Draft eve: preparing for the onslaught
On Wednesday, April 22, I’m getting ready for my shift as a server at Con Alma, a Downtown restaurant and live jazz venue.
Typically, I’m off work on Wednesdays; we’re regularly open Thursday through Sunday only. This week, though, is neither typical nor regular. Pittsburgh is hosting the NFL Draft, and we’ve been told it’s going to be like nothing we’ve ever seen before — not only an action-packed extended weekend introducing the future of football, but a potential boon for local businesses, as unimaginable numbers of visiting fans swoop down upon the Steel City with pocketsful of gold.
To be fair, no one has promised us anything. The marketing agency, though, has said the benefits will be regionwide, with attendees not only spending on the edges of the fenced-off event, but doing business near wherever they park or stay the night. Reporters have told us that the prior two drafts drew hundreds of thousands.
The Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership is getting a jump on the action before the official beginning with the Picksburgh Music Crawl. It’s not really a music crawl in the traditional sense of multiple venues in proximity with a structured opportunity to experience them all. It’s more a published list of local venues and the artists playing, allowing participants to choose their own adventure.
In preparation, we’ve stocked the kitchen to the rafters with wings and other items, filled the fridge with I.C. Light and added fan favorites like boilermakers. We’ve staffed in anticipation of record weekday numbers, and are bracing for a rollicking kickoff to what’s sure to be a banner long weekend.
Boarding the bus Downtown, I’m looking forward to getting started, if a little anxious as well. This predicted onslaught of hungry, thirsty, spendy visitors clamoring for our goods and services is wildly appreciated yet a skosh terrifying. Did we buy enough food? Where will we put everyone? Will we be able to handle it?
I board the bus I ride a minimum of four times a week but today I’m not exactly sure where it will take me; every website and app makes it clear that due to the draft there will be detours, but none provide concrete information. I ask the driver and she’s not sure either. Apparently changes and rerouting are happening in real time and as she tells me, “Hon, don’t nobody know what the fuck is going on.”
Walking the few blocks from the bus stop to the restaurant, downtown Pittsburgh is eerily quiet, the calm before the storm. There’s a fellow service industry worker bee here and there skedaddling to clock in, but it feels like there’s even less activity than usual. I get to work, and we’re all abuzz while we get everything in tip-top shape before we open the doors and let in the throngs. And then, ready for whatever, we wait. Let the wild rumpus start!
And we wait.
And wait.
And the wild rumpus fails to begin.
Over the next few hours we have a few guests here and there, but nothing close to what we could usually expect mid-week.
Editor’s note: The NFL on Saturday said it tallied 805,000 in attendance across the three days, a number that reflects daily headcounts and includes fans who returned on multiple days. Pittsburgh’s Public Source reached out to VisitPittsburgh, the agency primarily responsible for marketing Allegheny County and coordinating with the NFL. The county-funded agency sent the following statement from its President & CEO Jerad Bachar: “It’s important to recognize that the NFL Draft is a highly centralized event — fans travel here primarily to experience the draft footprint itself, which was concentrated on the North Shore and Downtown. That pattern is consistent with what we’ve seen in other host cities as well.”
Draft weekend: Feeling DraftFished
For the duration, we are staffed with all hands on deck, a schedule worked out a few weeks in advance. On Wednesday, we proceed as planned, despite the fact that our reservations are surprisingly low, figuring a good percentage of our business will be walk-in guests. But I am dismissed six hours in, around $70 richer than when I arrived.
Friday, instead of clocking in to serve, I do administrative work, ready to jump if needed. I am not. I sit at a table writing posts about our upcoming Nina Simone wine dinner as the evening’s band of some of the most talented musicians in Pittsburgh or anywhere is introduced by our sound technician. She makes eye contact with me the whole time, because during what should be the dinner rush I am the only person in the dining room.
On the other days, coworkers take the hits, sometimes half of us cut from the schedule or working partial shifts.
Saturday and Sunday are a step up, but still significantly less than average. At the end of the week, the days add up to around one average night. And the exhilaration and the rush that we collectively began the NFL Draft with sours into disappointment.
Part of this is financial. In an industry where revenue fluctuates wildly from one day to the next, not only for the businesses themselves but also for the people who staff them, we have a tendency to put it all on one horse. We count on that big Saturday night or hectic weekend to provide a downpour after the drought. If the payday we’ve been assured doesn’t come, we find ourselves parched and scrambling.
But it’s not just that we didn’t get what we hoped for. It’s that we fell for the hype to begin with. Not only did we lose out on the jackpot we thought was coming our way, we feel duped for believing in it. We’ve been DraftFished.
In retrospect: The idea that people coming to Pittsburgh for the NFL Draft are going to independent restaurants or galleries or bookshops? If you believe that, I’ve got three bridges to sell you. No one was here to explore the city in search of hidden gems and local flavor. They were here for the draft!
They were here to go to the North Shore and the Point and Market Square, the places dedicated to the specific event that brought them to this city. And that’s fine, there’s not a damned thing wrong with it and the visitors can’t be faulted for doing what they came here to do. But those who led us to believe that we — independent restaurants and galleries and bookshops — were going to benefit can absolutely be held to account.
This could have just been something fun and exciting and a victory for Pittsburgh. Showing off the city while being part of a major sporting event was a blast, and no one needed to promise us anything beyond that. Unless, of course, it felt necessary to justify the money spent on the draft instead of any of the other things the city desperately needs.
Editor’s note: The statement from VisitPittsburgh’s Bachar continues: “From the outset, we were very intentional about setting realistic expectations. We conducted more than 80 information sessions with neighborhood groups and local businesses to share what to expect in terms of visitor flow, timing, and concentration of activity. While not every area experiences the same level of foot traffic during the event itself, the long-term impact extends citywide through infrastructure improvements, increased civic and charitable investment and strengthened destination recognition, positioning Pittsburgh as a modern, globally relevant city well beyond the weekend.”
Post-draft: Stretching a meager paycheck
A few slow business days would have been fine. We’ve got parades and marathons and festivals, and we know that between people either being busy doing something else or avoiding whatever that something else is, our business is going to be negatively impacted. So we plan accordingly, schedule light, scale back on ordering and figure we’ll make up for it next time. In retrospect, that’s what we should have done this time as well, and that’s what we would have done if left to our own devices, instinct and experience.
Instead, it turned into a financial opportunity we hung hopes on. For so many of us, the expectation that this would benefit small businesses transformed our perception of it.
Now we’re trying to recover. Restaurants are figuring out what to do with the overages of perishable stock they invested in. Workers who took home to-go boxes instead of tips were left calculating how they could pick up extra shifts and stretch what’s going to be a meager paycheck where they were awaiting a hearty one.
All of us are struggling with how to move forward from feeling bamboozled.
Lissa Brennan is a writer who also makes a mean margarita and can be reached at lissabrennan.lb@gmail.com.
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