Emma’s Back Porch and The Water Street Cooker, a pair of waterfront restaurants sharing a 100 year-old building in downtown Burlington, closed their doors permanently this week, another casualty of pandemic economics. Rumours are that the building itself will be demolished for condos, making a post-plague renaissance unlikely. It’s a shame, because the view from their patio was incredible, and replacing the structure will feel like erasing a century of memories including some of our own (it was the first place we dined out with visiting family to celebrate our immigration).
The owners were a bit vague, saying only that “circumstances have prevailed and we cannot move forward,” but whenever something like this happens most locals wonder if there’s something they could have done to help. I don’t know if anyone could have saved Emma’s, but I do know there’s one thing we can do to help out the unique and valuable small businesses in our community and at the risk of sounding like a Portlandia character, this is a drum I’m willing to beat throughout the pandemic…or at least until it starts to annoy all my friends:
When you have a choice, buy local. When you can, pick up curbside takeout instead of getting delivery. When you need delivery, try to choose a business that employs its own drivers and avoid using gig economy delivery apps whenever possible.
What does the buzzphrase “gig economy” mean, exactly? Most simply put, it’s a catch-all label for whenever you disrupt an existing business model (like taxis, or hotels) by using technology (such as a mobile app or web portal) to connect independent providers with customers. Most people are vaguely aware of this idea, and have certainly become familiar with popular brands, but may not be aware of just how pervasive this disruption has become (in the USA alone, more than a third of workers are now involved with “gig” apps in some way). Why should this concern anyone, besides stockholders and economists?
Well, while disrupting a marketplace can sometimes be great for innovation, it can also be a great way to sidestep safety regulations, labour protections, collective bargaining rights, and in some cases even a minimum wage. While it sounds attractive and even progressive/leftist to for people to “share” their means of production with each other, the gig paradigm necessitates adding an interface layer into the process. The end result is, generally, that the middlemen end up with almost all of the profits while shouldering almost none of the risk, and whenever bad outcomes arise they just blame “the marketplace” or the government. If this sounds vaguely familiar, it should, it’s roughly analogous to why we hate health insurance in America.
When it comes to restaurants, you’re talking about, historically, one of the most high-risk-and-low-margin kinds of businesses there are, before you even factor in a pandemic. Restauranteurs weren’t getting along with the likes of Uber Eats, Door Dash, Skip The Dishes, etc. before the coronavirus. The theory used to be, while your app delivery sales might cannibalize profits, they could also serve as marketing for the dine-in experience. When delivery is only a small slice of your business, that might be a canny sacrifice for some…but always carries the risk of becoming a slow burn that consumes your profitability. During a state of emergency, shutting down the dining room completely accelerates that burn like a wicked witch throwing a fireball at a scarecrow.
Fortunately, here in southern Ontario, some enterprising local nerds are working on various ways we can collectively choose to throw that wicked witch into the lake instead. Instead of just complaining about all this, I’d like to celebrate some of their efforts:
The moment retail stores began to close and it was looking like the kids would be stuck home from school without play dates, I immediately glanced at our collections of board games and videogames wondering if we had what we needed for periods of self-isolation (when you have a health care worker in the family, that feels more like a matter of “when” than “if”). We’re not very cutting edge with our game consoles, and you can’t always pick up extra controllers or games for an old Nintendo at the Walmart up the street. Mail order was certainly an option, but who knew how long shipping might take as borders locked down? Then I discovered that a used games store in Hamilton had just closed their retail storefront and pivoted to making scheduled deliveries to our area! I spotted several titles I knew my kids would love and placed an order immediately.
The store owner kindly drove some titles over the skyway for us on his next delivery run, and pulled right up to the house in gloves and a mask with a credit card reader. It was like magic, and 100% of our purchase went to a local business we were thankful to have available. Now in between our bike rides, neighbourhood hikes, and homeschooling sessions our munchkins take breaks helping Princess Peach gather green stars while happily making kitty cat sounds at the TV. If you live in Hamilton and you’re interested in getting some games of your own, you might need to wait a little bit as they’ve since pressed pause on the idea to switch to mail-order…but stay tuned as that’s “coming soon.”
I first heard about Mai Pai, a Hamilton tiki bar with legendary deep dish pizza, months ago online someplace and had been meaning to check them out versus our favourite place up on the mountain (don’t flame me, I know the difference between “Detroit style” and “Chicago style” and I was born in NYC so I’m an educated pizza dork). When the pandemic response began, I figured I was probably out of luck. Then I noticed something curious. Several local eateries were rapidly rebuilding their web sites as online shopping carts all using the same web domain, so I backspaced over a restaurant name and hit return to find out what was up with that…and discovered a brilliant new Hamilton startup.
Curbside Pivot does exactly what the name says on the tin. They’re a local consultancy with both the IT and marketing chops to transform a dine-in eatery, in as little as 48 hours, into a curbside pickup business with an online scheduling and payment system. Their pitch is so well-described on their web site I’ll just paste it rather than attempt to paraphrase: “popular delivery services charge 30% to the restaurant, plus a gazillion% to you the customer. Curbside pivot? 5% split between the two of you. In short… your giving money to people, not a company.” You win, southern Ontario wins, and so far you can utilize their service to order from pizzerias, wine bars, dessert shops, cupcake bakeries, and yes, even satisfy a hipster donut craving (see their site for an updated list). You can also check out a recent TV interview with their founder and Mai Pai’s chef from CHCH Morning Live.
In case you’re wondering, yes, of course we ordered some pizza! We decided to try Mai Pai’s fancy-frou-frou take on a pepperoni pie, and it was absolutely glorious (plus the payment and pickup process was totally smooth too). I don’t know if Detroit deep dish will completely supplant our occasional Chicago style treats or not, but I definitely need to see if I can find out where they get their ricotta cheese because it was better than any I’ve tasted since we moved here…and sadly our Longo’s supermarket hasn’t been consistently stocking our previous favourite. I also wanna try some of their cocktail kits next time. Two other nagging questions I have, though, are what kind of dark magic is involved with their garlic dipping sauce and, even more mysteriously, why was my pizza box autographed by Nicholas Cage? 🤔
Having discussed both videogames and pizza, it feels natural to wrap up a discussion of getting local goodies “gig-free” with beer. Coming from Portland, it’s easy to become frustrated with beer selections in other places, but Ontario has a lot more going on that you might expect if you only ever glanced across the front of The Beer Store or visited one of our smaller LCBO locations. Between Hamilton and Toronto alone, there are dozens of amazing breweries nearby, but while browsing restaurant menus on delivery apps or hastily rushing through the grocery store you might never discover many of them. Fortunately, a couple of locals laid off from their previous day jobs have team have gotten together to solve this dilemma.
Beer Finder, launched just a couple weeks ago, is a web portal that seeks to catalogue all manners of tasty fermented brews that are produced in our province, and available for purchase directly from brewers. Conveniently for craft lovers, this completely eliminates Molson (which is questionably actually Canadian or actually beer) and a lot of the other less desirable stuff that might crowd tastier discoveries out of your closest store. They’ve got about a thousand varieties listed so far, and you can search those listings by all kinds of metadata including taste characteristics and delivery radius. Some can be ordered by the can, others by the case, and some even offer exclusive deals or free shipping. In contrast to the relationship between restauranteurs and gig app companies, breweries are actually excited about this.
I’m sure there are many more examples of innovation that’s happening in Canada during the pandemic to help small businesses, and the government has been stepping up as well, but I feel like without an informed swell of public sentiment against overusing these delivery apps, we’re all going to come out the other side of this thing missing a lot of what we love that keeps our communities unique. I realize that one geek’s personal jihad against what’s become societally normal won’t change much, and I realize that a lot of these restaurants and other establishments are still going to fail in the inevitable recession this pandemic will trigger. Nevertheless, I think it’s worth noticing and pointing out whenever there are “better” options one can choose in a given situation.
The thing is, there’s a somewhat inevitable synergy between huge gig app companies and huge corporate franchisers that’s just too profitable for the market to ignore, and I think as consumers with a choice we should rail against it when we can. Companies like Uber operate, overtly, to happily lose money while eliminating competition, with the intention of monopolizing whatever’s left when the dust settles. They cut sweetheart deals with national and international brands to streamline profit, while they soak mom and pop entrepreneurs for as much as a third of their gross delivery income while prohibiting them from adjusting prices to compensate. If we allow that to continue to normalize, our shopping centres eventually won’t look like Ontario, or Canada at all. They’ll just be a string of shuttered storefronts with every third or fourth stall repurposed by an assortment of international fast food brands (or worse).
Hey Curbside Pivot, come to think of it, will you please give Hutch’s on the Beach a call? Burlington without Emma’s is one thing, but I can’t imagine Hamilton, let alone Confederation Park or the Great Lakes Waterfront Trail, without their fish and chips.
This Ontarian Life 