Connell McShane:
We have a Fox business alert here on TikTok as the Commerce Department is now saying it won’t enforce its own order, that would’ve effectively forced the Chinese owned TikTok to shut down. It has cited a federal court ruling out of Philadelphia, and the ruling delays the implementation of a regulation, which would’ve banned U.S. Companies, such as Apple, from offering TikTok as a mobile app there, in its App store. So TikTok lives to fight at least another day. That’s just in from the Commerce Department.
So as we’ve been talking about, we know at this point that more COVID restrictions are coming. Some are already in place. And New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, as an example, saying that all the bars and restaurants in the state will have to close up shop at 10:00 PM. That restriction, the 10:00 PM closing, starts tomorrow night.
Buddy Foy, Jr. joins us once again. The owner of the Chateau on the Lake in upstate New York. He’s been on the show a number of times. And what do you think of this Buddy? What’s this going to do to your business in terms of getting people seated for dinner and the like?
Buddy Foy, Jr.:
Connell, the extra hour is a difference between staying open and closing. We’re a dinner-only establishment. And those of us that only serve dinner, people have to be gone by 10:00 pm, not seated by 10:00. So we can’t just take food off of people’s plates. It’s an hour and a half to two hour time frame to feed people. So basically what they’re saying is we can open from 5:00-8:00 proceeding, have everyone out and shut the doors at 10:00. At the end of the day, that extra hour is a difference between staying open and shutting down. And I don’t think we’re going to have a choice at this point.
Connell McShane:
So you’re, you’re going to shut the restaurant.
Buddy Foy, Jr.:
We’re going to shut it down until we can get through COVID. At this point, that hour is turning into conversations with employees that we have to lay off. Who do we give the job to? We’ve got to, we’ve we’ve already right sized our business for COVID and for social distancing. We’ve figured this out and I have 48 hours advanced notice, and that’s no way to run a business. We can’t run a business on 48 hours at a time. I’ll take a week so that people can plan and organize their finances. We have employees that we have to worry about. My phone rang off the hook last night, “What’s going to happen? We know we can’t stay open,” or “How are we going to feed these people?”
Social distancing. We can pay our bills under the current guidelines with the social distancing regulations, with the timeframe until 11 o’clock. We worked on it. It works. 10:00, we’re going to have to shut it down until, until we can serve and operate legitimately to serve and pay our bills. We can’t pay our bills closing in three hours. In other words, sitting people from 5:00-8:00. 10:00 means you’re not taking anyone inside your restaurant to eat after 8:00 at night, because you’ve got to go through a process. And it takes time. That extra hour is a difference between staying open and closing down until we can operate normally.
Connell McShane:
So this puts you over the edge. I mean, you were pretty close to the edge anyway, right? I mean, you’d come up with so many things to keep yourself going and you know, I’m sure you’d, we’ve talked to you a number of times you were lean as you could be. I guess eating outdoors when you could. I know it’s cold upstate, but you were pretty close. Where were your margins? Where were you before this that you had to say, “All right, enough’s enough.” How much money were you losing?
Buddy Foy, Jr.:
Well, before this, we had a great summer. Like we were out in the Adirondacks, we had outdoor seating. We had the best summer we’ve ever had in the history of our business. We knew coming into the fall and the cold season, it would be challenging. We don’t make money in the fall. We keep our employees busy and we break even. We keep everyone showing up to work, 40 hours a week, keep everyone out of trouble and keep their eye on the ball and getting ready for the next season. We work together to maintain a property, clean a property and feed a limited amount of people. We also offer online business. Our online business only requires a specific amount of staff to service that. 90% of our staff is used to service our in-house diners that sit and enjoy their meals. So what we’re at is that extra hour, we were just getting by in the fall with limited seating for indoor, since the weather got cold [crosstalk 00:04:09] and now we take advantage of it when we can.
Connell McShane:
That’s right.
Buddy Foy, Jr.:
When it’s warm, but it’s hard to plan the weather and the extra hour, that’s going to be the camel that breaks, the straw that breaks the camel’s back if you know what I mean.
Connell McShane:
Yeah, kind of the nail in the coffin, pushes you over the edge. We get it, man. This is tough. I hope, I hope it doesn’t last long that we can get through this winter and then you guys can be open, we’ll see. And you’ll have a great spring or something, but that’s that’s tough news, Buddy. We’ll stay in touch. Buddy Foy, Jr. there.
Buddy Foy, Jr.:
Excellent.
Connell McShane:
At the Chateau on the Lake in New York.