AUSTIN, Texas — Thousands of people descended on Zilker Park last weekend for the Austin City Limits Music Festival.
Many of those people bought food from the various local vendors.
"We did about 140% of our sales that what we were expecting to do from last year," Faraz Vohra, co-owner of Shawarma Point, said on Tuesday. "We tapped into our second week of prep on Sunday … We were expecting to serve about 4,000 people this year. This weekend we did close to 5,000."
Vohra said the business scraped by during the pandemic, applying for PPP loans and doing what it could to stay afloat. This weekend was the biggest ACL weekend Vohra has ever seen for his business, since opening in 2013.
"It's a big thing that we're going to celebrate at the end of this month when we're done with this long stretch of weekends to end Formula One," Vohra said.
For one of ACL's longest-standing vendors, the weekend went about as expected, which is to say business was fine.
"At a very minimum, it met our expectations. This year at ACL, because of the rising costs and labor and product, it was difficult and we had to stretch the boundaries of what I call our value proposition to the consumer," said Andrew Atsumi, owner of The Mighty Cone. "We raised prices, they don't even cover the cost increases that we've had."
Atsumi remembers buying a Mighty Cone at the first ACL Fest in 2002. He later bought the business in 2019, then was hit hard by the pandemic.
"COVID wiped out a consumer base. It wiped out a staffing base, and costs everywhere went up: fuel costs, insurance costs, rent, you name it – every touchpoint of our operation. It's been difficult," Atsumi said.
He hopes Weekend 2 of ACL will bring a bit more business. He plans to staff the weekend as if there will be more customers because, typically, Weekend 2 has more people, according to both Atsumi and Vohra.
"Weekend 1 was pretty solid for us and, you know, we plan on doing exactly what we did next weekend," Vohra said.
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