There is a great local (Lakewood, Ohio) grilled cheese sandwich shop called Melt. Guy Fiero visited it once. They expanded to several locations but they did not make it through the Covid saga. Now the last, original location has filed for bankruptcy. Among other things they are said to have 100 creditors. That seems like a lot of creditors for a restaurant that buys cheese and bread, no?
Well, cheese, bread, napkins, utensils, cooking oil, uniforms, toilet paper, cleaning supplies… there’s a lot that goes into running a restaurant besides what goes into the customer’s mouths. If they had multiple locations, different locations might have had different suppliers for some of these things. Plus, as revenue fell, they might have switched providers multiple times trying to find a cheaper deal to keep their doors open longer.
A hundred or so creditors doesn’t seem that unlikely.
landlord(s), multiple vendors for marketing - website, paper ads in your mailbox, google (ads), fakebook, etc.
Some restaurants get the majority of their supplies from a single vendor. Smaller restaurants tend to shop around to get better deals. If they’re failing then they’re usual suppliers won’t give them credit anymore and they’ll purchase from other suppliers, who will often give them credit for one or more orders before cutting them off. I expect most of the debts to be small, with some quite old. It is mostly short term credit, intended to be paid in 30 days or less, and no credit provided at all once they are behind.
If you’ve been to Melt you know they serve more than cheese and bread. They also have a million different kinds of beers (quite possibly each brand small enough to act as its own distributor), burgers, fries, apps, soups and seasonal menus. Not to mention each grilled cheese sandwich had very unique ingredients, possibly locally sourced.
Even very small outfits or food truck thing has to have vendors of some sort. You can have the best Taco truck ever, but if you don’t have a nice iced drink the customer will move on down the line.
Coca-Cola and Pepsi will actively court you to get your business. But, if you don’t pay, timely, they are the first to send you to collections.
All service ware is catch as catch can. Unless you’re a nationally branded, (MickeyD or something with their own logo-ed items) you have to find that provider or go online.
On and on.
Business credit cards are trivially easy to get if you have any credit at all. I bet there are 30 different ones you could hook up with before you’re over your head.
They probably have small business loans as well.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these debts go back to the COVID lock down era. Suppliers would continue to give short term credit while holding an old debt that they hope will get paid off eventually. Those suppliers were hurt during that time also, they couldn’t afford to give up customers who were a little behind.
I’m not a restaurant, but a small store. I just took a look at our books and we currently owe money (all in good standing) to just over 40 vendors. And that doesn’t count our other regular vendors that we don’t owe anything to right now.
If money was tight and we were jumping from vendor to vendor, that number would go up.
Also, you have to keep in mind how many vendors they have because it’s the only vendor to buy a given item from. If you sell beer/wine/liquor, you probably have quite a few vendors just for that. At least in my area, there’s no overlap to what they sell. So if you want Tito’s Vodka and Miller Lite and Yellow Tail wine, that might be three different vendors just for that.
Also, FWIW (and again, at least in my area), owing money to alcohol vendors is what’ll get you. Even if none of of your vendors make too big of a fuss about the outstanding debt, your alcohol vendors are required to report to the city and the city won’t renew your liquor license.
My BIL (as well as my late FIL) has worked at a local restaurant supply company for years and years. (Need 100 fairly nice water glasses for a function? I’ll make a call. Seriously, I’ve got cases of stuff like that. I’ve got a Belgian waffle maker I’ve never used.)
They would never reveal confidential information about the account status of a particular customer, but we got a lot of, “Well…they haven’t been doing that well this year,” when we would talk about a specific restaurant. We also heard that about school systems, since they supplied many of those as well. Cities and counties pay late just like other customers.
I pulled the list of creditors for shits and giggles. It ranges from the Ohio Attorney General and Ohio Department of Taxation, to landlords, a variety of utility companies, the Cleveland Indians, a medical insurance company, Doordash, and CPAs. There were of course a number of vendors, including knife companies, Orkin, and a printing company. The largest creditors were the bank holding a business loan and landlords. Particularly sad is the 90 employees that are owed wages.
Good info. Where do you find such information?
From the federal court’s PACER system. Feel free to DM me and I will send it to you.