AFTER Prime Minister Narendra Modi carried out his ‘surgical strike’ against black money, industry insiders had expected restaurants to be hit as badly as some other sectors of the economy. Their business did take a bad hit in the first two days and the restaurants were almost depleted, as Saurabh Khanijo of Kylin and Jamie’s Italian points out, but the drop in business has now stabilised at a manageable 10-15 percent and is expected to taper off after December 31.The restaurant owners I have spoke to are not complaining.
The business took a bad hit, initially
It is because more and more customers visiting restaurants are using credit cards, the variation in usage being 50 to 70 percent, so if there’s – any negative sentiment, it’s not visible yet in restaurants.
Of course, those in the wedding catering business have taken a beating because cash transactions are rampant in this sector; so has the growing home delivery segment, because people no longer have spare cash to spend.
Unlike the real estate, jewellery and luxury businesses, restaurants have experienced only a ‘manageable’ drop In business.
My personal discovery over this week has been that owners of restaurants, at least the ones that have been corpora-tised, are quite happy at the prospect of going ‘cashless’.
Riyaaz Amlani, President, National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI), and Founder-CEO of Impresario, says restaurants that do cash dealings are prone to leakages, because their employees start also taking ottsh without accounting for it.
