Recommended reading: Chaos edition
The on-again, off-again tariffs are perhaps working as leaders intended, but the real-life effects of the associated uncertainty touch us all.
I’ll start with some anecdotes:
1. On Sunday, I took my kids to dinner at a San Francisco restaurant. As they gleefully watched the chef prepare cacio e pepe inside a giant wheel of parmesan cheese, I privately wondered how much the wheel cost — and how much the next one might cost after President Trump’s proposed tariffs. At the time, they were set to take effect in just a few days.
When I asked the restaurant’s chef-owner how the tariffs would affect business, I was surprised — not by his answer, but by his calm resignation.
“Of course we’ll get hit,” he answered, noting that many of the restaurant’s ingredients come from Canada. “But this is the restaurant industry, we’re used to it.” I think he even shrugged.
I pushed back a little — surely, there’s a ceiling to how high costs can go, no? — but understood his position. It is what it is.
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2. A few weeks ago, I interviewed Sweetgreen CEO Jonathan Neman onstage at a retail conference. As we listened to the presenters onstage before us, Neman clocked my visible reaction to another interviewer’s question about tariffs (I have no poker face).
“Are you going to ask me about tariffs?” he asked, smiling. I wondered the same thing in the moment.
In the end, I didn’t ask onstage. I figured by the time he finished answering the question, our national policy would have changed, again, and there’s not much use in speculating. (Sweetgreen imports its steak from New Zealand and avocados from Mexico, but I didn’t get an on-the-record comment from Neman about either. In a February report, the company warned investors about business risks associated with potential tariffs. )
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In hindsight, after this week’s maybe predictable but also somehow shocking reversal — or pause, whatever — from the White House, my two casual interview subjects may have the right mindset.
These tariffs, whether real, proposed, discussed, or debated, are clearly the concept of a plan, not a plan itself. Still, the administration’s moves are causing chaos for businesses of all sizes. Small business owners have taken to social media to share their challenges planning for the future — and some large and high-profile companies have basically given up on trying. On Thursday, fellow indie business journalist Brian Sumers, who covers the $800 billion airline industry, reported that Delta, an airline worth $26 billion and whose chief executive earns tens of millions of dollars annually, declined to update their financial guidance this year during a recent earnings call.
“We all know that Delta executives are confident in their own abilities, but even they seemed to suggest that they know this is out of their hands,” he writes. (I’m using an airline example because the biggest companies on my beat have yet to report any earnings.)
This is a long-winded way of explaining that this newsletter was going to be about the restaurant industry’s response to Trump’s sweeping and historic tariffs, promised, but — as of Wednesday — mostly not delivered.
Instead, here’s a selection of coverage related to the future of hospitality and food service that’s worth reading. Each of these pieces speaks to the realities restaurants and industry workers face and highlights the forces shaping the future of hospitality right now.
🏝 Expedite is on spring break next week, which means no breaking news in your inbox. But I still have plenty to share!
Recommended reading:
How tariffs and private equity are (loosely) connected - Bossbarista
I appreciate the way Ashley Rodriguez, my fellow niche newsletter producer, thinks. And I appreciate her perspective as a journalist who’s watched one industry very, very closely for years. In this piece, she observes some similarities between otherwise disparate initiatives to extract more money from the coffee industry. “Both have revealing things to say about power structures,” Rodriguez writes, “and about the regular people who are left behind, or whose livelihoods are crushed, in the process—treated as little more than collateral damage as capital marches on.
Where will the middle class eat? — New York Times
I loved this look at the rise and subsequent demise of American restaurant chains with analysis of what’s replacing them. Spoiler alert: it’s takeout and delivery, which is robbing us all of some much needed conviviality. “If there’s only really fancy restaurants or fast food,” Nathan Wilmers, an associate professor at MIT, told the Times, “you don’t have the social infrastructure for having comfortable meet-ups.”
Convenience store sales are shaky. Brewers shouldn’t panic (yet). — VinePair
My pal Dave Infante, who also produces the spectacular beverage industry newsletter Fingers, knows the drinks business. Amid plenty of turmoil of its own, he argues for VinePair that convenience stores — and other retailers essentially masquerading as convenience stores — are still bright spots for the beer business: “Things are changing too fast, and in ways entirely too dumb, to forecast with certainty how this will play out for beer’s c-store bastion just yet. But we could all use some optimism right about now, and the optimistic take is that the channel’s emphasis on smaller package sizes and novelty sharpens the old industry saw that holds that beer is recession-proof.”
An unintentional symbol of the modern economy: avocados — Wall Street Journal ($)
I’m a millennial, so I’m aware of the significance society places on avocados as an indicator of prosperity. The WSJ has the story on Chipotle’s yearslong quest to source its avocados outside of Mexico. There’s an avocado toast joke in here somewhere, but mostly I’m impressed by the commitment to the cause.
Trump tariffs put the squeeze on NYC’s Economy Candy — Associated Press
This is just one of many stories that chronicles the plight of a small, quirky, beloved business in the face of extreme uncertainty. How many of this candy store’s 2,000 products will be affected by proposed and/or threatened tariffs? “I think all of them,” the store’s owner told the AP. I chose to share this particular story because I was an Economy Candy regular after visits to my beloved former watering hole: The Magician on Essex and Rivington. But business is already different than it was then; candy prices are up 89% since 2005 when I frequented the place, and price, not the consumer’s mood (or, uh, state of mind), is the biggest determining factor when making a candy purchase.
They were deactivated from delivering. Their finances were devastated. — New York Times
Millions of Americans rely on contract work from delivery services like DoorDash or Uber Eats. The companies tout the benefits of flexible contract work, and consistently extol their couriers, understanding they’re an important part of the overall business. So what happens when that work gets taken away through no fault of their own? The Times spoke to several workers who lost weeks of work when platforms suspended their accounts for alleged fraudulent use. Eventually, most were reinstated. But the Times also found that these often temporary suspensions can cause significant financial distress — and the median time before activation, according to a University of Washington study that examined deactivated accounts, was 11 weeks.
And one for the LOLs: A Waymo self-driving car got stuck in a Chick-fil-a drive-thru. — TechCrunch
It was actually just trying to leave.
