Catching Hell by Allen Ricca

Author:Allen Ricca
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510769717
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2022-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

RESTAURANTNOMICS

IF I RAN my business as badly as most restaurants run theirs, I’d have to close my doors within a month.

I know it’s hard for restaurants in the COVID world, and everyone is struggling to get by, but if some of these places spent even a fraction of as much time and energy attempting to get a handle on their finances as they do trying to skip out on bills, they’d be on much more solid ground.

The restaurant industry runs on credit. Specifically, credit extended to them by me and my fellow distributors. This is unsecured credit, mind you. I’m not a bank, even though I’m often treated as one.

Ideally, suppliers would always get paid on delivery. That’s how it works in most of the rest of the world. You walk into a store, you buy a candy bar, you give the guy a dollar, and you walk out. Transaction over. Everyone is happy.

But in the food world, I’m expected to deliver thousands, tens of thousands, or sometimes even hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of product to a restaurant every week, on time with no delay. But they don’t have to pay me back right away. They have thirty days to do so. Most of the time they do. A lot of the time they don’t.

One of my customers is a high-end Greek restaurant. This isn’t your corner gyro joint. This is a place with incredible seafood dishes that costs $100 to $200 a head once you factor in appetizers and drinks. They are very well-regarded by critics and diners, and I sort of get the impression that all this clout is what makes them feel like they don’t have to pay us in a timely manner.

I actually cut them off one time. They were too far behind on bills, and I told them we didn’t need their business anymore. It only took them a week to come crawling back to us, begging for us to sell to them again. They clearly realized that we have the best product in town, and all the adulation from critics and customers wasn’t going to help them if they weren’t putting top-notch food on the plates.

So after they’d coughed up a bit of money, we started selling to them again. Except this time, I jacked up my prices. I wasn’t doing this to be vindictive. This was my insurance policy. I had to protect my own business, and if they welched again I wanted a nice cushion to soften the blow. I also told them that their thirty-day payment window was now fourteen days. They agreed, and things were good again for a while.

Flash forward a few months later, my dad had a hankering for Greek food and invited me to come with him. He asked the salesman in charge of the account to get him a reservation. I told him this was a bad idea. Begged and screamed for him to reconsider. If he wanted to eat there, fine, but I wanted our visit to be a little more under the radar.

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