Which half is profitable

For most of the year a restaurant in the Gulf reports one number. One profit and loss, one set of covers, one business.

In the first half of August the two businesses come apart in front of you.

The dining room is quiet, and quiet in a way that is not ordinary seasonal softness: the residents are abroad, the school run is not happening, and the tables that pay the rent are empty at eight in the evening. The delivery tickets keep printing. Whoever is still in the city is not walking anywhere in this heat, so the kitchen spends the night packing bags.

For a few weeks the cost of each half is legible, because one of them has stopped subsidising the other.

The room carries rent, the fit-out somebody borrowed against, the rota, the air conditioning and the host at the front. It is hired to be an evening. Delivery carries commission, packaging, a driver, and a relationship that lives inside an app. It is hired to solve dinner in twenty minutes for someone who has already decided not to leave the house.

Two products. Two cost structures. Two jobs.

Run them as one line all year and the average hides which half is paying for the other. Split them in the empty weeks and the answer is usually uncomfortable, because the half that is still trading is the half with no marketing behind it. The photography, the seasonal menu, the launch, the table held for a creator: all of that points at the room.

In September the two halves go back into one line and stop being visible. The month that separates them is the only free audit either business gets.