Baton Rouge is going through what I’ll call an unsustainable restaurant boom. On one corner in a certain area of town, 12 stores have opened in the last 18 months . TWELVE, every one of them a franchise. It’s an impossible economic proposition for a lot of reasons, one of which being I fact that there were seven existing stores within a quarter mile already. For a simple math exercise, let’s say that each of these stores has to do 150-200 sales a day just to break even and that means there has to be 24,000 people stopping in the area each day. I could stop here and I would have made my point.

Before we go any further, yes, I own two restaurants so maybe I’m a part of the problem, but really this is about more than me. I want to know the mindset of all these people opening franchises. What kind of nonsense has the franchisor been able to sell to these people that makes all logic go out the window? Cults and churches need to go take lessons.

On a second corner in BTR, two meal prep places and two salad restaurants opened across the street from each other. While this may sounds like competition to you. To me it sounds like cannibalization. I’ll just outlast them.

Really though the last thing a lot of these places have considered should have been the first. Is the product they are getting behind far superior to what’s already being delivered by existing stores? Product trumps all, and there’s a lot of substandard stuff out there.

Lost in the glut are some solid offerings and I’m not just wholesale indicting every new franchise. What I’m saying is there needs to be some common sense thought to all of this expansion. It smells more like selling real estate than filling needs and that’s never going to last.

The restaurant business is a grind, we at FRESHJUNKIE aren’t perfect, but unless this city instantly grows by 50,000 people. These folks and likely me are in trouble. What the world needs is less better choices, not more for the sake of more.

Thanks for y’all’s continued support.

#hugsandhi5s