‘This is a Time for Survival’
May 7, 2020 | Hartland, Michigan
Dear Washington,
I’ve got a friend named JOE MACKLE, and he wonders if you know what you’re doing.
Now, now. Don’t go getting offended. It’s nothing personal. Joe doesn’t have some partisan axe to grind. It’s just that for a guy like Joe, living in the heartland—well, Hartland—and running a small business, a restaurant that’s his legacy and namesake, trying to survive during the harshest economic crisis of his lifetime, he’s looking to you for expertise and competency but seeing little of either.
Before you disagree—or become dismissive—you should hear Joe out. Because trust me, there are plenty of Joes out there: People who vote for both parties but don’t like either one; people who heed the warnings of scientists and economists; people who support drastic measures to protect public health but fear a one-size-fits-all approach might cripple the economy to a point beyond repair. He’s not the guy you’ll see yelling at a protest; he’s more likely to write a respectful letter to his congressman and grow irritable that he never heard back. Spend some time with Joe and you’ll realize he represents an awful lot of people—disaffected swing voters, heartsick small businessmen, restaurateurs who feel they’re not getting the attention they need.
You know I’ve covered a lot of politicians on the campaign trail. I’ve gone to a thousand rubber-chicken dinners. But I’ve never seen anyone work a room like Joe Mackle. The man just knows how to make people comfortable. It’s probably because he’s so comfortable with himself: 53 years old and balding, with broad shoulders and a modest beer gut, a goatee of grey stubble and a wide, toothy grin, he struts from one corner of his kingdom to the other, “touching every table, every night,” schmoozing with his customers about sports, about their families, about their work, and yes, about politics. Sporting khakis and a button-up shirt, or sometimes his grease-splattered kitchen whites, he swaggers over, pulls up a nearby chair and sits alongside regulars and perfect strangers alike, leaning so effortlessly into dinner conversations you’d swear he was a member of their party.
Joe’s restaurant is called “Mackle’s Table & Taps.” It’s located in a neat little strip mall off M-59 in Hartland, Michigan, a quiet town 30 minutes south of Flint. Consider it Joe’s little slice of the American dream.
A Philly kid whose family transplanted to Metro Detroit, Joe has worked in restaurants since he was 15—washing dishes, busing tables, cooking on the line and assisting from the pantry, taking orders, mixing drinks, managing both the back of the house and the front of the house. He graduated from Michigan State in 1990 with a criminal justice degree but decided to stick with the industry he knew. Joe went to work for Red Lobster and later Lonestar Steakhouse, opening more than a dozen stores. When a private ownership group set out in 1997 to open Stillwater Grill, a high-end steak and seafood joint in the Detroit exurb of Brighton, they found Joe for the job. The restaurant boomed. Three years later, they opened a second Stillwater just outside of Lansing. It took off, too. For the next 16 years, Joe shuttled between the two locations and his home in Hartland, running two highly successful restaurants—and wondering if one day, maybe, his name would grace the menu.
“I always dreamed of taking my shot,” Joe tells me, sitting at a high-top inside his desolate space. The last time I was here, the air hummed with aromas of beef and draft beer. Now, the keg lines are cleaned and the place reeks of Lysol. Nodding, he adds, “But this is a brutal business. The happiest day for an owner is when they open a restaurant; the second-happiest day is when they sell it.”
In 2016, Joe’s bosses sold Stillwater—and he declined to stay aboard under new ownership. For a couple of months, he dug swimming pools with a contractor buddy to make some cash. All the while, he was eyeing a spot, just around the corner from his house, that was for sale. It was a cursed location, home to several bars that had flopped due to bad food, bad management or both. But Joe believed—based on decades of relationships established in the neighboring town of Brighton, and a loyal kitchen staff that was ready to follow him into a new venture—that he could succeed where others had failed.
He emptied his life savings, drew down his 401(k) and other retirement funds, and signed a 10-year loan from the landlord. It was, to abuse all the clichés, a roll of the dice, an all-in wager on himself, putting everything on the line in pursuit of a lifelong ambition.
And it worked. Mackle’s was a boomtown from the day it opened in July 2016. The tenderloin steak tips, the buffalo chicken tenders, the large rotating cast of local brews—everything worked. Some of it was timing: Hartland, a longtime farm town, was growing rapidly into an upper-class suburb, full of lunch-expensing businessmen and active families with no time for at-home dinners. Corporate chains had long stayed away from Hartland; residents had driven down the road to Brighton to find Chili’s or Olive Garden. Now they came to Mackle’s.
Joe and his wife, YVONNE, were too anxious—and working too many 18-hour days—to grasp the success. It wasn’t until December, when their accountant paid a visit to examine the books, that they realized it. “Holy shit,” he said, looking up. Mackle’s had doubled the revenue done by the previous owner.
Joe was just getting started. In 2017, his restaurant enjoyed double-digit growth. Then another year of double-digit growth in 2018. Same in 2019. The business was so vibrant, their prospects so rock solid, that Joe and Yvonne sat down last May and made a decision: They would wind down the balance of their loan in 12 huge chunks, paying it off by May 2020, six years ahead of schedule. They would be a rare success story in the “brutal” industry. They would have made it in a way most restauranteurs never do.
And then along came Covid-19.
“We were two months from being out of debt,” Joe says. “Now, we’re two months from being out of business.”
There is no city synonymous with dining out, no Detroit of restaurants. The experience is so universal, the presence of eateries so ubiquitous, that we tend to overlook just how vital food service is to America’s economic wellbeing. In 2017, the Atlantic reported that restaurants were “the most promising sector of the U.S. labor market,” with “jobs growing faster than health care, construction, or manufacturing.” This was not a new phenomenon: “For the past three decades, restaurants have steadily grown, as part of the most fundamental shift in American work—from making things to serving people,” the Atlantic noted. “At current rates of growth, more people will work at restaurants than in manufacturing in 2020.”
When the automotive sector faced extinction in 2008 and 2009—threatening the livelihoods of millions in Michigan and across the industrial Midwest—the federal government acted with speed and precision. It was unquestionably the right call; jobs were saved, loans were repaid, and the automakers were better positioned for the future. Rescuing the restaurant industry, which touches Americans in every town in every county in every state, is an immeasurably more difficult task.
The first thing you have to understand, as Joe Mackle explains, is that “even the really good sit-down restaurants operate on 5-to-10 percent margins.” Much of that margin comes from alcohol sales; from the table that orders an additional round and from the people squeezed onto bar stools six inches apart from one another. In other words, these are businesses that don’t have room for losses to begin with—and losses are inevitable if customers aren’t willing to huddle in close proximity for extended periods of time.
Right now, Joe has no customers at all.
On the evening of Friday, March 13, Mackle’s was bustling. There was a 45-minute wait for tables and a celebratory—if curious—mood in the air. Earlier that day, Governor Gretchen Whitmer had announced the closing of schools statewide. “I’m talking to people that night, watching them book flights to take improvised trips because school is cancelled and the tickets are dirt cheap,” Joe says. “And I’m just thinking, ‘this my last weekend in business.’”
Sure enough, the next day, Saturday the 14th, his crowds thinned out. Sales were way down. Then, on the 15th, the bottom fell out. Joe’s dining room was empty. “It was like the world stopped spinning that Sunday,” he says.
The timing couldn’t have been worse. He was 48 hours from St. Patrick’s Day, the restaurant’s biggest revenue prize. Joe had just purchased $5,000 of keg beer. A food order, worth $8,000, was coming on a truck Monday morning. What was he supposed to do?
The decision was made for him. A few hours after Joe accepted the delivery Monday morning—honoring his word to a longtime distributor—he listened in a dreamlike state as Whitmer announced that as of 3 p.m. all Michigan restaurants were to cease their dine-in service.
Joe called in every favor he could, cashing in on all those years of relationships in the community. On St. Patrick’s Day, he managed to sell 60 corned beef dinners to-go and 60 reuben sandwiches. It was helpful, taking some bite out of his inventory and grabbing some revenue in lieu of the packed house he’d planned for. But Joe knew it wasn’t enough. His model isn’t built on carryout orders. His kitchen manager is a cancer survivor who’s high-risk. If he tried to stay open, the restaurant would bleed money at best—and get people sick at worst.
“We sat down that night, the 17th, and decided to shut down and sit on our cash until we could make sense of this,” Joe says. “I cried more those next three days—it was like my mom died all over again. It was a shot to my pride. I could no longer provide for our employees and their families. But it was the right decision. They could get unemployment for a while. And honestly, if we had stayed open, if we’d just let our bank account get chipped away trying to do carry-out, there wouldn’t be a restaurant for them to come back to.”
No responsible deed goes unpunished. Having shoveled so much cash toward repaying his loan—and having paid his taxes early, both to Lansing and the feds—Joe was panicked when the work stoppage hit. He applied for a business credit card, but the bank told him it had suspended new account openings. He applied for the Paycheck Protection Program but walked away empty-handed from the first wave of disbursements. “I have no debts with the bank. I have no loans or credit lines. I’m not leveraged,” Joe shrugs. “My buddies who got the PPP loans right away, they owe money to their banks. And some of them were still open for business, doing fine. … It was pretty obvious to everyone how the whole thing worked.”
This is where Joe’s populist streak comes out.
“The folks in Washington, they’re in the ivory tower, they don’t have their feet on the ground. They don’t know what I need in Hartland, Michigan,” he says. “So, we get this knee-jerk program. They pump out all this money without knowing where it’s going or why. I know they needed to move fast, but they had no idea what they were doing. There are a lot of people who don’t need the help who are getting it, and a lot of people who really need the help who aren’t getting it.”
Joe falls somewhere in the middle. He runs a healthy business in an affluent community that will rally around him when the doors re-open. At the same time, his cash situation is shaky—and there’s no line of credit to lean on. To restock his empty coolers from scratch, having donated all the food back in March, will cost tens of thousands of dollars. And that doesn’t even begin to account for the alcohol, the new cleaning supplies, and of course, the payroll.
Increasingly convinced that PPP represented his only lifeline, Joe watched nervously on Monday, April 27, as the portal for the second round of applications launched—and then promptly crashed.
“That was 10:30 in the morning, and I’m watching Trump that night at 6:30, and he gets questioned, ‘What do you think about the PPP loan system crashing?’ And he says he had no idea it had crashed,” Joe says. “And I’m like, ‘Bro, you got the keys to the fucking car. Where have you been the last eight hours?’”
Joe doesn’t want to talk about the president. Because, he says, this isn’t about the president.
Sure, he’s sick of the smallness. He’s tired of the name-calling. But Joe refuses to pile the blame for Covid-19, and for America’s broader social and political predicaments, at Trump’s doorstep. He sees institutional failures across the board—big banks, hospital systems, domestic manufacturing, leadership of both parties—that predated this pandemic and this administration. He fears the “partisan pissing match” only perpetuates a cycle of such systemic failure.
“This isn’t a time for Democrats versus Republicans,” he says. “This is a time for survival.”
If that sounds like lazy equivocation—“both-siderism” as Twitter calls it—well, Joe doesn’t care. He is the epitome of a centrist: fiscally conservative, socially moderate, intellectually curious, someone who prizes competence over ideology. He’s also a peacemaker. Joe wants his bar to bring people together. Some time ago, he banned Fox News, CNN, or MSNBC from being shown on his televisions—even when it rankled some of the regulars.
“We’ve had nasty arguments. We’ve almost had fights. Even before Covid, I could see the temperature here in Livingston County running hot. And now you’re heading toward November, with everyone picking sides. I’m fucking scared,” he says. “And also, look, I’m a business owner—I don’t see customers as red or blue. I see the color green. I’ve turned away candidates trying to host political events here. No, thank you. That’s like hanging a Michigan flag outside. Or hanging a Sparty flag outside. You’re telling half your customers they’re not welcome.”
Then again, half a dining room would be 100 percent more customers than he has right now.
He was crossing his fingers late last month, hoping Whitmer would allow restaurants to resume dine-in service with 50-percent capacity. She did not—and Joe was angry. “I’m for every safety measure, always erring on the side of caution,” he explains. “But it’s hard to sit here in Livingston County, where we’ve got one new death per day and two new cases and argue to continue shuttering the economy.”
Now, the next date circled on the calendar is May 28. If Whitmer finally allows half-capacity service on that date, as industry officials are cautiously expecting, Joe will reopen his restaurant to a world that looks nothing like the one he’s known over his 40 years in the business.
“You’ve gotta check the employees when they get here—but we can’t find a thermometer to buy,” he says. “We’ve gotta have masks, but we can’t find enough, so we’re making some. We’ve gotta have mass amounts of hand sanitizer, so I’ve been calling the liquor distilleries to buy some from them. So, now I’ll go from running a restaurant to retraining every employee. Now, on every table, you’re going to have salt, pepper, ketchup—and hand sanitizer. Oh, and by the way, beef prices went up 15 to 20 percent this week. Remember that margin I was talking about? That 5 to 10 percent in profits we live off? It just got a lot smaller.”
He pauses, and adds: “And what happens when one of our employees tests positive for Covid? In a small town where everyone knows each other? Are we done?”
Joe is confident that he’ll make it. But he sounds defeated when discussing the industry at large. Restaurants are risky by nature; they go belly-up left and right, even during the best of economic times. But this will be different. The Michigan Restaurant Association, he notes, is predicting that 20 restaurants will close in the state every single day. “For good,” he emphasizes.
Part of the reason for this coming restaurant apocalypse, Joe argues, is that PPP—the massive government program to help businesses cover payroll—was not designed to meet the needs of his industry. (Or at least his level of the industry: Small independents got screwed while Ruth’s Chris got its $20 million check faster than Joe could grill a 7-ounce filet).
“We’re shuttered. Two of every three restaurant workers in the state of Michigan are laid off,” Joe says. “You’re giving me money I can’t spend.”
It’s a problem Joe knows well. On Saturday, having gone weeks without any update about the status of his PPP application, he was suddenly notified of the approved funds. (Joe declined to tell me the amount.) His first reaction was relief. His second was worry. There’s an eight-week window in which 75 percent of the PPP funds must be dispersed to employees. The clock began ticking on Saturday when he accepted the emailed offer. Joe, who’s praying to re-open at half capacity three weeks from now, knows he’ll never be able to unload the money before the window closes a month later. Ultimately, any leftover funds automatically convert to a loan at 1 percent interest—which, Joe notes, would be preferable for a business like his that still doesn’t know when it’s going to reopen.
He’s glad to have the safety net beneath him, assured it will help him survive. But looking beyond the four walls of Mackle’s, he wonders what it all means—for the seven other small businesses in his strip mall, for the restaurants around the state that weren’t running on healthy margins before Covid-19, for the country that’s handing out historic stacks of money in response to a few clicks of the mouse.
“It’s scary, bro. Where is America headed when we’re giving out money like this?” he says. “And where did the money even come from?”
Joe thinks for a moment. “I understand you gotta keep the economy going. But it’s terrifying to think about how we pay for this. At some point, the bill comes due. It’s like we all won a big poker hand and the money is being shoved in front of us. Cool! But whose money is it?”
For now, it’s Joe Mackle’s money—and he needs to start spending it. Against his earlier judgment, Joe is now planning to open the restaurant for carryout orders on May 19. Between now and then, he’ll be deep cleaning his shop and re-training his staff of 50 to comply with the strictest possible safety guidelines. He’ll also be lobbying lawmakers—at the state and federal levels—to extend the PPP spending window for restaurants to at least 12 weeks.
Joe says he’s written to members of Michigan’s congressional delegation. So far, no response.
What do you say, Washington?
All this talk of food is making me hungry. I’m off to support one of my local restaurants; I hope you’ll do the same.
If you’ve got places you think I should visit, people you think I should meet, drop me a line: L2W@politico.com. Until then, please keep safe—and if you’re ever near Hartland, don’t forget about Joe. I recommend the buffalo tenders and a pint of Bell’s seasonal beer.
Your old friend,
Tim