It has been announced this week that the UK’s Top 100 restaurant groups pre-tax profit have fallen 64 per cent in the past year to £125m from £345m. The research, by UHY Hacker Young – the national accountancy group, follows the recent high-profile restaurant chains, Prezzo and Chimichanga announcing the closure of a large number of sites across their portfolio of restaurants.
The Casual Dining Group, which owns High Street chains Café Rouge and Bella Italia, is one of the most recent to report difficult trading with an 18 per cent increase in losses to May 2017 to £60m.
The study outlines the major driver behind the fall in profitability across the sector correlates with increasing staff costs and poor footfall.
Although the Chancellor has brought forward a planned cut to business rate rises by two years (to 2018), UHY Hacker Young says that more could be done by the Government to help the sector, in particular smaller restaurants.
ShopWorks has found many businesses in the Hospitality and Retail sectors to be suffering due to the growing costs of staff, with digital transformation becoming an essential requirement in order to keep heads above water.
With cloud-based Workforce Management solutions advancing, more and more multi-chain companies are searching for a bespoke solution, like ShopWorks, to manage their workforce needs.
“Above-inflation rises in the National Minimum Wage are very hard to sustain in low margin businesses.”
Peter Kubik, Partner at UHY Hacker Young
Lee Bowden, Head of Strategy at ShopWorks, said: “The labour intensive restaurant market makes a Workforce Management solution an imperative system to implement.”
To find out more about how ShopWorks cloud-based Workforce Management solution can help your business manage staffing costs, click the link below.