We assumed business was coming back after Covid. We invested in our staff paying higher wages than we could afford. We made some bad calls and mistakes along the way. There are similar, and cheaper, fast casual places with lower quality ingredients and we feel that inflation is playing into us losing our market share.Įmployment Challenges The turnover in the cooking job has been a huge challenge the last two years for most restaurants. More people are packing their own lunch, and in some cases still working from home. We have an occasional busy day, but that doesn’t make it sustainable. For the deli to work, we have to be busy, and we have not been consistently busy. We’re paying more for labor, utilities, ingredients, packaging, and basically everything than we were before. Our deli takes a lot of prep, and many employee hours and high quality ingredients. The issue is that the price point is just higher than what people can pay, and we aren’t charging enough as is. We expanded the menu during the pandemic to include fresh cut fries, Gunthorp sausage sandwiches, and Oswalt farm grass fed burgers. Sara and I know the deli food is better quality than ever, with more variety than before. Why close the deli completely? It’s a good question. Inflation has caused buying habits to shift Since we now find ourselves in a situation where expenses have to be drastically lowered immediately, we want you to understand why. We hoped to maintain regular hours through the end of the year, but fall break and the following weeks were exceptionally quiet, and forced us to implement these changes immediately. Summers are very difficult to get through. While it’s very good for families, the slow periods create large gaps in revenue for local businesses. Many that have the financial means, now take vacations often. However, holiday breaks associated with Ball State are now even slower periods than they were before Covid, and the slow period lasts much longer than the break. One positive result of Covid is that we now prioritize increased family and vacation time. It was at this time that we began to see our first decrease in sales. Consumers feel good about getting a nice “compromise” on a product at a lower price, but the reality is that the products are not what they claim to be. This type of marketing is manipulative, but actually very effective. Using labels that carried no third-party certification like “local” and “pasture raised,” are ways to make claims that are not substantiated. Kroger’s Payless also opened in Muncie, and both companies were well versed in greenwashing. But Fresh Thyme received several hundred thousand taxpayer dollars from TIF districts. We had over 1000 of your signatures on a petition. Our public fight asking the city to “stop the subsidizing of Fresh Thyme ” failed. And then several things happened that we didn’t foresee.Ĭorporate Competition Fresh Thyme, owned by Meijer, arrived. Despite being a Mom and Pop corner grocery store, a rarity in this age, we were growing thanks to the amazing support of our loyal customers. The financing went through without a hitch. The deli was very busy, we catered regularly, the store was very steady and business was increasing. In 2018, we finalized the purchase of our building and our business numbers were strong.
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