Popular restaurant and dessert chain, The Cheesecake Factory made headlines over the weekend when it was announced that the company furloughed roughly 41,000 hourly workers.
In a securities filing, it was also revealed that the company reduced the pay of corporate employees by 10% to 20%
Additionally, during the coronavirus crisis, The Cheesecake Factory is negotiating with its landlords to defer or reduce rent payments for the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic.
More specifically, landowners have already been alerted that Cheesecake does not intend to pay April rents on all of its restaurants
“Due to these extraordinary events, I am asking for your patience, and frankly, your help,” company chairman and CEO David Overton wrote in a letter.
“We appreciate our landlords’ understanding given the exigency of the current situation.”
“We are certain that with their partnership, we will be able to work together to weather this storm in the appropriate manner,” Cheesecake Factory’s chief financial officer, Matthww Clark told CNN.
The Cheesecake Factory’s company goal is to reduce their costs with sales drops expected and dining rooms shutting down and with companies like Doordash facilitating take-out service.
In a move announced today through Thursday, April 16th, The Cheesecake Factory is offering a complimentary free slice of cheesecake for all orders of $30 or more through DoorDash delivery.
To receive the free slice, guests must add a slice of cheesecake to their purchase and include the promotion code “FREESLICE” at checkout.
For those keeping score at home: Cheesecake Factory was founded in Beverly Hills in 1972. The restaurant operates 294 restaurants in 39 states, as well as in Washington, DC, Puerto Rico and in Toronto, Canada.
Health expert, Dr. Mehmet Oz believes that the coronavirus pandemic could last for some time. “If we do this right, then we’ll be able to start on this virus pretty quickly,” Dr. Oz told CBS Sports Radio’s The Zach Gelb Show recently.
“Certainly by June – that sounds like a long time away – but within the next two months we’ll be able to slow it down so much so that everybody will catch up to it and then we’ll be able to loosen everything up and it’ll go back to life as much as possible, back to normal. But if we don’t do it correctly, then we could run into a catastrophe like Italy is facing where you have a tsunami of patients heading into underprepared emergency rooms and that would be hard for our medical system to deal with.”