60 days open – 1st September 2020
Wow. I need to start this blog by saying that I have some of the best staff in the entire universe. I don’t know how it happened, but from up the road to around the world literarily, (even from New Zealand), they have arrived and worked like a flotilla of Belisha beacons, always alight, always working and forever making everything float along in a safe and magical way.
If I started to describe to you the carnage that followed the eat out scheme around, I would start by likening it to a millstone around a poor mans neck. It’s a bad description, because it doesn’t really do it justice, but even thinking about it makes me come out in a sweat. It finished yesterday, that was the last day.
On reflection, I feel I need to clarify what I mean about millstone. The scheme was either pure genius or some semblance of complete madness, but that aside, what it should have, and in my humble opinion has done for our industry, is brilliant. I have to say in all honesty, from a business point of view, as a way of getting cash in the bank, it was brilliant for us too. I mean, who in their right mind, does not want half priced food and soft drinks? Especially if you can get them from some of your favourite places, I wouldn’t say no to half a lobster on Boris, or I wouldn’t have done if I had chance to get out and eat some. The game changer, the bit you can’t account for, are people.
People are so wonderfully varied and exciting. We are a gregarious race, we enjoy the kingship and brilliance of everyone, but we are tribal too, we find our own kind, eventually, and we stick with them. The Rod has its own kind of people, just like every other business does, whoever says that everyone is their customer might not be telling an untruth, but within that ‘everyone’, there will be a group of people who spend the most money, and who return time after time, with other people like them because they really get you, your product and your ethos. They become your tribe, your followers and you learn how to excite and reward them. The eat out scheme changed all that. I have been told on numerous occasions that I have the patience of not just one saint, but a whole congregation of the communio sanctorum, I am after all married to Mr Jones. However, I can honestly say that the carrying on of some – not all – but some of the eat out customers, was among some of the worst carrying on I can ever remember seeing in my fellow human beings, and I must admit to ‘loosing my shit’ as my staff would say, on more than one occasion in the last month, not with one person in particular and not so anyone could see, but in genuine frustration with some parts of human race I was encountering. We have a saying here when things get a little hot under the collar, it goes something like ‘just smile and wave’, and believe me we did.
That said, I am not going to sit here and write, let alone subject you to, a tirade of anguished remonstrations about these particular incidents, there are other people who do that well enough for the entire sector. I am glad that we have managed to take advantage of what the government laid out on a plate, thank you everyone who came and spent your money here – there have to be some upsides to this pandemic and this is one of them. However, while I’m still reeling from the chaos, I’m conscious that winter is coming. The evenings are drawing in and I know that the sun lost its Indian summer strength somewhere in the middle of all the eating out hoo ha. It makes me nervous, people will go home, holidays will be put away, and the virus may well decide that it wants to come back with a bang, and I wonder if anyone is ready to face that all over again, because I don’t think Boris will give us free food the second time around.