O Briens Sandwich bars in examinership

DublinWriter wrote: »

...do you think they commuted from Poland to work every day!?!

Nope, they paid Irish landlords and paid Irish VAT on the goods they bought.

It's small-mindedness such as that that has this country in the sh*te.

The gombeen thinking of the drunken Irish slob in a bar in Boston who proclaims that his people 'built this country' (when in reality it was the Chinese and Germans) then moans about the eastern European immigration back home.

Here we all are, dancing about with glee because another indigenous Irish company has hit the wall.

Great stuff lads, I can see us becoming the next global superpower when schadenfreude can be harnessed as atomic energy.

I wouldn't exactly consider O'Briens to be an Irish type of Microsoft or a stable of our economy that we would be crying after.

The majority of the staff who work in their restaurants are migrant labourers and I doubt if there are too many O'Briens workers paying big mortgages etc. either and most during the boom were probably on minimum wage and exempt from most tax anyway.

I never said they were Polish but paying rent to Irish landlords is hardly something that I or the majority of the population are concerned with. These workers paid Irish VAT and Income tax and will now be entitled to avail of our generous social welfare for as long as it keeps going. Alot of them will probably return to their own countries and will probably be glad to see the back of this place for along time if not forever and quite frankly who could blame them.

I am not blaming the staff for the failure of this business but the way migrant labourers were treated here during the boom was dogged, no wonder such staff never smiled, there was no work spirit or having the craic like there is in Irish staffed restaurants as it was all go go by nazi type bosses who suddenly got all uppitity because they had an illusion of wealth but all they really had in reality was mountains of debt destined to failure. Add to it then the fact that if you speak up or step out of line there was ten more only waiting to jump into your job and add a language barrier to boot and you have a recipe for sad workers. I could say there was never one of their staff (or staff in the type of places also) actually happy

O'Briens epitomises everything bad about Ireland the Celtic Tiger, it was bad over priced food with bad facilities and an ever expanding chain fuelled by consumer debt and cheap migrant labour. Weirdly it was fashionable for a teen to pay anything up to €10 (of dopey daddys money) for a vile Frappuccino in Starbucks and whatever the O'Briens equivalent was.

I am not upset or concerned if jobs that employed Migrant labourers are lost as they meant nothing to the Irish economy and helped fuel the giant false economy we had. Eg. Housing estates built and owned by Irish landlords, let out to migrant labourers who were in turn slaving away for a pittance building more houses and apartments and thus the pyramid scheme continued, if we still had access to cheap and easy credit indefinitely within a few years our population would have doubled or tripled and I'd hate to be living here in that sort of property bubble crash. The pity was that the Credit Crunch did not happen sooner and we would have been spared alot of this entire mess that FF helped get us into.

j1smithy wrote: »

When I was in college, Brody Sweeney once gave us a guest lecture on entrepeneurship. He didn't come across as the most likeable person. He was/is a risk taker and has tried and failed with a number of businesses such as prontaprint. He told us his aim with O'Briens was to create a premium Irish Sandwich brand that would be up with the likes of U2 and Guinness. The shops/franchises that were opened all operate from a manual and everything about how they operate is set out in it, including prices. If I recall correctly franchises were not allowed to deviate much from the list price to maintain the premium product image. He believed, at that time, the onus was on the individual operators to make it work rather than being more flexible. I can see how this policy made it quite difficult to operate down the country especially. I can't believe they're blaming rent rates either as he told us he refused an opportunity to open in Dundrum town centre as the rate was too high. This was in 2006/2007.

I for one won't mourn the demise of O'Briens sandwich bar. For a premium product, I felt it lacked the quality that one would expect for the price. I begrudged them the money I handed over very early one morning in Dublin airport as I was very hungry and they were the only place open. Yes, I feel sorry for those that lost their jobs, but the company was incredibly out of touch with reality. In fairness, if the organisation were more nimble it would have forseen the market conditions today and reinvented itself as a premium but inexpensive café. It didn't and it failed... such is capitalism.

The difference between U2 and Guniness is that they are more or less unique products and hard to copy.

Anyone can make a sandwich, so to turn making a sandwich into an expensive franchise was never very clever, especially when the Spar etc. next door could do it equally well at half the price.

Add to that the fact that the master franchise (ie O'Briens head office) decided to take the stupid decision to take on the head lease for all its franchisees, which means if the franchisee can't pay the rent or goes bust, O'Briens head office is resoponsible to pay it, and you realise how stupid some supposedly clever business people are.