A MESSAGE TO OUR COMMUNITY

We have been making a lot of changes at Worth lately, and some of our guests/customers/former guests/potential guests have had a lot to say about it. We still have a few more changes coming, and we were going to wait to say this, but it feels like we may need to address this sooner than we had planned. We hope that you can read this message with an open mind, compassion, and empathy, and see the positive intent that is behind it.

The last two years have had a major impact on the lives of pretty much everyone in the world. It feels like an atom bomb went off in 2020, and we’ve been dealing with the fallout ever since. In 2021, some major factors started to impact our business model. Our consistency was something we prided ourselves on for years and was a major contributor to the success of Worth. It’s something that we felt kept us afloat and sustained throughout the start of the pandemic. People love the expected, their small comforts, predictably, it helps to sooth our minds to know that we can rely on certain things when everything else is out of our control. That was our greatest ally in 2020. In 2021, the ripple effect of the pandemic started to touch our business in a big way. By August the minor inconveniences that had started to pop up at the beginning of the year were now full blown problems impacting the health of our business. The two major ones are no secret, labor and supply chain.

We could argue about what caused this all day long, but that’s not what we’re here to discuss right now. Hiring has always been a challenge throughout the years. It takes a lot of time and energy to find likeminded people that see your vision in a growing and competitive market. In August it went from being challenging to nearly impossible. We’ve always had a mindset around creating a healthy and sustainable work environment for our team. We haven’t always gotten it right, we are not perfect, we are super flawed humans, and it takes diligence to have your actions align with your values on a daily basis. Things like higher wages for our employees, health benefits, work-life balance, two consecutive days off, breaks on shift, and consistent schedules have been priorities not just for the culture, but our business model and our own peace of mind. We saw the stability of this crumbling as staffing for shifts became increasingly difficult. We went through roughly a six month period where we were asking our staff work extra hours, come in on their days off, and we were paying for a ton of overtime to keep this consistency. It came at a big cost - not just financially - it was burning us all out.

So in January we reduced our hours from 8a-9p seven days a week to 10a-7p. It was painful to do this. It was painful to feel like we were letting down guests and our community, it was painful financially, but the positive impact for our team was undeniable. There was a clear correlation to our improved mental health and well being. We finally had time to address many areas of the business that needed help and we were able to make changes that were needed to keep the business healthy. The double edged sword of being busy and doing a high volume of business is that if there’s a problem in the business, like for example under charging for an item, it becomes an exponential problem and suddenly you’re success is actually a hindrance. The biggest impact though wasn’t just addressing the business needs, it was allowing our team and ourselves to have some breathing room, lowering the intensity on every shift, and giving us all some space to address our own needs.

Perfectionism is a scary motivator. Our industry has felt the pressure of feeling like we need to be perfect to survive, ultimately at the expense of the humans running the restaurant. Platforms like Yelp and Google reviews have piled on so much pressure that everyone in our industry has become dehumanized at one point or another. It’s become an empathy and compassion black hole.

We can’t let this be our motivation anymore. What started as us wanting to create delicious food in a beautiful space with meaningful human connection has become people pleasing. We are losing our soul and that is a huge misaligned value for us.

I haven’t even touched on supply chain and the cost of goods yet.

Our culture combined with massive restaurant chains with power over supply chain and purchasing, has created unrealistic expectations for what small businesses and craft producers can create for a certain price point…and it’s been labeled and become synonymous with being hypster, pretentious, greedy, and opportunistic. If you don’t trust me when I say this, maybe we’re not the right place for you - our prices are the way they are out of necessity. The math needs to add up. We need to be able to pay our employees and ourselves what we deserve for our time and to take care of our needs. If you like our food and our space, know that it costs a lot of money to create and maintain it all, and takes an immense amount of help that does not come for free and shouldn’t. A lot of the costs and labor is hidden as well, we’re not trying to advertise this all of the time, we don’t want guests thinking about this during their experience. We want your experience to be as positive and seamless as possible - but we do ask that you come to us with an unspoken assumption and trust that hard work and effort produced that seamless experience for you. If it feels easy, that’s because we are good at what we do.

With all of this said, we will be raising our prices. We have held out as long as possible hoping to see an improvement in our cost of goods. A lot of work goes into trying to source the best ingredients at the lowest price we can find, while still honoring our partners who are producing these products. The cost of chicken for example, has more than tripled in the last 12 months, and that’s only one line item. Almost everything has at least doubled. Significant time and energy goes into costing out our recipes. A lot of work goes into getting creative with menu items so that they taste great but ultimately don’t cost an outrageous amount. All of this with our guest in mind. So when we raise our prices, it’s not to spite you, it’s not greedy, it’s not with ill intentions, it’s for the survival of our business. It’s so that we can stay open, and so that our team, or myself and family don’t have to live paycheck to paycheck in a time when inflation and prices in other industries are climbing faster than we can keep up.

This is not a sympathy plea. I’m writing this to offer transparency to our community. I know that so much has changed in our world over the last couple of years, and not being able to get your favorite breakfast burrito on your way to work anymore may just be the last straw for some people. Be kind to yourself. A lot has happened to you. Be kind to us too, a lot has happened to us. I cry when someone lets me go ahead of them in line at lunch. We are all starved for humanity and human decency right now. We all need a gentle place to land.

So that’s what we are working to be. Our business model might be changing, but I just heard this on Glennon Doyle’s podcast the other day - something always has to die for something else to be born (or reborn). Parts of our business may be put to rest, but new exciting parts are being born from this.

We are working with our team to help them not only be compassion towards each other, but to be compassionate towards themselves. How great would it be to do that as a community? It’s not going to happen overnight, and it starts with us as owners modeling it. I have fallen prey to perfectionism for a long time, and it’s going to take me a long time to break that habit too. In the words of Brene Brown “Perfectionism is not striving to be our best or working towards excellence. HEALTHY striving is internally driven.”

Worth has been great because of our healthy desire to create a beautiful experience. We cannot continue to avoid making healthy decisions for our business and our team out of fear of what external criticism we will receive.

I appreciate you taking the time to read and understand what has been going on in our lives, as the humans operating Worth. We hope to make every experience feel ‘Worth’ it to you in the future (within reason).

XO Kelsey and Jim Bob

As a reminder, our new hours are M-F 10:30AM - 9PM, Sat & Sun 9AM-9PM, brunch 9AM-12PM on Saturday and Sunday. Menu prices are currently the same and will be increased in the next few weeks.