Every summer it’s the same old wedgie. People with interests ranging from snail ballet to endurance Twister can find theme vacations or specialty camps catering to their kind. But for the restaurant executive who wants to focus on canoeing, crafts and cash flow? You might as well look for a quidditch clinic.
Which brings me to my new whistle, clipboard and Camp EBITDA Counselor T-shirt. It may be late in the season, but there’s still time to breathe the special air of our just-opened South Bronx grounds while relishing such activities as pigeon watching, bail posting and Red Sox booing.
Yet there’s more to Camp EBITDA than s’mores and oil-drum fires. Working under the strictest work-release regulations, our instructors provide insightful programs geared to the latest industry trends. Consider these activities from our extensive catalog:
Peltz fencing. Why waste time, paper and ink by writing home? Put your communications skills to better use in our workshop on responding to the mash notes of Nelson Peltz and other militant shareholders. They’ve guaranteed a good summer for the U.S. Post office by firing off missive after missive to restaurant companies that aren’t operating the way they’d like—or, even worse, have the audacity not to sell themselves for a short-term pop to investors.
Peltz may be the most prolific of the bunch, a regular Dear Abby in reverse. He may not return phone calls, but he’s been dropping notes to Wendy’s International chairman Jim Pickett at a clip that makes you wonder how he can cut words from a newspaper and tape them into a letter so quickly. Or at least that’s what you’d expect after reading copies of the notes, which have been filed dutifully with the Securities and Exchange Commission, hopefully in a container that stifles combustion. Hallmark clearly doesn’t yet have a card to capture his sentiments.
Peltz is upset over how Wendy’s has been conducting its self-auction process, which, by all appearances, he direly wants to win. He’s repeated an assertion in the letters that Wendy’s would be an ideal complement to Arby’s, the quick-service chain operated by Triarc Cos., a concern he controls. And—how should we say this delicately?—he has the light touch of a pit bull in expressing himself.
For one thing, he sets his own deadlines for a reply from Pickett, as well as his expectations for the content.
“If we do not get a favorable response from you by then,” he wrote recently, “we will wish the [selection] Special Committee well in its effort to conduct an auction.”
Curiously, he didn’t sign off with any X’s or O’s. Learn how to elicit them if he should write to you.
Menu shoehorning. New York City and Seattle’s home county already have passed laws that require restaurants to cram their menus with nutrition information about every item listed. With 74 percent of consumers telling Technomic they favor that type of regulation, is it a surprise that Washington, D.C., and Maryland’s Montgomery County are already considering similar mandates? If you doubt that other jurisdictions will follow those leads, you probably believe Barry Bonds just does a lot of push-ups.
What could make menu white space even rarer is a movement already gaining momentum in Europe. The environmentally minded there are already calling for the disclosure of “food miles,” or how far items were transported before they ended up on a plate. That might be a bit extreme, but what about information about an ingredient’s source, or how it was raised, or whether it was caught in the wild or farmed? If consumers want information, are they going to stop at calorie and fat-gram counts?
A new Sharpie is given to every participant.
Regulator hosting. If you run afoul of government regulators these days, you can expect fines and the other usual penalties. But some authorities have been imposing another stipulation as of late: Having someone keep an eye specifically on you.
When New York chef Daniel Boulud settled a lawsuit that accused him of discriminating at his Daniel restaurant against non-white employees, for instance, the deal called for setting up personnel procedures to be overseen by two parties: the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the state attorney general’s office. That was in addition to paying $80,000.
Meanwhile, New York’s Cipriani family agreed to hire an independent financial monitor through 2011 to allay concerns about its bookkeeping methods. Patriarch Arrigo and son Giuseppe recently ended tax-evasion proceedings against them by pleading guilty and agreeing to pay $10 million in penalties and restitution.
I only hope the authorities don’t transfer that remote-watchdog approach to camps.
We wouldn’t have enough T-shirts to go around.
Read Peter Romeo daily in Nation’s Restaurant News’ blogs,
