Citing business losses amid a fragile economy, the company operating the Jollibee restaurants on Saipan yesterday confirmed the closure of their Chalan Kanoa outlet beginning July 1.<\/p>\n
YCO Corp., Jollibee\u2019s franchise holder on Saipan, said sales of the Chalan Kanoa restaurant dropped to alarming levels, prompting the management to decide on the closure in early June.<\/p>\n
YCO general manager Ralph Yumul said the restaurant was supposed to shut down operations on June 15, but the company eventually decided to extend operations to June 30.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we did is temporarily shut it down,\u201d said Yumul, who added, however, that \u201cwe have no plans yet to reopen it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yumul said the management projected a downtrend in sales. He refused to divulge the amount of losses incurred by the restaurant.<\/p>\n
\u201cFrom the business standpoint, the island is not stable. It has a very unpredictable economy,\u201d he said. \u201cOur present economy can either switch from bad to worse, from worse to bad, and bad to better.\u201d<\/p>\n
The general manager said only one part-time employee got laid off. He said six other employees were transferred to Jollibee\u2019s main branch in Garapan, while three others were absorbed by YCO\u2019s holding companies.<\/p>\n
Besides the Jollibee restaurants, YCO owns the Liberty Plaza department store, True Value Hardware and Servistar Motorsports\u2014all in Garapan\u2014the Do-It-Best Hardware in Chalan Piao, and a construction firm.<\/p>\n
The Jollibee outlet in Garapan continues normal operations, Yumul said. When pressed if the business was doing well, he simply reiterated that operations remain normal.<\/p>\n
Jollibee Foods Corp. is the leading fastfood chain in the Philippines. YCO acquired a franchise from Jollibee over five years ago for $65,000, excluding the minimum required capital investment of $250,000. Its franchise allows it to operate three Jollibee outlets on Saipan.<\/p>\n
YCO first put up the Garapan restaurant for $700,000. Its capital investment for the Chalan Kanoa branch totaled some $300,000 four years ago, Yumul said.<\/p>\n
Yumul said the rest of YCO\u2019s holding companies have been performing positively. The YCO companies have over 80 employees.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Citing business losses amid a fragile economy, the company operating the Jollibee restaurants on Saipan yesterday confirmed the closure of their Chalan Kanoa outlet beginning July 1.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-82460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82460"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82460\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}