When Melissa Roberts was asked by the Monitor to look back on her three decades as a waitress at the recently closed Pizza Hut in Concord, one memory stood out: “Ten or 15 years ago, it just kind of — things shifted. People didn’t go and sit in restaurants,” she mused.
It wasn’t only Concord that saw the shift. The rise of online deliveries, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic, changed people’s relationship to many restaurants. Pizza Hut was particularly hard hit.
There’s a reason for that, says the region’s dean of franchised pizza restaurants.
“It used to be that Domino’s was delivery, Pizza Hut would have the sit-down restaurant, and Little Caesars would have the economical pizza,” said Rik Yeames, who owns two Domino’s franchises. He has owned one since the early 1990s, which makes it the oldest Domino’s franchise in the state under one owner and the city’s longest continually operating pizza shop under one owner.
What changed? Doordash and other online delivery apps, known in the industry as aggregators.
“Aggregators turned everyone into a delivery restaurant,” Yeames said. Domino’s years of branding as a place to call for delivery pizza made it easier for it to transition to a delivery-heavy ecosystem. “The world is changing,” he said. “The speed of change is increasing.”
While it’s not clear what directly led to the Concord closure, the fact that Pizza Hut was sold earlier this year to a private equity firm, LongRange Capital, was a bad sign for an older restaurant. Private equity is infamous for cutting costs by firing people, closing stores and changing lease agreements in order to increase the amount of money they can make — sometimes to the detriment of the entire chain, as Toys ‘R Us demonstrated.
“It’s getting harder and harder to run big empires. To me, it’s easier to run something that you’re local and have a direct influence,” said Yeames.
