Covid struggles —> hospitality advocacy

Last week we talked to Someday Bar's Megan Rickerson about her background and experience with Covid.

This week Megan's back and we're talking Covid again, but this time through the lens of how Covid and its aftermath directly led her to get super involved in advocacy for the hospitality industry.

Megan never saw herself as somebody who'd get involved in something like this. But when Someday Bar failed to qualify for any relief programs because it was too new (they didn't have historical numbers to base relief amounts on) and Covid regulations kept getting tougher and tougher to deal with, she felt she had to do something.

Check out the video interview for more about Megan's Covid struggles and how they directly led to involvement in hospitality advocacy.

Why worry about menu design?

Imagine this: you've done the significant work to have an always-up-to-date drink menu. Every single time a keg kicks or a new whiskey arrives you update the menu accordingly. And that happens multiple times a month/week.

But you're not seeing an uptick in drink sales. Why? The up-to-date menu should be helping. You're starting to wonder if maybe it's not worth maintaining the menu.

If this is the case, your issue might be with the design of your menu rather than the content. A poorly designed drink menu can flatline your bev sales. But a well-designed menu can:

• Make your customers want to spend time with your menu.
• Help customers figure out what to order more easily.
• This puts customers at ease: coming back to the menu to order another drink isn't a daunting task. It's a pleasant one.

How can I get a well-designed drink menu?

You could do it manually, though that would require the services of a graphic designer as well as knowing that the menu document they create could be fragile, breaking if a beer name is too long, etc.

• 3 years ago, Uber purchased Drizly for $1.1 billion. Now they're shutting it down. According to Axios, it seems a cybersecurity issue may be at root of the decision. That issue exposed info on 2.5 million customers. Worse, Drizly knew about it for 2 years before confirming it, something they did only after the acquisition. Drizly loomed large in the industry, so having it suddenly evaporate comes as a shock to me, let alone any liquor stores who depended on it as a revenue stream.
• Anheuser-Busch workers are threatening a strike if a new contract isn't agreed to before their current one expires on 2/29. The 5,000 employees represented by the Teamsters voted 99% in favor of a strike. This is one to keep an eye on.
• We've covered this often, but earlier this week New Jersey updated its liquor laws to be more friendly to breweries and distilleries. This was the state's first substantive change to liquor laws since it repealed Prohibition.