Dairy Queen hours reduced due to supply issues

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Dairy Queen hours reduced due to supply issues

Post by Super S »

https://www.chronline.com/stories/centr ... ues,270662

This is not good. Dairy Queen is typically busiest during the summer months, and although this does not apply here, there are some areas of the country where Dairy Queen operates on a seasonal basis and closes during the winter months. This could have a huge impact on those seasonal locations.

Some locations have also been drive-thru only since the pandemic started.
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Re: Dairy Queen hours reduced due to supply issues

Post by buckguy »

This has gone viral but I can't find other reports that suggest it's a thing elsewhere. What I did find was the DQ has decentralized their supply chain, with a variety of suppliers and variation by region. There also may be variation in what suppliers supply---I'm guessing SYSCO supplies more on the grill side than the ice cream side.

I think we're stuck in a situation where there still are shortages and they're often quirky. There was a point last year where finding plain white vinegar was a problem--red wine, rice, cider, etc. no problem. Fancy white vinegar no problem, but the plain stuff house brand or otherwise was absent and this was after the other noticable shortages had ended. There seemed to paper goods hiccup after the usual brands and items were back in stock and then there was a period where, all of a sudden, we were back to seeing off brands from Mexico again. The good thing is that these events have been shortlived.
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Re: Dairy Queen hours reduced due to supply issues

Post by bryceleinan »

There was a similar post from City Subs in Coos Bay this past week - they and a lot of restaurants relying on US Foods / US Foods Chefstore are out of product because of a massive COVID outbreak at the US Foods facility in Portland, resulting in no deliveries to restaurants or to stores. I'm guessing SYSCO is in a similar situation. Dairy comes from Umpqua Dairy IIRC - not sure if this changed with Producers buying Umpqua.
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Re: Dairy Queen hours reduced due to supply issues

Post by SamSpade »

bryceleinan wrote: August 13th, 2021, 1:22 pm There was a similar post from City Subs in Coos Bay this past week - they and a lot of restaurants relying on US Foods / US Foods Chefstore are out of product because of a massive COVID outbreak at the US Foods facility in Portland, resulting in no deliveries to restaurants or to stores. I'm guessing SYSCO is in a similar situation. Dairy comes from Umpqua Dairy IIRC - not sure if this changed with Producers buying Umpqua.
Now I understand the Instagram story I'd seen posted by two local food establishments. It seems the local Restaurant Depot was slammed in trying to make up for the lack at US Foods / US Foods Chefstore.
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Re: Dairy Queen hours reduced due to supply issues

Post by storewanderer »

What a nightmare.

Faced with increasing labor costs and other increasing overhead, and inability to even get product, how are many of these businesses even going to survive?

US Foods ChefStore is still directly supplied by Supervalu/UNFI... it is not being supplied directly by US Foods Warehouses. I'm not sure if the US Foods Warehouse is dropping the items to Supervalu/UNFI to then take to the stores? That seems like it would be really inefficient. Supervalu/UNFI is actually slotting US Foods private label products now.
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Re: Dairy Queen hours reduced due to supply issues

Post by Brian Lutz »

My aunt in Bonney Lake reposted a post on her Facebook feed today from the owner of the DQ restaurant there saying that in the 31 years the restaurant has been open they have never been as short staffed as they are now. The post goes on to offer $15 per hour (or more depending on experience) starting pay, plus a $1,000 signing bonus conditional on staying on through the end of next January.
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Re: Dairy Queen hours reduced due to supply issues

Post by veteran+ »

I guess the idea of, "you reap what you sow" fits nicely?
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Re: Dairy Queen hours reduced due to supply issues

Post by storewanderer »

Difficult decisions need to be made as a result of these labor shortages.

For a place like Dairy Queen, they should probably only sell hot food during certain hours. In the evenings, Dairy Queen seems to do a very high volume of ice cream business and then 1 in about 15 orders have some kind of a hot item. These orders cause the entire line to stop since no hot food is made (not enough volume to cook and hold) so it has to be cooked. You either have to dedicate an employee to hot food who is standing around most of the time or pull someone else to handle it further causing an efficiency loss. It isn't worth it.

These businesses need to make some serious changes to their operation, to make things more efficient, to survive these labor shortages. It is clear that increasing wages to $15/hr, offering sign on bonuses, etc. is not helping them attract enough staff to move back to normal operations. Increasing wages is helping them at least attract enough staff to stay open in some form/limited form at all...
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Re: Dairy Queen hours reduced due to supply issues

Post by jamcool »

If fast food is too expensive people will either go to traditional restaurants or eat at home.
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Re: Dairy Queen hours reduced due to supply issues

Post by buckguy »

It hasn't been all gloom and doom for chains or their franchises. The fast food chains been able to reach higher income customers than in the past and start exiting the seemingly never ending cycle of $1/99 cent deals and other unprofitable promotions which franchises hate. The big chains like McDonald's have relied on foreign growth to offset saturation of the US market and with COVID effecting them world wide, they've probably had to pay more attention to US operations than they have in ages. And there are regional chains that have continued to expand---Swenson's, a small chain in Ohio just opened a new location and Culver's another Midwestern chain has been opening in Florida (they're probably regretting it now, but perhaps not in the long run) as well as in their home region.

I live near a large concentration of mostly locally owned restaurants and my workplace is in an area with a mix of franchises, locals, and small chains (some local, some national). The DC media talks about labor shortages, but places seem to be adapting. Some places have cut hours--if their dinner trade brings in the people, the lunch trade was dropped or vice versa, but less of that than I would have expected. One of the franchises near my work place is closed, but it's on prime real estate that I suspect the owner wanted to redevelop. I haven't seen/experienced shortages and my guess is that they affect smaller markets more, esp. those near the end of supply chains. Centralia, IL probably is one of those places, even though it's not exactly hundreds of miles from St Louis.

The business will be different when this is over, but it may mean better wages for workers after years of resistance with this being offset by the end of unsustainable cycles of promotions and probably some more creative approaches to operations and more focused menus. And some people will have learned to live w/o fast food (not that difficult, actually).
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