OAKBROOK TERRACE, Ill. -- Even before the Great Recession, it was the fashion among restaurant-business savants to predict the imminent extinction of the independent restaurant. How could a single place compete with the purchasing, marketing, siting and recruitment advantages of a chain with any scale?
No wonder casual dining was in its heyday.
Those thinkers were intellectual descendants of the doomsayers who declared the Internet would never catch on and the public would shun ATMs for the personal experience with a bank teller.
Their blunder was in disregarding the party that would determine the fate of chain restaurants and independents alike, the consumer. And the public’s sentiment was and is unambiguous. Is there anyone who hasn’t caught a whiff of consumers’ predisposition against chain restaurants? There’s even a legislative movement to ban chains on a hyperlocal basis, as if they’re toxic dumps with silverware.
That big-is-bad mentality isn’t as widespread in retailing, where even the übercool will praise the benefits of cookie-cutter concepts such as Target (pronounced tar-jay, of course). Nor has it tarnished impressions of Starbucks, In-N-Out or Chipotle. Sales for the latter chain alone exceed the combined intake of the Top 100 independent restaurants.
But Chipotle would not be Chipotle if founder Steve Ells hadn’t graduated from the Culinary Institute of America and forged his business ideas while working in the kitchen of a landmark San Francisco independent, Jeremiah Tower’s Stars. His distinctive coleadership of Chipotle is a good illustration of three things any chain executive or restaurant manager can learn from independents’ playbook:
1. Burn the catechism
Time and again, Chipotle acts as if it’s the first and only chain on earth, with no precedents to follow or conventional wisdom to flaunt. There’s no paralysis due to scale, potential static from investors or the gnawing awareness that every other brand does it differently.
So, when everyone took it as an article of faith that big chains couldn’t buy from farms as independents did, Chipotle opted for better beans and meat and saw sales and margins grow.
Click here to view the other two lessons. And be sure to click here to view the Top 100 Independents in Restaurant Business.
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