It doesn’t take a genius to see how hard this hits when the dining public has less to spend. Pxhere
It seems every year I’m penning an article about the difficulties of hospitality. Unfortunately, here I go again. This time though it is more a discussion about the broader industry—not so much my own and Fix’s travails.
At time of writing I can quickly count about 20 higher profile restaurants and cafés that have closed this year, and there will be many more that have shut their doors in the past six months that are not on the radar, but the reasons are all likely to be the same. I’d like to say that will be all, but I’d be very surprised if we don’t see a similar number of closures between now and the end of the year.
In the restaurant game, inflation has a double whammy: our raw produce costs have skyrocketed—across the board we have seen about 25% increase in our food costs.
At no point in the two decades that I have owned a hospitality business would I ever describe the business as easy. Margins are always very tight and it only takes a sneeze from the economy for any discretionary service business to catch a cold.
The GFC in 2008 was the first serious downturn I had experienced as an owner. Fortunately we had a small buffer built up and that kept us holding on by our fingernails until things turned around. This time around
This Article was originally published on The Real Review
