Restaurants run in Laurie Katz’s family
McDonald’s restaurants run in Laurie Katz’s family the way other families pass down freckles or baldness from generation to generation.
She owns four of them across Niagara. Her brother, Matthew, has seven. Her parents, Michael and Jana, had nine at one time and her grandfather, Albert, was the first owner-operator of a McDonald’s restaurant in Canada, on Ontario Street in St. Catharines.
Back in the late 1960s, her great-uncle, Ed Garber, worked with George Cohon to bring McDonald’s to Canada.
“Then I also have two cousins that are owner-operators in Toronto, they’re in their 60s … it’s very much a family business,” says Katz, 44, who lives in Niagara Falls.
“It’s always been McDonald’s — nothing else.”
As a teenager, she started work at the Ontario Street restaurant and just before her 30th birthday got corporate approval to own her own store.
First, she bought the McDonald’s on Oakwood Drive at McLeod Road in Niagara Falls and later opened an outlet in the Walmart nearby.
In November, she bought her third store, in Port Colborne. Then things got really busy — “I went away to Florida in February for a Disney trip, and came home to chaos.”
About the same time she got approval to own a fourth store — a new build, at 153 Lincoln St. in Welland — COVID-19 blew in.
The pandemic required closure of all restaurant dining rooms and adoption of a long list of safety protocols, and forced many people, including Katz, to work from home.
She was juggling responsibilities for her two original stores and still getting to know the staff at the Port Colborne one she had just bought, while planning to build the Welland site from the ground up.
And looking after her two little children while her husband worked at Dofasco in Hamilton.
“It was the busiest time of my life as an operator, and it was the most stressful at the same time,” she says. “Thank God I have great managers.”
After a few delays when construction projects also stopped due to COVID-19, the new Welland restaurant finally opened on Sept. 9 and so far, she says, sales have exceeded projections.
Finding good applicants for the roughly 100 positions, there was never a problem. Far from it.
One reason might be that Niagara has so many restaurants, and COVID-19 forced nearly all of them to either lay off some staff or reduce their hours.
But having food-handling experience was never a requirement; McDonald’s provides its own staff training.
Fast-food venues, unlike some other restaurants, were already doing brisk drive-thru business before the pandemic forced dining rooms to close.
Even so, more staff training was required and delivery service had to be introduced or expanded.
Now that dining rooms have finally reopened, Katz believes many of the new safety protocols put in place due to COVID-19 will remain.
At McDonald’s, at the start of each shift, each employee gets a temperature check and is questioned on their health. She says they are strict about employees staying home if they’re not feeling well.
“And we’re still dealing with that now,” she says. “I would say that’s our biggest challenge in the restaurant, from a staffing level, is a lot of the sick calls.
“And it’s because we’re overly cautious … so we have a larger on-call list to call people in from.”
She continues: “I think the way it is now is the way we’re always going to be. I don’t think we’re ever going to revert back … with all the safety standards in the restaurants now.
“I can’t see the masks going away, the gloves … for the debitcredit pin pads, there are covers over them. We have the extender poles in the drive-thru to limit the contact of touching.
“The Plexiglass we have in our restaurants, the six feet apart — I don’t see that changing. Because what are they saying, a vaccine might not be around for another year?
“And who’s to say the next virus isn’t going to come around? I just think this is what our new normal is going to be.”
At her four stores, she employs 313 people, including managers and office staff. With close to 20 McDonald’s outlets across Niagara, it’s one of the largest employers in the region.
Katz has no idea how many people over the years have worked at her family’s stores to put themselves through college or university, pick up extra income as they got older, or made a career of it. Or met their future partner or spouse. Probably thousands. “When COVID hit, I would keep seeing online how people would say to support local business. And I know when people see McDonald’s, they think ‘big business, corporation, the arches worldwide,’ ” she says.
“But it’s individual franchisees that own these restaurants, and our blood, sweat and tears — our money, our life savings — are in these franchises.”