So if we were in that position, yes, would I buy back the stock? Yes. But how much am I going to be able to buy back. It’s not going to be meaningful. What’s more meaningful is having the money available to make a meaningful acquisition that gives us long-term cash flow. So that’s been my position. Would we do a transaction to try to take the Company private? Well, that presents problems also because certainly, certain shareholders will get screwed by that. Others would do well. But the big problem would be how do you evaluate the value of our deal at the Meadowlands. And if that were to become a casino, everybody that was bought out would feel that we knew something and took advantage of some information that wasn’t available to them, which is not the case.
But we still viewed that way. So I’m comfortable at the moment in terms of the Company’s cash balances to leave those in place and try to find something that enhances the Company’s cash flow long term.
Operator: Our next question comes from the line of [Peter Jackson], a Private Investor. Please proceed with your question.
Unidentified Analyst: Couple of questions. First of all, do you have any sense of timing on when the Bryant Park decision would be made?
Michael Weinstein: We are told sometime in spring of this year, this coming year.
Unidentified Analyst: Okay. And how does it work in terms of the way they view, if another restaurant group that’s larger and well-financed, better-financed arguably comes along, does tie go to the runner — does the fact that you’ve been in there and performed well. Do we have sort of the lead position there? Or is it completely starting from scratch and they’ll look at anybody equally?
Michael Weinstein: I have no idea what they’re trying to do in terms of the goals or I think this is a requirement of the Parks Department at the end of the lease and we’ve submitted our proposal. We know other people who submitted their proposals. As I said, we’re a finalist. We do not know what their goals are or other than to put out an RFP.
Unidentified Analyst: Okay. In terms of acquisition, obviously…
Michael Weinstein: By the way, excuse me. We’ve disciplined ourselves here not to drive ourselves crazy by speculating.
Unidentified Analyst: Okay. You mentioned you want to — you’re always taking a hard look at acquisitions and certainly the prices you’ve paid in the past have been fantastic. But given, I guess I want to just understand about the price increases. So, I totally understand that you don’t want to raise prices or you want to keep them down as low as possible. On the other hand, you have increased payroll costs, insurance, utilities, which presumably all your competitors face as well and varying degrees. At what point I mean, the problem is that that’s not doing a lot for margins when you’re not raising prices and you have these increased costs. So what gives there? And why are we in a different position from any other restaurants are?
Michael Weinstein: So, good question, and thank you. So I will mention something that’s in our response to the RFP and Bryant Park. Post pandemic, we raised our prices 7%. So you’re talking a couple of years here. That’s the average price increase. Our revenues this year — or excuse me, our revenues post pandemic are up 12%, which means we’re adding headcounts. I would tell you the same thing is true in Vegas. Now Vegas, it’s not necessarily us setting the headcounts, Vegas is exploding, but we’re adding headcounts in Vegas. We’re very, very sensitive to headcounts as opposed to revenues. And we have long-term leases, where we’re — Rustic is a great example. We were forced to raise prices in Rustic by more than 7% because the price of cabs went from $23 a pound to $54 a pound.
At one point, we were charging — and we put two pounds on the plate. So we’re at $135 right now for something at one point, which was costing us $108 to put on the plate. But I have a blue collar — a large segment of my customer base at Rustic is blue collar, and they use that restaurant for celebrations of anniversaries, birthday parties, blah, blah, blah. Some people don’t care. They’re very wealthy, and they want a great meal of crabs and they come to Rustic. But in all of our restaurants, we have a pretty broad spectrum of people on where they stand on the economic ladder. I don’t want to get a reputation that we’re too expensive. And that’s the way we ran this company from day one. We’ve always had sort of an umbrella of safety as opposed to the quality of our product and services and our architecture and decor as compared to other restaurants in cities in which we were competing.
So it may be stubbornness, but I think in the long run, in the past, it served us very, very well. Right now, what we’re seeing is stability in food prices, stability in alcohol prices, in some cases, certain prices are coming down, crab legs coming down. All of a sudden, we don’t have a 70% cost in crab legs. We had probably a 50% cost of what’s on the plate. This will swing back in our favor. I mean payrolls aren’t going to come down, but they’re going to stabilize, insurance premiums or the worst they’ve ever been, they’re going to come down. So it requires a little bit of patience to get your margins back. But in the meantime, you’re not changing the reputation of the Company as being good quality at fair prices. And that’s what we’re trying to do.
The reciprocal of that is we don’t discount. You’re never going to see us with coupon books out there or deals because our statement to the world is, listen, you’re getting good quality, good service and a nice atmosphere and the prices are fair. We don’t need to discount to get more people into the place. And that’s the reciprocal of it. So, I think we’re being consistent and that’s the way we want to run our business.
