Oh Walt. What were you THINKING?? (Part II)
Thursday, June 11th, 2009Lots of things can kill a location for a restaurant venture. From something as seemingly innocuous as ingress/egress (which are fancy/schmancy words for the ease and ability to enter and exit, by vehicle, the area where the place is located), to the proximity to other retail establishments, the ways by which a restaurant’s location can hurt it are varied.
I once had a client who came to me after he chose to build up, from footings to rooftop, a new building to house his Mexican food fare. It was a costly error in itself, but from my perspective it was greatly exacerbated by the fact that it was tucked away and nearly invisible from the main street. As a new concept, it needed to be seen. And it wasn’t. This helped spell its doom. While the restaurant was built near a theater chain, the theaters were of the dollar movie variety. And because its menu prices, which despite being fairly reasonable, weren’t in line with the customer base for the center, it failed. Kids and families went to the movies there and paid a buck and change. They weren’t willing to spend the kind of money this full-service place was looking to draw. And the primary draw was the movie theater, rather than the restaurant itself.
I saw another client choose an end cap location in a well-established strip mall. The problem was that nothing had ever succeeded at this particular end of the mall. I watched 3-4 restaurants and other retail outlets over a number of years try their luck at this unit number, and all were finite and fairly short-lived. It was a very tough left-hand turn to make into this end of the strip mall. To make matters worse, cars were not supposed to use this same end to exit onto the main road. As a result, cars had to go all the way to the other end to get out. It was a long, narrow strip, making it inconvenient to leave. I think this hurt his chances as well.
There are other things that hurt a restaurant’s chances due to location, such as perception of the center as an appealing place to be, age and upkeep of the center itself, and the product/service makeup of other tenants in the center. The waters are teeming with hazardous ways a restaurant can fail. Treading carefully in the location decision is a crucial element to its success - or failure.
