In this article, we will discuss the improvements that will be critical for restaurants — from the largest chain restaurants to small coffee houses — to make to meet the needs and demands of customers whose perceptions, tastes and behaviors are likely to be much different from before the coronavirus outbreak.
Introduction
Part of what we have all learned during this “quarantine life” era is that we have come to appreciate what we had before the COVID-19/coronavirus pandemic, much of which we took for granted until March 2020 in our everyday lives. One of those “things” which we just assumed to be fairly constant was the regulard http://miura-seikotsuin.com/ https://remontibudowa.com/ https://zaskakujacakuchnia.pl/ http://urzadzajzpasja.pl/ https://dlabiznesmena.pl/ https://casinomega888.com/ https://fk-vintage.com/purchase/shoun/ https://www.celeb-lady.jp/ https://foozoku.net/ availability of all styles, groups, cuisines and sizes of restaurants. Whether it was the morning stop at Starbucks for coffee to have breakfast, lunch, dinner-or maybe even the late night’s “fourth meal” at Taco Bell, we got used to having a multitude of food options open to us that our ancestors could only dream of! We could drop in, drive through, order out for delivery-heck, at the nearby Sonic we could even order and eat in our own cars-even getting our food supplied by a roller-skating server! Sometimes we could feel almost overwhelmed by our choices as there were so many foods available and various ways of where, how, and when to enjoy these restaurants.
Well, that was then, and now restaurants everywhere are fighting to survive in the midst of state lockdowns, stay-at-home orders and a formidable public. From big chains to the family bistro, restaurant management teams have to make tactical decisions almost everyday-with their plans often thrown out of the window. At this time how can we better serve customers? In fact how do we work safely? What workers can / should we hold on-how many and how long? In fact, how can we extract any revenue-and is it enough to justify remaining open? How do we act in a way that strengthens our brand and our group standing? And of course the big one, will we really survive this?
There has never been an incident like this that has already entered the restaurant industry. As we addressed in this series’ first article (The Post-COVID-19 Business Environment — Part 1: Overview), the COVID-19 pandemic is perhaps our lifetime’s quintessential Black Swan case. Restaurants, however, seem to be especially vulnerable to the effects-both immediate and long-term-that coronavirus can have on their operations following the passage of extreme fear and risk. One idea that we will come back to time and again as we examine various sectors in this series of articles is this:
The average American consumer is likely to be changed forever because of the experience of living through this pandemic. No matter what age group, race, income level, and so on-no matter how you set your target market before March 2020, you need to attach a new dimension to the future. It is the fact that just as our Elders’ experiences influenced them as consumers-i.e. going through recessions, conflicts, 9/11, social change, the etc.-this occurrence would reshape how we behave as consumers, both individually and collectively. And today, a single word will concentrate on that dimension: hygiene. And when it comes to food and foodservice, sanitation is an utterly important aspect of service.
In the first article in this series (The Post-COVID-19 Business World — Part 1: Overview), we described this proposition in the followi