Finally Friday, and that means something food-related. This week, you might have passed over the article on NYC’s Monkey Bar in the NY Times. You can read it if you click through here. In any event, it provided a pretty good business lesson for today’s screed.
This joint has been around for 75 years. Luminaries such as Tennessee Williams, Joe DiMaggio, Helen Hayes and others helped to build its reputation. It was taken over in 2009 by an ownership group that was focused on glitz and exclusivity and were quite successful taking that route. For a time. Now, not so much.
I found these lines to be especially interesting:
In those early days, the restaurant essentially stopped accepting reservations by telephone. Diners without a direct line to one of the owners had to apply by e-mail because “we were getting 1,000 calls a day,” …
Most of the 120 seats were booked with private-line calls. Many were Friends of Graydon, and Mr. Carter personally fine-tuned the nightly seating-chart calculus from his office at Vanity Fair, where he has been the editor for 19 years.
Now, two years later, Mr. Carter said he still peruses each night’s guest list. But it is formidably less peruse-worthy. On a recent evening after Labor Day, the restaurant was three-fourths full. Reservation seekers can now simply pick up the phone, or log on to Open Table, which over the last week has shown lots of same-day availabilities, even in the choice 7-to-9 p.m. window.
So what do we learn here? Perhaps that the walls we’ve constructed to keep out the riff raff also serve to lock us in to a faulty business model? After all, if the food is mediocre and you’re turning away people with money to spend simply because they don’t meet your ideal of “who belongs”, where is the future? Ask Studio 54.
When a place is booked solid because the food and service are exceptional, I think we all understand. Great products are always in demand. I think, however, that most of us want to feel as if that greatness is accessible and not denied us due to snobbery. I know of dozens of golf clubs, for example, that wouldn’t even consider admitting the “wrong” kind of person when they were almost full and yet now that many clubs are hurting they’re cutting dues, reducing initiation fees, and yet being rejected by those they previously turned away. Could the Monkey Bar’s downturn be due to the economy? Probably, in part. But one might also think there’s a bit of a backlash – if my money wasn’t good enough for you then, why is it now?
We all need to remember that there are always other options, whether it’s where to drink, dine, shop, or devot our precious time on content. We need to embrace everyone, even those we need to turn away. Payback, as it turns out, really is a bitch.
Thoughts?
Consult Keith 