'It feels I'm working for nothing': Cafe owner calls on Government to help struggling businesses
Gregory Autret, owner of Le Petit Breton in Drumcondra, Dublin. Pictures: Moya Nolan
Working a 90-hour week is not a pleasant prospect for most of us. It is something even the most desk-bound of us will never experience.
For Gregory Autret, it is the reality of his life and his business, Le Petit Breton, an artisan creperie and coffee shop in Drumcondra on the northside of Dublin city near Croke Park.
But despite the relentless hours, his business is not growing, it is struggling.
“Right now, it feels like I’m working for nothing,” he tells the with a shrug.
The source of his worries is a by now familiar perfect storm of costing issues. Familiar to us all because restaurants have been closing in their droves in Ireland over the past six months, and being busy is no indicator of what is going on behind the scenes.
Mr Autret, a 42-year-old native of Brest in Brittany, opened Le Petit Breton nine years ago and it quickly became a local fixture. On the face of it, the cafe does healthy business. But things are not all that they seem. After several years of resounding success, Le Petit Breton is barely breaking even, and it is slowly grinding Mr Autret down.
Drumcondra is a much-changed place from what it was 20 years ago, when pubs, chippers, and GAA headquarters were about all it had to sell itself.
Mr Autret has had something to do with that. Initially coming here to work for a succession of corporates, he saw the gap in the market for a dedicated French-style creperie before establishing Le Petit Breton in 2015.
For the past 10 years, there has been a healthy supply of small coffee shops and restaurants on the tree-lined stretch of road leading to the heart of the village.
But post-covid, and particularly within the past year, the same reality facing food-led businesses countrywide is starting to hit home.
Of Mr Autret’s perhaps two closest competitors in the area, one cafe has closed and the other has changed hands, both within the past six months.
What is causing this? Several factors: the rising costs of energy and produce; the consistent rise of the national minimum wage; and, perhaps most pertinently as far as business owners are concerned, the return of the Vat rate to its pre-covid level of 13.5%.
More businesses are hamstrung by the debt they warehoused with Revenue dating from when they could not trade properly during the lockdowns.
But Mr Autret is not one of those. Le Petit Breton stayed largely in business during the pandemic, aided by the success of its takeaway coffee shop — 2022 was one of his best years.
And still, he is struggling to such an extent he was recently unable to pay his business’s rates for the first time in its existence.
His first inkling of what was in store was when his energy bills doubled, a common problem across the population in the wake of the uncertainty brought about by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. But while those prices have stabilised somewhat, they are a lot slower to come down than they were to go up.
At the same time, his wholesale suppliers have been raising their prices in tandem with inflation.
Since 2020, Ireland’s minimum wage has risen from €10.10 to €12.70, and staff are especially hard to hold onto these days in Dublin.
“Because they can’t afford to live locally,” Mr Autret says.
“I am lucky if they stay for two or three months. And they all want more hours but I don’t have them to give.”
This means he ends up working around the clock himself.
All of this adds up, but the real kick in the teeth for Mr Autret was the Government’s decision to raise Vat on the catering sector back to 13.5% from 9% last September. That may prove the straw that breaks the camel’s back for many.
“They should have waited four or five years to give restaurants the chance to build up their money. We were just starting to recover. My business, it’s quite popular and we are struggling. So how can any restaurant withstand this? I am stressed for the restaurant. It’s all my life,” he says.
"I have raised my prices a little but you can only do that so much and keep custom. Is it sustainable? It’s very, very hard. Right now, it feels like I’m working for nothing, as soon as we get any money in it’s immediately gone somewhere else,” Mr Autret says.
He feels the Government is “stabbing small businesses”, particularly in terms of Vat.
“I feel like I speak for all restaurants saying that,” he says.
Noel Rock, a former local TD, knows Le Petit Breton well as a customer.
“I was taken aback to hear it’s struggling because it’s always busy,” he says.
“It does illustrate the significant challenge in terms of the trading environment,” he says.
Asked what can be done, he too hones in on Vat.
“The way it was raised was inopportune given costs and the minimum wage. The Government needs to look at what levers are available to them to alleviate this at this stage.”
It is a sentiment shared by Adrian Cummins, chief executive of the Restaurants Association of Ireland, and someone who pushed hard for the Vat rate to be left at 9%.
“It’s a situation nearly every food-led business is facing at the moment. They’re all saying the same thing, the demand is there but their business isn’t viable since September when the rate went up,” he says.
Asked if the Government understands what is going on, Mr Cummins replies: “I don’t think they know how bad it is. There’s been nearly 300 food businesses closed in the past six months.”
“We need an immediate reaction on Vat. We need it to be split out from the accommodation sector,” he says.
A spokesperson for the Department of Finance said splitting the food sector out for Vat would amount to an estimated full-year cost of €545m, and said Revenue had noted the “significant practical operational concerns” which would accompany any variance in Vat for the accommodation sector.
“In making any decision in relation to Vat rates or other taxation measures, the Government must balance the costs of the measures in question against their impact and the overall budgetary framework,” they said.
For now, Mr Autret says he is “not giving up so easily”. But he thinks the future is bleak.
“This is only the beginning,” he says. If they don’t give us help now things are only going to get worse.”
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