Companies are booming one after another. And then there’s Sean Feeney, a former bond trader at Goldman Sachs and current owner of two popular Brooklyn restaurants, who was a part of President Trump’s restaurants panel and told the president this week, We view you as one of us.” As long as the restaurant industry relies on this sort of person to stay afloat, we cannot expect workers to be cared for.
As this style of restaurant took off, the trends made their way to neighborhood joints with more modest ambitions. More than 100,000 new restaurants opened their doors in the 2010s, many of them in cities that affluent Americans began flocking back to after a half-century in suburbia—places like Austin and Nashville. But as they did, a decade of uninterrupted economic growth led to rising rents, increased labor costs, and heightened competition. The only people making money were the folks with their own restaurant groups, who’d gotten very good at recognizing opportunities, moving quickly to take advantage of them, and elbowing out all competitors,” Alexander says.
All of these forces, taken together, make the restaurant industry precarious at the best of times, but also one that relies on exploitation to exist. Which means that making the necessary changes to this industry—worker ownership, mass unionization, ethical supply chains, prices that reflect real costs—is in many ways scrapping how restaurants work now and starting fresh.
While sandwiches might not scream foodie” to everyone, Capriotti’s offers a variety of award winning sandwiches for customers to choose from. As a franchisee, you’re likely to spend between $197,000 and $427,500 to get started. And with that, you get training, design help and a brand name that’s been around since the 1970s.
Our leadership team has decades of experience and a strong background in operations. Combined with our franchisee input, we bring together frontline experience and institutional knowledge. That has enabled A&W to make changes to the brand based on long-term growth objectives, rather than a short-term rewards-based decision typical of Wall Street or private equity investors. Our franchisee-owned brand is here for the long haul, and our strategies have already paid off with strong results and lots of room to grow.