November 2010 - Central Florida Chapter Associated Builders and ...

For Here or
In the struggling restaurant market, builders
are finding opportunities in old, familiar places.
Buffalo Wild Wings
18 BUILDING CENTRAL FLORIDA NOVEMBER 2010
TO GO?
It doesn’t take an advanced economics degree
to know the restaurant business is still
climbing out of a funk. Reams of sales data
and market research can confirm it, but the
restaurant industry's tale can likely be told by
anecdotes culled from any American family.
We’re eating out less, spending less per check
and changing the way we perceive value in a
bought-and-paid-for meal.
The stakes for this industry are high. According
to the National Restaurant Association,
about one in every ten working Americans is
employed in the restaurant industry, including
more than 804,000 Floridians. Even in an off
year, the restaurant business is expected to
generate $27.6 billion in sales, and there is a
positive outlook for the future. The Association
expects restaurant employment to grow by
nearly 16 percent during the next ten years.
The current cloud over the market, however,
remains.
The National Restaurant Association's monthly
Restaurant Performance Index report for
September 2010 shows restaurants are still
missing targets for sales, capital expenditures
and customer traffic. The last time the Index
showed consistently positive results in those
categories was the summer of 2007. In lieu
of numbers, take a drive through your town's
main street to see the evidence firsthand.
Empty storefronts are an all-too-common
sight in most Central Florida communities,
and in many of those holes a thriving restaurant
once stood.
For ABC Central Florida members, however,
those empty spaces are turning out to be
part of the solution, not just a symptom of
the problem. A glut of available space and
aggressive pricing from contractors is creating