Gold Bunny Donut has closed at Westfield Montgomery Mall in Bethesda. Their space was dark today during their typical operating hours. The owner says they are seeking a new location and hope to reopen soon. Gold Bunny was a huge success after it opened at the mall, regularly selling out of donuts, so one has to wonder if the anti-business policies of the Montgomery County Council have claimed yet another victim.
To be fair, did the owners give a reason why they're closing the MM location? Increased rent? New lease terms? Reduced mall traffic/sales? Just wondering.
ReplyDeleteHow many consumers will spend $4.50 for a donut? I'm surprised the potato place has lasted so long.
ReplyDeleteMaybe they could not sell enough donuts to make up for the minimum wage increases?
ReplyDeleteThey may well have regularly sold out, but if Montgomery Mall food stall leases run $50,000/month, (as was told me to be the cost by the operator of the since-shuttered, was-always jammed-busy former Thai place, who left 18+ months ago because of such a rent increase,) you would have to sling a boatload of doughnuts, even if you are charging $4-5 per confection, as the web tells me was Gold Bunny’s pricing. That would require 329 pastries be sold every single day of the week, *just to make rent*. Salary, supplies, profit would need many hundreds more be daily flogged. That seems a huge number of units to move for a business relying so much on foot traffic, (they must have had at least some catering/large, offsite orders as well, surely,) and located afield from the central, core set of food stalls, where lazy eyeballs like mine never even saw the vendor, so missed altogether the opportunity to try their wares and possibly become a devotee.
ReplyDeleteI’m not suggesting MoCo policies might not have been an ingredient in the closing of this operation, but sometimes one can discover other options in The Big Toolbox of Blame. I’d first suspect factors like a business less than ideally situated, with high costs and a relatively low per-unit profit, in an operation where average customers aren't going to be buying many units per visit. Mall patrons might go to McDonalds or to Panda every day without thinking about it, but I suspect the number of people who would daily stop for a $5 doughnut are far fewer. Panda can cloak itself in the idea it is providing sustenance, nourishment, (caveat emptor,) that it’s selling a meal, a requirement to sustain life itself; everybody has to eat, why not enjoy some orange chicken? Gold Bunny can’t. It was never anything more than an extravagance, a treat, a superfluity. That would need a monster-load of customers to sustain it if the annual rent really is in the neighborhood of half a million dollars. Before lobbing cream-filled confections at [the otherwise fully deserving of opprobrium] County Council cabal, do consider Occam’s razor might be worth investigating, as well.
Wow. that' huge. I can't see many eateries making enough to cover rent let alone 'wages and food costs. Maybe the chain restaurants have more bargaining power to get a break?
Delete$50 k seems so ridiculously high to me that no business person in their right mind should ever consider opening doors with that hanging over their heads. Even if it were $15k - that would be a big fat NO from me with a donut shop.
DeleteA 'one and done' sort of enterprise, they just ran out of customers and couldn't make it with a less expensive product.
ReplyDeleteWestfield Montgomery is clearly an upscale mall, 50,000 is not surprising to me. Brands that are still in the mall are surviving merely based on their existing footprint around the area, and the constant foot traffic. It is sad to see Gold Bunny Donuts go, but you can't blame the mall. It's well positioned and should push to attract more tenants that are able to make more profits towards the mall, not just, unknown local brands that don't have an existing footprint in the area.
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