I'm personally curious to see how much investment goes to the restaurant industry. Despite the sad circumstances that led to lots of real estate becoming available, it will mean fresh opportunity for a new wave of retail and dining.
I suspect the types of businesses opening will be ones that are inherently better adapted to lockdowns and lack of indoor dining in case things surge again.
But it's going to take a whole hell of a lot of special sauce to survive when you're the first random mid-level restaurant competing against places that can attract customers through line of sight.
You can't simplify away the varying value of certain land for certain uses and still pretend you're doing economics.
No OP, but restaurants are the most competitive industry possible. Anyone can start a restaurant, and lots of people want and can do it. Because it's intrinsically a physical business, the market reach is limited to a small area unless it's in downtown or a highly trafficked area - where it also costs a lot more in rent.
There's almost no way to make a restaurant profitable as many restaurants are a labour of love, basically.
Agreed on the smaller businesses - I love that aspect and always wondered if a faked version of that in NYC or something (subdivide a typical restaurant space into a number of 6-10 seater counter bars like you'd find in Japan) would take off.
The biggest takeaway (...) for me was the stats about how they are still growing by a decent amount. I haven't paid attention to them in a long time but
> expects... over 1,300 net restaurant additions in 2022.
That is only common today when you have high rent. Most of the older business tends own the property ( Like early days McDonald ) and it will remain a competitive advantage.
Investors are interested because GrubWithUs is the only company solving the overcapacity problems that cripple many urban restaurants. Rents are high, so extra space is expensive, but everyone wants to go out on Friday and Saturday nights so the restaurant tries to accommodate them. Leaving a bunch of unused floor space on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.
GrubWithUs lets the restaurant sell off that extra floor space in chunks, and keeps a good chunk of the value captured (and also gets people to meet each other, or something like that).
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