Reply #10: "fast food" restaurant competition is feirce

[Ravenseye]

Though normally these types of lawsuits aren't brought by other large corporations, but smaller local chains or individual restaurnats. I have a few of these smaller chains as clients, and the type of competition they get from Qdoba, Chipolte, etc lately has been pretty crazy. Chipotle for instance is owned by McDonald's and they come into an area and slam advertise the hell out of the place. TV. Radio. Flyers. Billboards. You name it. Spend in ways the local places can't. Then they intentionally run at a loss in order to drive local business out of business.

It's not impossible to overcome it, but it does make competition very difficult. When you're working one streetcorner, and you've got your restaurant, and your competition can lose 10 times as much money as you make in order to drive you out. The Wal-martization of america.

The strange part here is that it's a Panera. I guess it must be a franchise owner who was promised a certain level of non-compete in order to place his restaurant there, and he's barely scraping by as it is. Losing this ruling probably means that panera will close inside of a year, probably 6 months, leaving only the Qdoba.

The one by your house might have enough traffic to warrant two, this one might not.