Jon Taffer's biggest worry for restaurants reopening after COVID-19
'Bar Rescue' host Jon Taffer says a plan is needed to jumpstart businesses when they reopen.
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“Bar Rescue” host Jon Taffer said on “Fox & Friends” on Tuesday that the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting closures of restaurants will present challenges that have not yet been addressed.
“The biggest worry that I have is the premise of spacing continuing into retail environments,” Taffer said.
He then provided an example saying, “people aren’t going to want to sit shoulder to shoulder right at the end of this.”
“They are still going to be cautious and want some spacing so when restaurants start to space out their tables it reduces seating capacity by 40 to 50 percent and nobody is talking about this,” he continued, explaining that this will lessen the revenue that restaurants can bring in.
“When we consider the change in capacity, this could affect sports arenas, it could affect movie theaters, it could affect Broadway so if the seating capacity of these businesses is going to get changed and our overall revenue capacity lowered as a result of it, that’s really powerful,” he continued.
Taffer also stressed that restaurants must work on immediately establishing trust with the customer.
“It’s critical that they have a trust in the restaurant so that they will come back and spend money,” he said. “It’s critical and it has to happen right away.”
He explained, “The only way we’re going to develop that relationship with the consumer is by taking expectations and making them demands: the kitchen will be clean, we are treating our people in a surgical fashion, food doesn’t get touched by human hands, it is maintained at the right temperature, we do have spacing to keep you safe when you are in our environments.
“These are the steps that we need to take to assure the consumer comes back, but yet these costs are expensive,” he noted.
A survey of more than 4,000 restaurant owners and operators conducted by the National Restaurant Association found that during the first 22 days of March, the restaurant industry lost an estimated $25 billion in sales and more than 3 million jobs.
Taffer, who spoke via skype from Nevada, said the $2.2 trillion coronavirus economic stimulus package is a “good start” to help restaurants impacted by the novel coronavirus.
He noted that while the stimulus “sounds good,” there are still “things that it doesn’t cover.”
“Every walk-in, every refrigerator in every restaurant now has bad food in it, complete new inventories need to be purchased,” Taffer said. “Not every employee comes back, we need employee training, there’s a number of things that have to happen that are very, very expensive for restaurants to open and I worry about that.”
He went on to say, “I’m focused on restarting America.
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“I get that we have to make it through the pandemic, but we need a plan to jump-start these businesses and make sure they’re solvent when they begin and get the consumer back,” Taffer concluded.
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