According to the Riff Raff Brewing website, a new program known as ‘Takeout Tuesday’ will kick off today, April 7, right here in small-town Pagosa Springs.
During the month of April 2020, participating Pagosa Springs restaurants will supply a free lunch for Archuleta County residents every Tuesday from 11am to 2pm. This community lunch program helps keep our restaurants going during the COVID-19 pandemic, while it also helps you get some yummy food into your belly. Everyone wins!
Sponsored by the Town of Pagosa Springs, Archuleta County, Census 2020 and the Pagosa Springs Area Chamber of Commerce, Takeout Tuesdays aims to connect Archuleta County residents with local restaurants while sharing critical and timely information about the local government response to COVID-19. This program represents a community effort to bring some normalcy while managing through Stay at Home orders and social distancing requirements during the month of April.
The key phrase here is ‘takeout’. The participating restaurants are not open for inside dining, but people in the community are welcome to “stop by… and ask for the selection of free meals provided by that restaurant. You’ll also receive information about local efforts to manage the community’s COVID-19 response, along with information about the ongoing Census 2020 effort in Archuleta County. Just mention you’re participating in ‘Takeout Tuesday’ and you can grab some grub.”
A ‘rotating group’ of local restaurants will provide free meals to the public each Tuesday this month.
Four local restaurants are providing free lunch deals today, on a ‘first-come-first-served’ basis and while maintaining ‘social distancing’ guidelines. (In other words, don’t crowd in line, dude!)
The restaurants featured for Tuesday, April 7 (in no particular order) :
Pagosa Brewing Company
The Buck Stops Here
Kip’s Grill & Cantina
Riff Raff Brewing Company
Pagosa Brewing posted a Facebook notice on Monday afternoon that they were taking advance orders…
…and three hours later were back on Facebook, posting: “SOLD OUT of Free Lunches! Thank you for the support.”
Two Facebook followers commented that they were disappointed in Pagosa Brewing’s approach — reserving lunches for customers a day in advance — and that Kip’s Grill had assured them orders would be taken only on Tuesday, and only at the restaurant’s front door — on a ‘first-come-first-served’ basis.
Still working out the kinks?
The Buck Stops Here had also posted a Facebook notice…
… as did Riff Raff:
The restaurants for the rest of the ‘Takeout Tuesdays’ this month — April 14, 21 and 28 — are ‘To Be Determined.’
In years past, many of the restaurants in Archuleta County have chosen to close during April, for a week or perhaps longer, to clean and remodel and get prepared for the summer tourist season. Tourism here has traditionally been light during “mud season” (the month of April)… to put it mildly. You can see the annual drop in sales tax collections during April in the following graph created by the County Finance Department a few years ago:
But the month of March — as you can see — is normally one of the better months for Pagosa businesses, with sales considerably higher than in January, February, April or May. Many of us credit this spike in March sales tax collections to the ‘spring break’ skiers who flock to our local ski area — Wolf Creek.
The sales tax curve is going to look different than “normal” this year, due to Governor Jared Polis’ decision to close the state’s ski areas on March 14, right in the middle of (normally-highly-profitable) spring break.
And many are wondering if we will even have a summer tourist season this year?
Curiously enough, even though restaurants and bars are forbidden from seating customers under the current public health emergency orders, and are limited to curbside ‘takeout’ service, almost all of the restaurants in Pagosa seem to have remained operating during April.
Will the $8,000 contributed by our Town and County governments towards the community’s ‘Takeout Tuesdays’ make a crucial difference for our food service industry? The new program is supposed to fund four Tuesday events — so that breaks out to about $2,000 per event. If four restaurants split that amount evenly each Tuesday, that’s $500 per restaurant. According to an article on ToastTab.com, your typical restaurant spends about one third of its income on ‘food’ and about another third on labor, leaving the rest to pay for overhead and profit. Profits typically amount to maybe 5% of income.
5% of $500 is $25.
So we have to wonder… how much per hour will a restaurant owner make by organizing their staff and revising their menu in order to participate in the government-subsidized ‘Takeout Tuesdays’?
When I relocated to Pagosa in 1993, I heard the following aphorism repeated ad nauseam by people from all walks of life:
If you want to leave Pagosa Springs with a million dollars, you better come in with two million.
That’s what we love about our town.
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.