Four springs ago, Ashleigh Goss saw a light crowd on St. Patrick’s Day weekend and knew luck was not on her side.
Market Cross Pub, the classic slice of England she owns on North Hanover Street in Carlisle, was about to face its biggest challenge in three decades of existence.
A once-in-a-lifetime pandemic would soon shutter indoor dining nationwide, so at the earliest sign of disruption, Goss prepared for the worst. She purchased an online ordering platform and stocked up on takeout supplies.
When the first lockdown hit a few days later, Goss made deliveries herself until she could get enough help. She was determined to keep food on the table – both at work and at home.
“This is what feeds my kids,” she said of her family’s business. “ ... There was no question whether or not we could stay open. It was just, ‘What do we need to do to stay open?’”
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Those darkest days of COVID-19 are literally history now. It’s been a whole presidential term since the first stay-at-home orders and nearly three years since Pennsylvania dropped its statewide mask mandate. But for the independent restaurants that pump oxygen through the heart of Carlisle, that pre-pandemic normal never quite returned.
Instead, it’s a new normal. Gone are the deadly health concerns, but still hanging are bothersome costs, worker shortages and a culture shift to American dining that may be the hardest to overcome.
“Quite frankly, it’s never going to be like it was before,” Goss said,” just because people have changed.”
High costs and labor pains
America’s restaurants were “resilient” last year, the National Restaurant Association said in its annual report, released in February. The same number of people now work in restaurants as they did before the pandemic, association data shows, and food and beverage sales should hit a record high this year.
But this recovery is not created equal. The Northeast, where population gains also lag other parts of the country, has been slower to rebound than the South and West. The type of restaurant matters, too.
Chain restaurants are on a quicker comeback than independent places, noted Bank of America’s 2024 restaurant outlook for 2024, because cash reserves help chains better fight economic headwinds.
“Profits are higher since COVID, but compared to last year, it’s not as high,” said Shamma Alam, associate professor of economics at Dickinson College.
Alam’s students last fall interviewed 58 local businesses and nonprofits — including 14 restaurants — to learn how Carlisle’s economy was rebounding from the pandemic. Students presented their findings last month.
“Half of the restaurants say they have recovered — or kind of back to the pre-pandemic state — and half said they didn’t,” Alam said.
Restaurant owners told Dickinson students that rising costs and labor shortages were their biggest continuing challenges. Eighty-three percent said they experienced worker shortages over the past year, although turnover rates stayed the same or decreased for 66% of owners compared to previous years.
“Staffing, I would say, just started to turn,” Goss told The Sentinel. “We’re finally getting applicants. We’re finally getting people that want full-time hours.”
Prices, however, are still troublingly high, even as the Consumer Price Index has stayed around 3% since last summer. Two summers ago, it was at a pandemic peak of 9.1%. Average food costs are up more than 20% nationwide, according to the restaurant association, while four in 10 U.S. restaurants still carry debt accumulated during the pandemic.
Goss said it’s not just the price of ingredients but also the costs of equipment, dry goods and handyman services like plumbing and carpentry that eat into her pub’s recovery.
Restaurants are competitive, said Matt Hicks, owner of Helena’s Café and Crêperie on West High Street, so they’re reluctant to raise prices on customers in return, “but prices are constantly being raised on us.”
“I make money five dollars at a time here,” he said of Helena’s. “ ... And so, when my customers have to pay $10 more a week at the gas tank or $20 more a week at the grocery store, I lose customers pretty quick like that.”
Foot traffic changes
Delivery orders — crucial during social distancing — still make up a larger share of restaurant spending nationwide than before the pandemic, USDA researchers reported in January. But on-premises spending — meaning inside the restaurant — remains “sluggish.”
Even before the pandemic, a 2019 restaurant association survey of customers found a majority of their dining occasions — 60% — were off-premises. Translation: delivery and drive-thru are beating date night.
“The culture has definitely changed,” Hicks said. “And we had to change with it a little bit and try and be available to do business with our customers online.”
Hicks took over Helena’s in October 2022 to lead a post-COVID resurgence. He revamped the menu, increased hours and partnered with other local businesses. Hicks hoped foot traffic — especially at night — would return to pre-pandemic levels, but instead new partnerships with delivery apps DoorDash and Uber Eats have been essential.
“Whether I like it or not, people are ordering in and not coming out to get their food,” Hicks said.
Downtown Carlisle functions like its own ecosystem, Hicks said, so fewer people dining out means fewer eyeballs on other businesses, especially new ones trying to grow. For example, someone out for dinner may be piqued by a specialty shop or a clothing boutique and have reason to come back next week.
“They have to be here to see it, to know they want to come back to it,” Hicks said. That in-person dining loss, then, “is more exponential.”
Food service future
Carlisle businesses have a surprisingly positive outlook on the future, Alam said. On a five-point scale, more than 8 in 10 owners in Dickinson’s survey rated their optimism about their establishment’s future at a “4” or above.
“There’s of course some businesses that struggle; that will always be the case,” Alam said. “But we felt, at least from the interviews, they are in good shape, even though they are facing all these challenges.”
New places are also opening after a handful of permanent closures during the pandemic. One newbie is One13 Social, a restaurant on West High Street that co-owner Kevin Rockwood and his partners opened in January 2022 when the pandemic began to wane.
“I feel very confident in the future,” Rockwood said. “I like to think that COVID is far in our rearview at this point.”
Rockwood, who also just opened Pitt Street Station, has seen a resurgence in foot traffic the past few months, and he expects more people as the weather warms. Goss said Market Cross Pub’s foot traffic is back, although she cut back on night hours because people aren’t staying out as late anymore.
The nationwide reality after COVID-19, according to the restaurant association’s annual report, is that convenience and technology are now “driving forces” affecting how all restaurants operate, especially as digital natives become a larger share of clientele. More than seven in 10 adults aged 18-27 use third-party delivery services, the association found.
This shift appears in the Dickinson survey, too. Sixty-two percent of Carlisle restaurants said they’re making more deliveries and 46% are seeing fewer in-person diners. Forty-six percent also have new loyalty programs to apparently “incentivize people to still come in,” Alam said.
“It might not be a reverberation,” Hicks, owner of Helena’s Café and Crêperie, said about how the pandemic changed dining. “It might be a full shift in cultural norm.”