Restaurant business: not everyone will survive and not immediately

Vice-President of the Union of Restaurateurs and Hoteliers of Russia Sergey Mironov predicted in an interview for Rusbankrot that half of the country's restaurants will be closed after the pandemic and no new ones will appear. The future belongs to fast foods, Mironov is sure.

Novye Izvestia publishes the most interesting places from this interview.

“A restaurateur today is a person who regrets his profession. The restaurant market is now in very poor condition and in a huge minus. Everyone has frantic cash gaps and losses, only we have suffered such losses.

If you take a store, then it’s out of load - rent and a small team. And the restaurateur has a large number of employees and many products that have already been thrown away.

The more expensive the restaurant, the more menu it has and the more products it has in its warehouses. Therefore, the losses at restaurateurs are now enormous. In March, they lost more money than they earned last year. There is nothing to say about April and May, because this is a solid minus.

We believe that 50% of institutions will close in two stages. At the first stage we are now and the closure has already begun. On the second, restaurants will close until the new year. Moreover, according to forecasts, the second stage of institutions will close more than the first.

Most restaurants will not open because they have no money and no further prospects. Part will open, but then close after the first - they rely on guests and profits, but this will not save them.

Only fast food and cheap restaurants, where there are no expensive chefs and modern equipment, will be able to avoid all this.

Experienced in this business people have tried all the methods and techniques to increase the marginality of their business. But, unfortunately, this business is unprofitable now. To prevent this from happening again, it is necessary to change the tax policy, because it does not take into account the peculiarities of our restaurant business ... "

However, this situation concerns not only Russia, the same thing is happening all over the world. Bloomberg writes.

The owner of the Bainianfeng Catering Management restaurant chain in the homeland of the pandemic in Wuhan, China, Xiong Fei told reporters that ending quarantine did not bring relief, but only new problems.

Restrictive measures remained in Wuhan; they do not allow doing business as before. Small businesses, like Xiong Fei, fear that quarantine will forever change the habits of their customers:

“If earlier people had lunch with their colleagues during the break, now everyone eats from their lunch box, they often cook at home and do not go out”.

Before the pandemic, Fei had ten restaurants - not one of them was open to visitors, only three resumed food delivery. Fay closes three more establishments completely, as he expects a decrease in the number of clients, and discusses with business partners what to do next in the long run.

Half of Bainianfeng's establishments are hot food outlets, where visitors themselves cook raw meat and vegetables in shared pots with boiling broth. Now, customers are likely to avoid such places.

Fay closed most of the restaurants in December due to rumors of a "deadly virus" pneumonia, and wrote off $ 142 thousand in damages for fresh food. The staff of the company has declined: most employees were either too scared to come to work, or could not leave the house. The rest spent most of their time disinfecting the kitchen of the only restaurant that Fay managed to keep open during quarantine.

Now, to attract more visitors, three operating restaurants offer delivery anywhere in the city, even if it takes several hours. The aggregator commission is 20%, but Fei does not raise prices, as people will start to complain.

Fey believes that there will be a “significant decline” in consumption, and the entire city hospitality business (restaurants, hotels, events) will face a crisis, despite the fact that many companies hope to return to their usual work after the pandemic.

The restaurateur is looking for new ways to preserve the business, developing delivery - for this he began to import high-tech packaging machines from Taiwan for resale to other restaurants. “Certainly, restaurants will be eliminated”, he says. “Natural selection is taking place on the market, only the fittest will survive”.