Comment by duxup
2 years ago
Quality control and management ... seem to be the secret sauce to restaurants and are amusingly unrelated to the actual food / recipes and etc.
I too have a few local places that despite being busy and great food for ages, suddenly couldn't keep good people working there. They were doing great then just fell on their face.
I suspect that they just couldn't adapt to it being more difficult to retain / keep good people and everything else suffered.
Dominoes Pizza (US national pizza chain), seems to be the alternate story, long time bargain pizza chain with poor quality.... got better quality pizza and reportedly took off again.
For my poor friends the whole 'emergency pizza' thing was amazing marketing. Every other company is actively screwing them, increasing rates to unaffordable, shrinking sizes. Domino's not only stayed affordable, but said, hey, times are though, if you get in a crunch, here's an emergency pizza to fill the gap. Friggen' overdraft protection on food for their kids. The amount of good will that corporate marketing campaign brought in that group I can't even tell you. I'm talking about the single dad's working two jobs, moved back home with their parents segment. They now feel like Dominoes is the only company that hasn't f'd them. They actively talk about Dominoes randomly (we guys don't have much to talk about but still it doesn't normally fall to discount pizza discussion).
This happened to a local sports-bar chain around us. It was always decent and our first choice for family nights out, but after Covid it went downhill, locations closed, and the last location close by just started falling flat... empty even at busy periods, no wait staff, declining quality, etc. It just up and closed shortly after.
Lately for pizza I've only been ordering from Dominoes, mostly because it's sort of cheap but also consistent.
Not fantastic, not bad, but always pretty good.
I hope they keep up with it, whenever I go in they always appear fully staffed and in good spirits.