LUBBOCK, Texas (KCBD) – Six years have passed since the pandemic brought much of the country to a standstill. For restaurant owner Jeremy Waller, the memory of those early weeks is still vivid.
Waller opened Picosos Mexican Kitchen in 2018, and the restaurant was just beginning to gain traction when COVID-19 forced businesses across the country to shut their doors.
“It was wild,” Waller said.
With indoor dining eliminated, the restaurant had no choice but to overhaul how it functioned. The dining room was converted into a staging area for takeout orders and, eventually, a makeshift call center as phone volume surged.
“Changing our whole operation having to answer the phone more so bringing in more phone lines. Turned our dining room into a call center. We turned our dining room into storing to go stuff then all of a sudden to go packing started getting low,” Waller said.
The scale of that shift was staggering. Takeout had previously represented just a fraction of the restaurant’s revenue.
“Because we weren’t even doing a lot of to go orders back then. To go from, I think we were doing 3% to go business…to go from 3% to 100% overnight was very scary,” Waller said.
Amid the uncertainty, Waller made a deliberate choice to retain his entire staff rather than pursue layoffs.
“The ones that needed to work and wanted to work and we wanted to make sure they stayed employed. They were able to pay their bills. We were excited about being able to be apart of that and give them a little certainty during a very uncertain time,” Waller said.
That decision paid off. The restaurant has grown from roughly 50 employees at the time to nearly 90 today — growth Waller credits to the community’s continued support.
“It was just a scary trying time. I’ve been doing this I guess at the time I had been doing it 15 years and it was one of the most exhausting times of my career just being different every single day,” Waller said.
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