The Diner Boys

Where I live, in the Northeastern part of the United States, diners are a big thing. If you're not familiar with diners, they're twenty-four eateries that have everything from steaks to eggs to crab legs to chicken noodle soup to gourmet cakes and baked goods and everything in between. 

The beauty of a New York diner is that you can get a lobster at three am, Eggs Benedict at ten at night, or buffalo wings for breakfast. All while drinking one of dozens of different flavored milkshakes, a cream soda, or the beer of your choice. 

And the food is so good. I never understood how they could make salmon, lasagna, Matzo Ball soup, a chef's salad, beef goulash, chili, baked clams, gyros, burritos, omelettes, fish and chips, and pork chops all taste so delicious. It always felt like it’d be too many things to master.

Years ago, a close friend of mine, upon biting into a bacon cheeseburger at our local diner, looked at me and said, "If I tried 100 times, I could never make a burger taste this good." 

He was right. 

During the pandemic, a diner opened up in my town. Despite diners being ubiquitous by me, we didn't have a proper diner in my actual town. Until The Diner Boys showed up. All pandemic long, we ordered through one of the apps, and for months, they delivered delicious food right to our door. 

They were so successful that they changed locations to a bigger space which just happened to be walking distance from my house. We were thrilled. But when I walked up there one morning to get some breakfast, they were closed. 

Their hours, per the graphics on the front glass, we're 11:30am to 9pm. 

What?! I thought they were supposed to be a NY diner, and NY diners don't close. But this place did close. And they were closed a lot. They served eggs and breakfast foods, but by opening at 11:30, if we wanted eggs or pancakes or waffles for the kids, it wouldn't be to us until noon or later. As I mentioned earlier, it's fun to get eggs at one am, but sometimes, I just want breakfast when it's time for breakfast, especially when it's for the kids. 

I ordered a salad one evening and upon walking into the empty restaurant, asked the guy who handed me my food, "How are you guys doing here?" 

"We're trying to hang in there," he told me. 

Within a few months, they'd closed down, with a new restaurant (not a diner) taking their place in what felt like days. 

I'm all for people taking chances. I'm all for people trying new things. And I'm mostly for them doing it in unique ways. But these guys missed something so crucial. 

People were expecting something from them that they didn't deliver. Maybe that was intentional. Maybe that was their unique spin on this. And I'm more than willing to acknowledge that I don't have all the context here. Perhaps one of the owners has a sick spouse or child and simply couldn't be there for overnight shifts. 

But that's what their customers were expecting. And they didn't deliver. 

I used to hear the term, "The customer is always right" and scoff. I've worked in so many restaurants and have seen so many examples of entitled, arrogant, overly fussy customers making ridiculous and unreasonable requests and throwing tantrums or storming out if we couldn't accommodate them. I used to think, "The customer isn't always right at all. Sometimes, they're wildly wrong." 

Maybe that's true in individual cases, but I'm believing more and more that on the macro level, the customer is always right. 

In this case, the customers sent the message that they didn't like what this business was doing enough to keep them open. 

It made me wonder how many entrepreneurs and leaders in general simply don't know what it takes to do what they're trying to do. I saw an interview with mega-millionaire Gary Vee recently where he said that he'd built his dad's wine business into a fifteen million dollar a year company while still getting paid $150,000. This went on for years as he was putting so much money back into the biz. 

A few years ago, someone I knew from a previous job began his own consulting company. When I asked, after his first week in the field, what he planned to do that weekend, he told me, "Sleep." He's no longer in business. 

Take chances. Act before you're ready. But don't be the person who has no idea what kind of effort it'll take to actually be successful. And even if you don’t have any idea, round up. Do more than you think you should. Unless you want to be doing something else really soon.