Dear Santa,
We don’t want to hurt your feelings, big guy, but dancing at Chippendale’s might not be the best fallback career for someone of your, um, horizontal magnitude.
Can’t say we see much promise in a sleigh version of Uber, either. And let’s just drop this notion of a virtual concept specializing in six types of snow.
Might you be best off in sticking with your niche of hand-making toys for children the world over and distributing the whole batch in one night via chimneys? How do you manage to shimmy back up?
Still, that has to be easier than trying to run a restaurant circa 2022. Sure, you, too, have the challenge of fielding and training enough workers to stay afloat. But how many other employers can there be in the North Pole? And how many are chasing recruits with pointed ears and virtually no experience outside of toy making?
Restaurants have lowered their hiring criteria to take anyone who can fog a mirror, though only true sticklers are unbending on that point. Most would happily settle for a workforce in curled-toe slippers if that meant being fully staffed.
Heck, the reindeer would be brought aboard with bonuses and all kinds of perks if they just had opposable thumbs.
And we’ve yet to run a single story on toy parts being tied up on the docks of Los Angeles or stuck on trucks no one wants to drive. That’s assuming Claus Enterprises can afford to pay what workshop supplies are fetching while the supply chain “normalizes.”
All in all, you have a cakewalk compared to what the typical restaurateur faces.
So stick with your day job, One in Red. The clincher should be that you won’t have a millisecond of agita over what to wiggle down restaurants’ chimneys this year. Cloning kits would be good. Robots, even better. And elf resumes are very easy to transport via sleigh. Throw Mrs. Claus’ LinkedIn info in there, too, just in case she’s had her fill of reindeer whining.
If labor remedies don’t merit one of your ho-ho-hos, how about leaving one of the pricey toys high on restaurateurs’ wish lists? Think of how their faces will light with joy if they find a new POS or KDS under the tree this year! Just remember to bring a replacement in 2023, given the speed tech is evolving for a business supposedly built on food and service.
If all else fails, go with the tried and true of restaurant gift ideas: a few hundred pounds of chicken wings, all battered and set to be fried by the Super Bowl.
The only better gift would be a true end to a pandemic that feels as if it’s entering its sixth decade, calendars to the contrary. The industry is hopefully at the end of that slog and the shin kicks it’s incessantly delivered to a business that was either essential or not worth helping with more federal aid, depending on the day. Be sure to stress the possibility to a business that’s had enough of life during wartime.
But please go one step further and extend the harried, hard-working members of the restaurant business a laugh and heartfelt Happy Holidays from the staff of Restaurant Business. It’s an honor to serve that industry of opportunity.
Now, where’s the sports car we asked for?
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