Mike's Minute: Hospo - a boom or a bust?

We got the press release recently from the Restaurant Association where they said there were flat sales, cost pressures and regional divergence was the theme.

I have changed my mind a bit on hospitality.

More broadly, I wonder whether there are too many vested interests in this country who get in the way of real progress.

The hospitality story has been a long, arduous and well told one.

We hear hospitality is shot, hospitality is a disaster, no one makes money and no one wants to work in hospitality.

Yet my increasing observation is that is not true.

If you take a very large industry as a whole and average everything out, you might well be able to find some dour times.

But what is increasingly obvious, not just from personal experience but a lot of anecdotal expert opinions as well, is a lot of hospitality is not only fine, it's actually going quite well.

The thing about hospitality is it is malleable. You are not a log exporter reliant on a single market to either buy, or not buy, your tree.

In hospitality you can vary what it is you are offering and what I see is a lot of people doing really good things and, as a result, they are doing very nicely thank you.

It took us over a week to get the last table for lunch the other day at a local that, in our experience, has changed hands and boosted their product and offering and as a result has gone from a quiet, regional operator to a booming tourism business rushed off its feet.

Same place, same name, new product - whole different result.

The other thing about hospitality is it doesn’t require any skill to enter. Anyone can buy a café, and a lot do, and I have seen them, often immigrants, as it's an easy entry point. They take over a going concern and wreck it, change a menu, employ the family, kill the service and they're dead in a week.

We are over supplied of course. So in your area where you have a choice of a dozen places, only two have to be good before they boom and the others wilt.

So the Restaurant Association telling us things aren't flash is not the real story.

Bits aren't flash, but then if you are not up to much in the first place - they never will be.  

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