Post #797656 by tikiskip on Thu, Sep 26, 2019 2:21 PM

My family had restaurants our whole lives four of them over the years since 1942.
Some were 24 hour places and three of them were in downtown Columbus.
Small diners with low prices and get you in and out fast type places.

They always did well, very well, my dad hunted all over the world while my mom took care of the places and that's the way she and he wanted it.

When I took over the last one I had it for over ten years and we were very busy, we were the ones to beat in downtown Columbus.
It was hard, very hard, things would break, staff would not come in or was hard to find staff at any rate but we did have great times there and made money.

Many, many of our customers came in every day and the phone would ring all day long with carry outs.
We would get well over 100 carry outs a day.

Well I had to sell it as I needed another hernia operation my third and my mom had died so she was not around to talk my crazy sisters off the ledge and get them back to work without killing each other.
So I just gave up and still went out on top.

That was 14 years ago and now it is on it's last leg.
I watched over the years and just shook my head at what the new guy has done to it.
One by one he made stupid changes and lazy stuff that killed it, it was murder.

He first started buying the cheapest stuff he could find the food was bad, he would not even change trash bags so he could save money by emptying them into the larger can.
Repairs went undone, simple light bulbs were not replaced, the place is and was dirty.
His wife passed away and he just did not go in for a year, when my mom died we got one day off and for a year after that people would come in and say "how's Ida" my sisters were crap the rest of the day.

Even now he will just not come in on any given day and close, he does not tell the employees till they come to work and then they have to go home wasting the time they did to come in.

The new owner gave NONE of the employees a raise in the 14 years in fact I used to pay for their parking and he stopped doing that long ago so Vicky got a cut in pay by over a hundred dollars a month!
Vicky was the only person who went in to help the new guy open back up after his year off.

The place lived through our families health problems and deaths open, the many breakdowns open, blizzards,
the remodel of the alley, one time NOBODY came to work just my mom, Open, Open, Open.

So next time you read one of these stories of how the place was drove out of business by no fault of the owner take a closer look.

I hate to see it go, as my mom put it Jacks is like one of your children.
But then my dads name is on the door and the new guy had turned it into crap I don't wish to be linked to any more.

https://www.dispatch.com/news/20190924/jacks-diner-up-for-sale-owner-cites-downtown-construction-rising-costs