Armand's Pizzeria and Grille is closing at 190 Halpine Road in Rockville. After over 51 years in business, the restaurant's co-owners announced on Instagram that they will permanently shut their doors after the close of business on June 20, 2026. This is your last chance to get a slice of Armand's pizza. But it's also another chance to see what the anti-business policies of the Montgomery County Council, and the resulting moribund Montgomery County economy, have wreaked on our business community and underfilled County revenue coffers.
WTOP reporter Luke Lukert wrote that "due to financial reasons and a struggling environment for small businesses, they will have to shut their doors." Lukert interviewed Armand's co-owner Chris Sappe, who told him,"Montgomery County is a tough place to have a family-owned business with minimum wage increasing." Along with recent hikes in ingredient and fuel costs, Sappe said, they had to make the difficult decision to close.
Let's again spin one of the greatest hits recorded by Peter Gragnano of the Suburban Washington Franchise Owners Association, when he and many other business owners and advocates pleaded with the Council not to move forward with their massive minimum wage hike in June of 2016. "That's a lot of extra Slurpees to sell," Gragnano said in the quote of the night. Did the Council heed these warnings? Nope.
Remember the Council's brilliant idea to index the minimum wage to inflation beginning in 2021? Yep, that one hasn't aged well, either. One businessman warned the Council that if inflation spiked as it did in the late 1970s and early 1980s, "there won't be a way to wash a dish in a restaurant." This is the man you should now be asking to generate your lottery numbers! Inflation spike? In America? The County Council clearly does not share that businessman's Kenny Kingston-esque foresight.
Another one of the brilliant minds in the business realm of Maryland is Maddy Voytek, who in 2016 was working at the Maryland Retailers Association. She noted that Montgomery County had already lost 2141 retail jobs between 2000 and 2016. Voytek told the Council that adoption of the $15 wage would "devastate our economy."
What we've seen most recently, as all of these dire predictions came true, are more closings of older businesses. Community institutions. Businesses like Armand's or Flanagan's in Bethesda. Businesses that have survived wars, recessions, and the 2008 "Great Recession," only to be felled now by the incompetents on our County Council. Something is rotten in the County of Montgomery. Have the smelling salts reached your nostrils yet?
But it's the people who keep voting for these economically illiterate social justice cupcakes. The people get the government they deserve.
ReplyDeleteDo you know the pizza-man?
DeletePlease. The recent inflation and higher fuel costs which raised costs on all their supplies were what did it. Other businesses are still around while paying their workers a decent living wage. So add a dollar to the price of a pizza.
ReplyDeleteArmand's was mismanaged. They survived Covid, but this war-induced price spike did it. Also, there are tons of other pizza places in MoCo, there's competition from Doordash letting you order from any type of food easily, and the county's demographics are changing. If they couldn't make their money off college kids in College Park, how could they compete with a good but very limited menu?
Um there was higher inflation and higher fuel costs under Biden. Nice try
DeleteThe owners/manager of armands gave up 15 years ago and haven't tried or cared since tenlytown closed... There are hundreds of new Asian restaurants and halal restaurants and hispanic restaurants with owners that put in the effort and defy your narrative... The correct narrative is that white owned businesses are being discriminated against by globalist landlords and insurance companies
ReplyDeleteOh, wow!!! Care to explain how that discrimination works?….
DeleteEasy to vaguely blame "financial reasons and a struggling environment for small businesses". Armand's was mid at best. Better and simply more options in the local market likely also have something to do with it.
ReplyDeleteSeems like owners are blaming everyone but themselves in this case. Trust me Mr Pizza Tycoon, you were the reason those employees lost a job. Bye bye!
ReplyDeleteAuthor is clearly anti worker, how tf can ppl afford to live much less buy pizza without wage increase when everything is going up? I will miss that deep dish but don't put that on MoCo, you can't eat pizza everyday and there's just so much competition, just how the capitalists like jt
ReplyDeleteLook at the places in Rockville that have crowds and even lines - the Asian restaurants and coffee/tea shops.
ReplyDeleteIt's not the 1980s anymore.
But, the owner is right. Montgomery County is a difficult place for small business and to live given the cost to do either in 2026.
Look at the salary of a chain restaurant manager along Rockville Pike - very difficult to get by on that now.
Call in Dave Portnoy
ReplyDelete4:07: "Zero flop. Undercarriage: to die for."
DeleteHe does great pizza reviews.😊
Delete
ReplyDeleteFor more than 45 years we have lived within a mile and never have gone there. We like other styles of pizza. Montgomery County caters too much to locally owned businesses. I know I am not the only resident and taxpayer that would like the County to encourage chains we hear about from others, American, family, fish, reasonably prices would be nice. We have more than a million people with one Walmart. People visiting from other areas of the country can't believe it. Wawa got approved but not a second Walmart?
we
9:38: You can thank the Montgomery County Council for the lack of Walmart, because they banned it over a decade ago. Walmart had proposed stores for Pike Center in Rockville, and the Vitro site in Aspen Hill. The Council stepped in and shut it down.
DeleteToday, Pike Center is a struggling property with vacant storefronts. The Vitro site continues to rot. We are being led by very stupid people.
Note that Montgomery County also has no Olive Garden, no Texas Roadhouse, no Cracker Barrel, and no Waffle House, all businesses that are ubiquitous every few miles outside of MoCo. Truly weird.
So let me get this straight, Mr. Dyer, your argument is that businesses can’t stay afloat because they can’t exploit their workers by not paying them a living wage? Where are those workers suppose to come from, where would they live, and how, on the old minimum wage?
DeleteCuriously enough you don’t find any fault in the massive layoffs MoCo residents suffered in the past 18 months and the uncertainty introduced by the cancelation of numerous Federal Government programs/contracts. Nobody I know goes out at the same rate they did 2 years ago. In this K-shaped economy the middle class, which represents most of the patrons of these businesses, is squeezed from all angles.
And if you contend that local businesses can’t stay open (while protected by MoCo Council from big box store competition) and in the same breath you advocate for bringing Walmart in town, it’s not the MoCo Council that looks stupid. Everywhere where big box stores arrive, small businesses die!
6:43: Minimum wage jobs are typically entry-level positions, not ones you work for a lifetime and retire on. Mostly teenagers and college students. If such jobs are now seen as careers to purchase homes and raise families on, that's just another damning indictment of the Council's well-documented failure to attract high-wage jobs to the County. And now many more entry-level jobs have been lost, as we see with the ordering kiosks that became ubiquitous after the minimum wage hike.
DeleteRaising wages, rather than tackling out of control pricing of housing, cars, and groceries, only jacks up inflation even higher. Increased purchasing power sustains demand at overinflated prices. This is basic economics, which is understandably not the Council's area of expertise.
This shopping center property was purchased by an Asian group and proposed to be redeveloped entirely as Asian themed food experience. Im unsure about you but I can only bare to eat Asian food once a week at most...
ReplyDeleteHow many Hot Pot places does Rockville Pike actually need
DeleteLess yimbyism and more businesses please? Yimbys are purely annoying.
ReplyDelete