Lap Dance

Paper or plastic? It won’t be long until this question will disappear from daily use at grocery stores.  Most haven’t asked it in years. For those of you who only eat in restaurants and don’t know what I am talking about (and bless your hearts!), this is shorthand for a longer question. "Would you like for me to place the groceries that you have purchased in a paper bag, or a plastic bag?" I have always known that the environmentally correct answer was paper, but the plastic ones are so convenient. I can carry an entire cart of groceries into the house in one trip with plastic bags. I just keep grabbing the little handles of each bag, loading up until the trunk is empty. Kind of like a supermarket Sherpa. 

In the restaurant industry, we don’t ask you if you want a paper napkin or a linen napkin. We make the decision for you. It’s one or the other, and you don’t get to choose. The thought process that goes into this is an interesting one. At concepts with lower price points, or with a high amount of takeout, the answer is easy–you are going to get a paper napkin. At concepts with higher price points, and nicer ambiance, you are going to get a linen napkin. And somewhere in the middle it gets all messy.

It is that messy-in-the-middle place that I find interesting. I pay attention to napkins at two different times. One is when I get a linen napkin in the kind of restaurant where paper would be the norm. That happened tonight.  A very casual place where the highest prices on the menu were $12. And they had linen napkins! A nice touch.  All other things being equal, would I go back because of the napkins? No, but it reinforced an impression that they were trying to make with their food: quality. Everything made from scratch, high quality ingredients, well thought-out recipes.

The other time that I notice napkins is when I am in a nicer, more expensive restaurant that uses paper ones. There is something about being in a restaurant with a $18+ check average that uses paper napkins that is a disconnect. If you ask an operator why they use paper when their competitors, in their price range, use linen you will usually get the following answer. "We talk about it all the time but we just can’t see where we would get the extra cost back by switching to linen. No one complains about paper ones, and we have always used them."

And that is the crux of the issue. When it comes to paper napkins, very few concepts will make the upgrade to linen, even when it becomes clear that it is out of the norm for their competitive set. Maybe 20 or 30 years ago, when the concept was just getting started, paper made sense. But concepts evolve, menus evolve, prices evolve, and ambiance evolves. I have found over the years that the type of napkin seldom evolves. It is an increase in daily expenses that is tough for an operator, or a controller, to get past.

Restaurants need to be remodeled, refreshed, and updated on a regular basis to stay competitive. It is a leap of faith that the cost of this investment will get repaid in either more customers, or by not losing existing customers. It is a one-time, every few years expense that makes sense to an owner. The decision to refresh and update a concept by upgrading to linen napkins seldom will get out of the discussion stages due to the financial aspects.

Marketers talk a lot about "brand alignment". This is when all aspects of the concept that are visible to the customer support each other by being in agreement. I find it interesting that napkins usually fall out of this equation. Every restaurant either gives, or makes available, napkins to its customers. Usually they end up in the lap of the customer. Paper or linen? This is a lap dance that some higher end concepts don’t handle well.