Reply To: Upholstery – Restaurant Warning Signals

[mitchellreid]

Owners and Associates,

I want to continue to encourage all upholstery techs that the upholstery world is continuing to open up even more but with a bit of a twist. In the months since my last post on this topic I have had several upholstery jobs that were somewhat different than the work before the world shutdown for Covid. Instead of the normal number of booth recovers I have had to do all the work which was stopped for the past year to year and a half all at once. What I mean by that is all of the sudden the tap went from off to full blast. My most recent job involved recovering over half the booths in a restaurant and also spring repairs on all the booths. This work could only be done between 8-11 a.m.each day. No overnight work was permitted. It took me 9 days at 3 hours a day to complete this job.

My purpose in making the previous statements is to let you know that as restaurant chains start loosening up on their maintenance restrictions they are wanting all their upholstery back to pre Covid levels ASAP. This sounds great but is a tremendous amount of work which takes quite a bit of time. I have found that the best way for me to catch up on all this work is to push as hard as I can to get it done as fast as possible. I can easily see how things could get backed up and customers get frustrated waiting on us to complete the work which they are being pressured to get done by corporate. I never imagined that I would or could be the reason for any slowdown in service when it came to upholstery. The ONE thing I thought I was actually good at in the upholstery world was service!

I say all this to encourage all you upholsterers to complete all the work you can as fast as you can in order to not only take care of your business but to help preserve those customers that we have worked so hard to get in the past. Best of luck to you all in the Post Covid Era.

Sincerely,
Mitchell Reid
The Wandering Upholsterer
“All Who Wander Are Not Lost”