Your Friday regulars used to order two entrées and a bottle. Now it's one plate, split, with the house red. The pullback lowers the check average long before it shows up in the cover count.

One bit of good news, if you run a coffee program: wholesale arabica coffee is down about 31% from a year ago on a record Brazilian harvest, per Trading Economics, so wait to sign any long-term pricing contracts while the market is still falling.

Let's jump into today's service.

The reflex, when inflation ticks back up, is to raise your own menu prices to match. This month, resist it. You're still pricier than cooking at home, and the cautious guest is doing that math at the table.

Full-service menu prices rose 3.8% over the past year, still more than a full point ahead of groceries at 2.7%, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers out this morning. The home-cooked meal is still the cheaper option, and the guest is already ordering carefully. The bright spot is on the cost side: cheese got cheaper last month, and so did the broader meat, poultry, fish, and eggs group, exactly the inputs a full-service kitchen runs on.

The Move: Hold your menu prices this month and find the margin on the cost side instead. Recheck your latest invoices for cheese and those proteins; where your supplier price dropped, keep the menu price and let the margin grow. Build this week's specials around those same ingredients, not around an increase the cost-sensitive diner will spot first.

The good news and the bad news are the same: everybody's hiring again. Restaurants and bars added staff in May at the fastest pace in more than two years. The cook you want is getting the same offer from three other kitchens within a mile.

The number behind it: 48,000 restaurant jobs added in May, the best hiring month since January 2023, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Restaurant Association. Unemployment held steady. A surge this big, this early, means the fight for summer staff only gets harder from here.

The Move: Lock in your summer crew now, before the July rush makes poaching easy. This week, sit down with your two or three hardest-to-replace people. Offer each one something in writing: set days off, predictable hours, a training stipend or a better family meal. The point is to take them off the market before a competitor calls.

Demand isn't the problem; the check is. Dining out is still the top thing people spend discretionary money on, ahead of clothes and entertainment. But more than a third of diners now say they're ordering fewer add-ons like desserts and drinks, per the NRA's latest consumer survey, and more are choosing cheaper spots than usual. That shrinks the average check before it dents the door count. Coach your servers this week on the easy add-on, a shared app or a second round, because the dessert is what's quietly leaving the table.

Labor costs keep climbing even after the raises stop. Average hourly pay rose 3.4% over the past year, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and that sets the going rate for every line-cook opening. A guest already cutting back won't absorb another price hike, so the fix isn't at the register. Build next quarter's labor budget for wages 3 to 4% higher, and find the savings in scheduling and menu mix instead.

That hiring surge in the jobs report? Almost none of it reached full-service. The most recent segment numbers, which run through April, show full-service still about 187,000 jobs below its pre-pandemic level, per the National Restaurant Association. Coffee shops and fast-casual passed their pre-pandemic staffing levels years ago. Full-service didn't, so its hiring pool is the tightest in the industry and won't loosen on its own. Lean on retention, not recruiting, to staff the summer.

Chain-style paid promotions no longer take a marketing team. DoorDash rebuilt its ads product into a self-serve tool called Smart Campaigns: a one-to-three unit operator can launch a buy-one-get-one deal with a built-in spend cap, right inside the Merchant Portal, per DoorDash and Marketing Dive. One case-study operator, Pubbelly Sushi, reported more than $4 in sales for every $1 spent. The catch is the usual one: the ads only pay off if prep, packaging, and handoff can handle the extra volume without sinking the reviews. Test it on one slow daypart with a capped weekly budget before scaling.

Card processing is the third-biggest bill most operators pay, behind food and labor, and the one shot at a break this year just fell through. Colorado passed a law that would have capped the swipe fees card networks charge, worth at least $3,500 a year to the average full-service restaurant, the NRA estimated. Then the governor vetoed it, and a similar bill in Illinois stalled, per Nation's Restaurant News. With the cap dead, the only savings left are the ones you negotiate: pull your last three statements this week, find your effective rate, and if it tops about 2.5%, make your processor re-quote.