Healthcare Workers Update

To our Guests,

This is not going to be an easy post. I have to alter a pledge that I made to you yesterday when we announced our plan to serve complimentary meals to Healthcare Workers. When we planned this program Chrissy and I, along with my management staff made several assumptions based on programs that we have embarked on in the past which included providing free meals to Veterans and to the furloughed federal workers during last year’s government shutdown.

This program, however, is turning out to be much different than past efforts. For one, the number of affected Healthcare Workers is dramatically bigger than we expected. We served 234 complimentary meals yesterday. That’s a big number, much more than we expected and most likely would increase to levels we just could not sustain. So, after a night of soul searching we reached the conclusion that in order to continue the program we would have to place a limit on the number of meals we can provide per day.

So, we’ve made the decision to limit the complimentary meals to 60 per day, and also to two per order. This feels like we’re turning our positive intention into a negative result and for that, we’re really sorry. Sixty donated meals per day is what we naively projected to serve from the beginning and the number we can provide without over-taxing our staff and our budget. I have often been accused of being too optimistic and too aggressive and hopefully, I’ll learn to temper myself someday. Chrissy, when it comes to community support, is even more aggressive than I am, so setting a limitation is especially hard for her to accept. But we will continue to do the best we can.

Thank you as always for your support.

Stay safe, healthy and at least a little hungry,
Mike