Rising costs are crushing small independent restaurants like ours

As told to Sara Crocker, Phoenix New Times’ dining reporter.

Food and restaurants should be a bright spot in a person’s day. Meals out are how we celebrate, how we bring people together, how we share our culture. 

Five years after we moved to downtown Mesa, we knew we wanted to open a restaurant. When we launched Worth Takeaway in 2016, it was a very small sandwich counter that we thought could make a big difference on Main Street. 

We kept it minimalist, bright and light, with crisp white walls and pale green subway tile. We hung simple pendant lamps, letterboard signs and midcentury architecture-inspired art around the small dining room. 

When we got started, our menu was pretty minimalist, too. We had about seven sandwiches on the menu, all priced at $9. Our goal was only to charge what we needed to and be attainable for the people around us.

The area was still sleepy and needed some new life. We made the choice to risk it all and bet on our community instead of opening in an area that was more established. We left our jobs at a local restaurant group, took out a $50,000 economic development loan, put up most of our savings and maxed out our credit cards to open Worth. 

The restaurant shouldn’t have worked, but it did. We’ve expanded our dining room and our menu. We’ve hosted farmers markets, holiday markets and an annual “Bob’s Burgers”-themed Halloween pop-up party. 

We’ve been in downtown Mesa for 10 years. We’re so grateful that the community continues to support us after all this time, but running a restaurant hasn’t gotten any easier.

If anything, it’s getting harder for restaurants to be successful. We’ve watched catastrophic weather events impact crops and drive up the cost of produce. Labor costs continue to rise. The pandemic wreaked havoc on supply chains and drove up inflation. As much as we wish food weren’t political, how we vote and the decisions made by politicians in our state and our country affect menu prices at restaurants.

For the last three years, we’ve held on tight, not raising our prices in an effort to stay true to our original mission of serving the community. But it is hurting our business, which hurts our team and our families.

In April, we raised the prices on Worth’s menu for the first time since 2023. We’ve had to get creative with some dishes and say goodbye to others. 

Minimum wage has increased every year that we’ve been open. That’s 10 years of increased wages. We believe in paying people a livable wage, well above the minimum, but the bar for that keeps moving with each increase, and so does our ability to stay competitive.

Sustaining higher labor costs is just one challenge. Now, in 2025 and 2026, we’ve seen tariffs that have exacerbated costs and supply chain disruptions, along with rising gas prices and soon-to-be-higher fertilizer prices. 

We’ve also had to shoulder rampant inflation. While we work with a supplier to source the majority of our ingredients, those items’ prices fluctuate. A business of our size doesn’t have the buying power to leverage lower prices. 

Instead, we’ll often seek out better deals because we care about keeping prices as low as possible for our customers. Jim Bob spends hours driving around town in search of the best prices on ingredients like chicken, used for Worth’s best-selling crispy chicken sandwich. The cost of French fries has doubled in the last year. When bird flu drove up egg prices, we didn’t add a surcharge to our menu. Instead of passing the cost on to diners, we took it on ourselves.

There are many unseen costs that our customers aren’t always aware of either: To-go supplies, our alarm system, our point-of-sale software, our credit card fees, our utilities — everything has gone up in cost substantially.

And after all of this, we watched fuel prices skyrocket when the Strait of Hormuz closed in February. Those costs have a huge impact on businesses. The conflict in the Middle East is worlds away from Main Street Mesa, yet those waterways move impactful imports like oil and fertilizer – two things that are closely connected to everything else in our lives. It takes months for ships to cross the ocean, and we’re all feeling the strain. When fuel and fertilizer prices rise, those costs get passed along to farmers, then to suppliers and to restaurants like ours. 

We’re paying an additional $3,000 a year in fuel surcharges and delivery fees just to get products to our doors. And no one can give us an estimate for when these fees will decrease or if they will go away at all. We’re hopeful once the conflict is resolved, we’ll see those surcharges end, too, but there’s no guarantee.

When we set out to serve our community, we never imagined we’d end up navigating international tariffs and geopolitics as part of our business. We truly want to bring all our customers joy without overcharging for our food. But the reality of our costs meant we had to adjust the menu and our prices. 

One thing has remained true since we sold our very first sandwiches: If you spend your hard-earned dollars with us, we’ll make it worth your while. When you dine at an independent restaurant like Worth, those dollars stay in the community, benefiting local workers rather than enriching a billionaire and their corporation. And, we continue to support Arizona purveyors like Capital Farms and Noble Bread.

Inflation fatigue frustrates us all at some point. All you want to do is go out and have a nice meal. Then you sit down at your favorite restaurant, and all you can think while looking at the menu is, “Wow, that’s expensive.” We’ve been there, too. 

Kelsey reads and responds to all of our online reviews. It’s tough as a business owner to read complaints about the cost or to see people assert, “It’s just greed.” We can promise you it’s not.

Our mission at Worth continues to be about our community and bringing them value with every meal. Raising our prices isn’t about making more money or ripping anyone off. It’s about making sure we’ll be part of Mesa for another 10 years.