift? Any word on a final check? (We’re not identifying the brands involved because we can’t verify the questioners are truly employees.)
That’s when I wonder how to sneak a statue of Gene Lee into the main floor of McCormick Place when the industry’s big show, the National Restaurant Association’s national convention, returns to Chicago in May 2021. (Full disclosure: The Show is managed by our parent company, Winsight, but that doesn’t help if you’re trying to slip a half-ton granite likeness past security. And Gene is very tall.)
Lee is CEO of Darden Restaurants, one of the nation’s largest operators of full-service restaurants. With dine-in service nearly banned from coast to coast, that’s not a point to brag about. He’s the person ultimately responsible for 1,800 restaurants and 190,000 employees facing dual crises—one health-based, the other economic—of biblical proportions.
We’ve not heard a public peep from most of Lee’s peer set. Lee, in contrast, sent two heart-wrenching notes to all 190,000 associates, reassuring them that furloughs and cuts in hours would be an option of last resort. Neither communication was a shovel-load of sugar. As Lee noted, his salary was the first to be cut—to zero.
Contrast that with what we heard from another multibrand casual-dining operator that was forced to shut its restaurants. We were contacted by a brand manager, a C-level exec and a director-level employee, one of whom was seething because we’d run a story. It became evident the company hadn’t informed the rank and file that all operations had to be indefinitely suspended, as it had alerted a federal bankruptcy court.
It’s a truism, but crises clearly do bring out the best and worst in people. The heroes far outweigh the villains this time around in our business. Consider, for instance, how Square, the credit card processing company, returned the subscription fees it’d already collected during the first two weeks of March, when the pandemic had yet to worsen into a true nightmare.
Dozens of franchisors immediately suspended the collection of royalty fees. DoorDash launched a marketing campaign to promote delivery from all restaurants. Randy Dewitt’s Front Burner Restaurants turned its Dallas catering kitchen into a production facility turning out 1,000 meals a day for anyone who’d been furloughed from their jobs. McDonald’s, a company said to be more of a landlord than a burger titan, suspended rent payments for franchisees.
And then we have the others who sense an opportunity—not a chance to survive, but to prosper on other parties’ woes: the consultants promising to get restaurants through this, as if they have some magic formula for a situation no human has experienced before, or the suppliers who haven’t changed a thing about their goods, services or terms of purchase. They just spy a chance to find new traction because people are panicked, if not desperate.
Unions have been particularly oblivious to the struggle most restaurants are facing. Labor advocates have seized the occasion to bash employers or pressure them with walkouts. If ever there was a time for labor and management collaboration, this is it. Yet those parties seem intent on fanning inherent opposition.
We could go on and on. And maybe we should, if that’d convince the opportunists to change their stripes. There’s nothing wrong with trying to keep a business afloat during these extraordinary times. But if there was ever a time to go an extra yard, to show true partnership, it’s right now.
It’s the “how to stay afloat” that matters as never before.
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