How will restaurants respond to the economic downturn?

Here's an interesting article from Slate arguing that restaurants need to retool their current business plans in the face of an economic downturn. Here's the current situation:

The emphasis on wine has a simple explanation: Wine sales are the lifeblood of many restaurants. Ronn Wiegand, a Napa, Calif.-based restaurant consultant who holds the rare Master of Wine degree, says that wine accounts for 10 percent to 15 percent of total sales for casual restaurants and as much as 60 percent at fancier establishments. Restaurants generally have low profit margins and thus need to slap markups on pretty much everything they put on the table. But a $250 Bordeaux is obviously going to make a far greater contribution to the bottom line than a turnip. . . . For decades now, markups of 2.5 to three times the wholesale price have been the industry norm. According to Wiegand, such multiples are an economic necessity for most restaurants; anything less and they may have trouble sustaining themselves. But not every wine on the list has to be marked up at the same rate. So long as the average cost per bottle is in the 2.5-to-three-times-wholesale range, list prices for individual wines need not follow any formula. And, in fact, most restaurants that take wine seriously use a system of progressive markups: They generally slap the biggest markups on inexpensive wines and the lowest ones on pricy bottles (the idea being that the closer an expensive wine is to its retail price, the more apt the customer will be to bite).

But with consumers pulling back on their spending, some retooling is needed:

The easy profits are over, and restaurants hoping to weather the recession ought to think about dialing back their wine prices. Kevin Zraly, a New York-area wine educator who helped pioneer the use of progressive markups when he oversaw wine service at Manhattan's Windows on the World, says that at this point, restaurants just need to fill seats and should scale back their wine markups as a way of attracting diners. "Wine is a tool to get people into restaurants, and in this economy, wine prices need to be dropped to do that," he says. "We had adjustable-rate mortgages, now we need adjustable-rate wines." He also says that restaurants that allow customers to bring their own wines but charge relatively high corkage fees should think about reducing the amount they charge for BYOB. Zraly believes $20 per bottle is a reasonable tariff.

Restaurants that charge $35+ for corkage and sell their wine for 3x-retail will get eviscerated. There is no bigger turn-off to going to a restaurant, seeing a bottle of wine that is already overpriced at $50 retail, offered for $100+ on the wine list. And when the natural impulse is to save more, consumers will become even more reluctant to purchase such insanely priced bottles. In short, the restaurant sector is another part of the wine sector that is due for some shaking up in the current climate. The bubble's over....