Restaurant Ingredients, Lawsuits, and Avoiding Bad Public Relations

It seems the restaurant industry has had a stroke of really bad luck. The global economic financial crisis severely hurt the industry, and it didn’t help that the real estate market also crashed. After all restaurants are usually on top of expensive commercial real estate. And there have been serious issues with the FDA, the state of New York, and the state of California demanding more information of the ingredients of all the dishes which are prepared.

You will recall the huge problem with transfat and the mandatory disclosure of such ingredients, and then the eventual banning of transfats. It seems that restaurant owners just can’t get a break, and the latest ObamaCare has made things even worse. Many restaurants simply cannot afford to have that many people on their payroll, and still provide insurance coverage for them. This means they cannot have as many people on staff, and therefore the customer service goes down, and either way it cuts into their profits.

But that’s not all that’s going on, as it seems like every day you read in the paper that the restaurant industry is getting hit for one thing or another. It’s almost as if they can’t get Out of Dodge, and the onslaught of regulations continues to create havoc and crisis for the sector.

There was an interesting article the other day in the Wall Street Journal on January 12, 2011 titled; “With Fast Food, It’s Tough to Sort the Beef from the Chaff” by Carl Bialik (the numbers guy) about a lawsuit involving Taco Bell and it’s ingredients, such as Beef Substitute instead of real beef in its tacos.

The last thing we want to do right now is to hurt the restaurant franchising industry, because the industry means lots of jobs for Americans. Some people say those are not very good jobs, but if it is the only job you have, it probably sounds pretty good to you. Likewise many of the restaurant waitresses and waiters do make tips, and some take home a good amount of money.

In the fast food restaurant most people are paid just over minimum wage, and to add the costs of Obama Care simply means they can’t hires many people, and they will have no choice but to go robotic. In other words, no one will have the benefit of working there. Now then, some of the restaurants, that is to say the large restaurant franchise chains have been able to work out a deal with the Obama Administration to get a waiver on ObamaCare.

The problem with that is many other restaurants have not been able to get the waiver, so that unbalances the playing field in the free market. In which case, there are more barriers to entry and the free market doesn’t exist. This latest issue with lawsuits, ingredients disclosures, and Bad Public Relations is not what the industry needs right now. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this.

Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank. Lance Winslow believes writing 22,000 articles was a lot of work – because all the letters on his keyboard are now worn off..