I had a friend Jeff, whom I nicknamed “Sparky”, who used to work in the restaurant industry. He’d spent about a dozen years doing all sorts of things and I was forever surprised by what he knew about running a restaurant that I would never even consider.
We’d go to lunch and drive by a place with construction on the side and he’d say “Oh, So-n-So is putting in a drive-through window. That’s going to add between $175,000 and $225,000 to their bottom line this year alone!” and “This guy picked the wrong side of the street to put his place. If he’d gone on the West side instead of the East, it would be worth about another $25,000 a month because of people going to work late and coming home with more time to stop there.”
He was always coming up with stuff like that. One that he shared with us was that most of us can keep about ten restaurants going. Some of us can do more. Some of us fewer. But the average is about ten. And through the course of a year we’ll take in a new place and maybe be impressed or not. If we are, we’ll add that one to our list and it’ll bump out whoever was at the bottom. And we won’t do this with any thought. It’s not a conscious decision. We don’t have a serious meeting and decide to stop going to BurgerCity. We just don’t go back. And a year or two from now we wonder why?
Kathie and I have found this to be true for us. One day last month we drove to South Pointe and wondered why we hadn’t been to Old Chicago in so long? For that matter, what happened to Chili’s? The Meat Me pizza and the fajitas were great for years and then one day we just… stopped going.
Do you have a place or two like that? Do you keep rotating between about ten or a dozen places? It’s been true for us.
