The Hobbit’s Choice: A Restaurant
Jeff Dean is a restaurant supply sales representative. He works in a large metropolitan area and calls on many of the restaurant owners in the city. His dream is to one day own his own restaurant. He had saved a substantial amount of his earnings during his 15 years in the restaurant‐supply business and had recently gone over some financial figures with his banker. He and the banker both agreed that he had enough capital to get serious about investing in his dream. His banker, Walker Stripling, was very optimistic about Dean’s potential for success, even though he had seen many failed attempts in the restaurant business. Stripling had confidence in Dean because he thought that because of his restaurant‐supply experience, few people knew the restaurant business as well as Dean did.
Dean’s idea was not try to compete with everyone else. There were too many restaurants that, except for their décor and a few menu items, offered little new to the market. He had seen many of the “metoo” restaurants falter after a short time of operation. His plan was to offer something not currently available in the market, even though the city was fairly large. Dean had traveled extensively during his career. His primary purpose in traveling had been to attend trade shows in the restaurant‐supply business. There were usually several of these a year, and Dean had been diligent about attending these shows as he learned about new products and services his supplier firms were offering for him to sell to his local restaurants. While attending the trade shows, Dean and some of his friends made a habit of visiting restaurants of all types in the various cities. Dean was familiar with restaurants in New Orleans,
San Francisco, Dallas, Miami, New York, and many of the other major cities in the U.S. These cities all had restaurants like the restaurants he had as clients at home, and they had these same types of restaurants by the dozens. But there was one type of restaurants these cities had that was missing from his own metro area. His city did not have a fine, upscale restaurant featuring the finest entrées, drinks, and desserts in an elegant atmosphere. He had visited with the owners of these types of restaurants in several of the cities in which he traveled. Many had been very willing to talk with him about what they had learned and how they operated. Dean had planned his restaurant for several years. He took the best ideas from the restaurants he had visited and put them into his plan. His restaurant would be called
“The Hobbit’s Choice”. Dean was a fan of the author J.R.R Tolkien, and he thought the reference to the
Hobbits would be perfect in a name for an upscale restaurant. The Hobbits, characters in Tolkien’s writings, were portrayed as good, fun‐loving people whose lives primarily centered around eating.