Rebuild gods hurting CBD hospitality
It saddens me to see the demise of The Villas restaurant on Montreal St. Having been both an employee and an owner of businesses that have gone bust, I can empathise with everyone involved. Don’t panic folks. A bunch of bars, cafes and restaurants will fail over the next few years – 30 per cent of them by the reckoning of one expert I spoke to this week. It’s just a sad consequence of an industry that believed the Blueprint.
The hospitality industry is a good metaphor for evolution. It’s unregulated – praise be – and there’s always a new organism looking for a share of the pond scum on offer. Those that survive will be strong, lucky or ideally both. You gotta adapt, evolve, get better at it than any of the others and most importantly – be lucky.
I know all about failure. A restaurant I opened after the quakes took me to horrible point where the only thing that saved me was the generosity of friends.
Now I’ve just about paid off that mistake and am a better business person for the experience, because business failure teaches you much faster than success.
The most destructive thing for central city hospitality has been the rebuild. Whether Cera, Otakaro, or the lousy city council, those charged with helping us have fumbled their way across the central city, leaving a trail of destroyed businesses in their wake.
A few less consultations for the sake of saying you’ve consulted or hacks selling future utopia and a few more on the end of shovels would have seen a better result.
The roosters charged with rebuilding have been so obsessed with master plans, visions and blueprints that they’ve failed to recognise that those doing business in the current environment want to be a part of the future city, want to be the genesis of the future city.
As plants have grown up between the cracks in the rubble, those leading the rebuild have cried: ‘‘They’re weeds’’.
‘‘No they’re native plants,’’ we replied. ‘‘They’re weeds to us. We had an expensive sculpture of a plant planned for this spot.’’
Small business has been of little concern as Big Plans met Big Business in line for the trough and told one another lies about how the little guys would get fat eating the scraps from the floor.
An obsession with removing parking from the street, parking wardens aggressively and vindictively targeting streets where life is peeping through, bike lanes at the expense of everything else and a dogged determination to have hacks with no skin-in-the-game lecture business owners on how to run a business will ensure that more good hospitality businesses go the way of the Neanderthal.
The success or failure of the central city can have its pulse taken with hospitality. The residential component has failed, the Anchor Projects are moving so slowly that we’ll be dead before they’re all done but bars, cafes and restaurants continue to open every week.
When people go into the hospitality industry, they must have their eyes wide open. The chance of great success is much slimmer than the chance of failure.
But large scale failure is almost guaranteed when those driving the bus are drunk on power. And when the rebuild gods talk about ‘‘vibrant hospitality offerings spilling out onto laneways’’, make sure to call out their BS.