The sandwich shop chain's same-store sales had been perking up a bit before the coronavirus hit, but that momentum shifted quickly.

CHICAGO, April 25, 2020 -- Potbelly Corporation (NASDAQ: PBPB) today released the following statement. Potbelly’s sales dropped dramatically when COVID-19 hit, forcing us to.

Company remains focused on the health and safety of employees, customers, franchisees, and communities Prior investments in Off-Premise & Digital, coupled with decisive.

Potbelly (PBPB) delivered earnings and revenue surprises of -39.13% and -1.81%, respectively, for the quarter ended March 2020. Do the numbers hold clues to what lies ahead for the stock?

The backlash against large public companies receiving government PPP loans continues to grow louder.

Potbelly (PBPB) possesses the right combination of the two key ingredients for a likely earnings beat in its upcoming report. Get prepared with the key expectations.

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Social media perked up over the past few days on the news that a number of biggish, publicly traded restaurant chains managed to snare millions in government aid for small businesses that more modestly sized restaurants and vendors missed out on.Public outrage about this dumpster fire is useful and welcome. It’s also occasionally been misplaced. But it’s founded on the all-too-obvious fact that the White House and Congress lined up $349 billion for entrepreneurs and unloaded that vast pile without properly planning or managing how they would dole it out — and apparently without prioritizing which businesses should receive it. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s team left banks in the dark about loan terms, business owners weren’t sure how best to apply for funds, the online application process was chaotic, more well-heeled businesses probably found their way to the front of the line, and there were strange regional disparities in funding (just look at this map).Then poof, lucky winners of the aid lotto claimed all those billions in just two weeks. The White House hasn’t provided a full accounting of where the money went or the logic determining who got it. By the time we find out, it is likely to have been spent. Never fear, the federal government is set to approve another $350 billion in small-business funding, possibly as soon as today.Small businesses — especially the employees who work for them — need this support. It’s unlikely that the broader economy can recover without breaking entrepreneurs’ freefalls. It’s also possible that $699 billion and counting won’t be enough to heal Covid-19’s economic wounds. Still, the money is moving through the pipeline, and common sense should be used in spreading it around. That brings us back to one of the targets of social media scorn on Friday night: Shake Shack Inc., the ubiquitous burger chain Danny Meyer founded in 2001.Meyer is one of America’s most gifted and conscientious restaurateurs. His holding company, Union Square Hospitality Group, owns a collection of acclaimed eateries in New York City that includes Union Square Café, Gramercy Tavern, The Modern and Maialino. He began assembling all of that in 1985, when he was 27. His book, “Setting the Table,” is a must-read for any manager of anything. His business philosophy is grounded in an “employee first” approach, and he has led the way on improving compensation for restaurant workers (sometimes with uneven results) and convincing restaurant owners to be more socially minded. Unlike Meyer’s high-end restaurants, Shake Shack is publicly held and built for the masses. Meyer, no longer one of Shake Shack’s largest shareholders, is chairman of the company’s board of directors.On March 18, as the coronavirus forced New York and other cities to start shutting down and the restaurant business to collapse, Meyer began laying off most of USHG’s employees, about 2,400 people. He helped seed a fund to support them with his own salary.Unlike Meyer’s other restaurants, Shake Shack can still sell food for take-out or curbside pick-ups, so it hasn’t been wiped out. The chain employed 7,603 people and had revenue of $595 million and the end of last year. It announced last week that it had to lay off or furlough about 1,000 workers. And it was able to corral $10 million, the largest grant possible, from the government’s small-business rescue fund. That money is meant to buttress payrolls, so presumably it would have been used to maintain wages for Shake Shack’s workers and keep their lives intact a while longer.Here’s the hitch: The government defines small businesses as those employing fewer than 500 people. A loophole in the bailout allows franchises and chains to count employees on a store-by-store basis, which makes them eligible for funding. (I’ve written here about how scammy some of this may wind up being.) That, understandably, has made Shake Shack, Potbelly Corp., and Ruth’s Hospitality Group Inc. — hefty chains that all got bailout funds — objects of curiosity or scorn. This might have been avoided had the government structured the business bailout with greater precision.After all, Shake Shack isn’t the size of, say, United Airlines Inc., which had about 96,000 employees and $43.3 billion in revenue before the coronavirus struck. United is getting $5 billion from a separate bailout fund earmarked for the nation’s airlines. Shake Shack isn’t as small as the Montclair Bread Company, either, which employed 30 people in Montclair, New Jersey, before the coronavirus hit.I ran Shake Shack’s $10 million grant past Rachel Wyman, the owner of Montclair Bread, during an interview with her on Saturday.Wyman opened her doors eight years ago and has become a fixture in a town populated with foodies. She helped put herself through college by making bread, graduated from the Culinary Institute of America supported by student loans and her own hard work, and then began earning a master’s degree in business administration so she could defer her loans. Along the way she has survived a divorce and a bike accident that shattered her pelvis while she was training for an Ironman competition. She’s also raising three children. When the coronavirus hit, she stayed tough.“I’ve struggled a lot in life, generally,” she told me. “I guess I went into immediate survival mode.”In early March, Wyman had to fire about 20 of the people who worked for her and since then has been working from 3 a.m. to 8 p.m., six days a week. On Mondays she gets to sleep until 5 a.m. Money she earned from speaking engagements and running baking classes has dried up. But she’s got a relatively vibrant take-out business at her shop that is keeping her little team afloat for the time being.How long will she survive? “Oh my gosh, I don’t know. I just don’t know — physically or financially,” she said.Like Shake Shack, she worked hard to line up federal aid. Unlike Shake Shack, she didn’t have a phalanx of lawyers and other advisers to help her. She said she and one of her co-workers applied three times to her bank and the Small Business Administration for $100,000 in funding. Each time it took three hours to complete the online application. Each time the application was spit out at the end for undisclosed errors. On the fourth try, her application was accepted. On Friday she got an email from her bank. “We have learned the SBA has approved loans that will exhaust all the funding available for the initial round,” she was told. “We understand that many of you are disappointed.”Wyman is more than disappointed. She’s furious. “All of this money that the government is bragging about having for small businesses feels like it’s not really there. I just feel locked out,” she says. “We need the money now to keep our employees and families afloat and keep our space so that we have somewhere to start over in when this is over.”She didn’t begrudge Meyer’s $10 million, however. “I don’t think it’s fair to come down on a business like Shake Shack. It’s hard to build a business like that. The people who work for them are no different than the people who work for me. As long as the money is actually going to the employees, I have no problem with it.”Rather than see restaurant pitted against restaurant, or specialty store pitted against specialty store, Wyman says the government could have created better buckets of funding for businesses in various industries. Truly small businesses like hers could have been in one category, mid-sized businesses like Shake Shack could have been in another, and mega-businesses like United in still another. The way the aid was set up potentially left mid-sized operations like Shake Shack in a no-man’s land, and when they sprang into action to get funding many of the business community’s small fry were out-muscled. Meyer noted in a LinkedIn post late Sunday night that the squeeze-out made him change his mind about keeping Shake Shack’s government aid. “Many who need it most, haven’t gotten any assistance,” he and the company's chief executive wrote. “We’ve decided to immediately return the entire $10 million.”It’s unclear to me why the business gurus in the White House weren’t sharper about structuring all of this properly from the get-go — unless, of course, they aren’t really business gurus or they weren’t really interested in adequately planning how to spend taxpayers’ money. With a second round of mega-funding on the way, it’s still not clear whether they’ve learned from the current fiasco and will raise their game. Fingers crossed.This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.Timothy L. O'Brien is a senior columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinionSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

Operators of large restaurant and hotel chains were specifically granted the chance to get Paycheck Protection Program loans in the $2.2 billion aid package known as the CARES Act.

Big chains like Ruth’s Chris Steak House, Shake Shack, and Potbelly Sandwich Shop got an exemption to qualify for PPP loans. Shake Shack is giving theirs back.

President Donald Trump and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin address this week how a coronavirus aid program for small businesses has been helping big public companies.

Shares of Potbelly Corp. fell more than 12% in the extended session Tuesday after the fast-casual restaurant chain reported a wider quarterly loss and sales that were below Wall Street expectations even as its delivery, drive-through, and takeout sales rose 45% in April. Potbelly said it lost $13.3 million, or 56 cents a share, in the fiscal first quarter, compared with a net loss of $18.4 million, or 76 cents a share, in the year-ago period. Adjusted for one-time items, Potbelly lost $7.7 million, or 32 cents a share, in the quarter, compared with a loss of 12 cents a share a year ago. Sales fell to $87.6 million compared with $98.1 million a year ago. Analysts polled by FactSet expected the chain to report an adjusted loss of 23 cents a share on sales of $90 million. "Simply put, the pandemic arrested the strong turnaround momentum we initiated in Q4 last year," Chief Executive Alan Johnson said in a statement. "We understand challenges will persist over the next several months, and are taking the necessary steps to support and fortify our business." Potbelly drew down its $40 million credit facility and cut costs and expenses, it said. It is negotiating with landlords and considering closing up to 100 shops, the company said. Shares of Potbelly had ended the regular trading day down 1.3%.

Sandwich maker Potbelly Corp on Monday promised to reimburse activist shareholders' expenses with stock not cash, creating a situation that lawyers call an outlier for now but which they said could find traction in tough economic times. The two sides reached a settlement that looks routine for the times with two board seats going to the activist group led by Vann Avedisian while the company's directors keep their jobs. Buried in a regulatory filing, however, is a twist that discloses Potbelly's plan to issue 130,000 shares as "reimbursement for all documented out-of-pocket costs, fees and expenses (including attorney’s fees and other legal expenses)."

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- In the pre-coronavirus days, the Los Angeles Lakers was one of the most valuable and profitable sports franchises on the planet. Forbes estimated last year that the team earned $147 million in 2018 and would fetch about $3.7 billion in a sale. A trust controlled by the children of the late Jerry Buss, a wealthy investor, owns a majority stake in the team. Other co-owners include Philip Anschutz, a billionaire with a broad portfolio of holdings in energy, real estate, media, entertainment and other industries; Edward Roski Jr., a successful commercial real estate developer; and Patrick Soon-Shiong, who owns the Los Angeles Times.The Lakers, as ESPN reported on Monday, received $4.6 million in bailout funds from the federal government as part of the $349 billion Paycheck Protection Program meant to backstop struggling small businesses sideswiped by Covid-19. The Lakers operation has fewer than 500 employees, which qualifies it as a small business under the government’s aid guidelines. But the Lakers hardly seem as immediately vulnerable, or without access to other resources, as, say, your corner grocer, baker, barber or dry cleaner. The Lakers, undoubtedly aware of a wave of recent disclosures about unlikely companies receiving PPP funds, told ESPN it returned the $4.6 million.The Lakers said it decided to disgorge the money after learning the entire $349 billion in federal aid was scooped up in two weeks, thereby leaving out tens of millions of other small businesses the team described as “most in need.” Indeed, only an insignificant percentage — 5% or less — of U.S. small businesses appear to have received funding from the problem-riddled program according to my own take on the data. And much of it, according to Bloomberg News, hasn’t even found its way to small businesses in regions most severely derailed by the coronavirus pandemic.Despite gaping holes in the program’s launch — or perhaps precisely because of them — the government had to approve a second, $380 billion round of funding last week. The doors opened to prospective small-business borrowers on the new round on Monday, and, like the first round, application and administrative problems erupted. Banks also took to social media to complain about all of the snafus they were encountering.The Treasury Department and the Small Business Administration have overseen the PPP program and haven’t provided enough public information about exactly which companies have received money and how they were screened. It bodes poorly for how effectively this new huge pool of funding will be deployed.“It is reckless for the Small Business Administration and Treasury Department to release a second round of funding before clarifying the major gaps and issues with the Paycheck Protection Program. The program still lacks clear terms for forgiveness, rules prohibiting banks from again prioritizing applications of larger clients, and guidance for new lenders to come online to the program,” the Main Street Alliance, an advocacy group for small businesses, said in a statement on Monday. “With funding likely to run out in 48 hours, it is ludicrous that Congress thinks it has done its job supporting small businesses.”Fortunately, a flow of valuable reporting in recent days has identified some questionable recipients of federal aid and offers a window into how haphazard and inequitable the PPP program already appears to be. Consider:NBC reported that its analysis of about 200 PPP recipients revealed at least a dozen examples of firms possibly leveraging relationships, gaming the program or overcoming problematic backgrounds to receive funding. That group includes Cinedigm Corp., an entertainment company controlled by a Chinese investment firm, and MiMedx Group, a skin-graft company repeatedly mired in law enforcement investigations. It also includes Hallador Energy, Crawford United and Flotek Industries, all of which have ties to the Trump administration and which collectively snared $18.3 million in PPP funds. (Hallador and Crawford didn’t respond to queries from NBC; Flotek said it didn’t take advantage of White House relationships to obtain funding.) The Associated Press reported that at least 94 PPP recipients were publicly traded companies with market values greater than $100 million. About a quarter of those companies had warned investors long before the coronavirus arrived that their fortunes had so soured that they might not be able to stay in business. The AP also said that its review “found examples of companies that had foreign owners and that were delisted from U.S. stock exchanges, or threatened with removal, because of their poor stock performance before the coronavirus hit. Other companies have had annual losses for years.” The Washington Post reported that AutoNation Inc., a national network of automobile dealers with 26,000 employees and a $3.2 billion market valuation, received $77 million in PPP funding. “AutoNation used separate tax identification numbers assigned to dozens of its more than 300 locations to apply for at least $266 million in funds for separate dealerships,” the Post reported. I’ve noted in an earlier column that a loophole in the $2.6 trillion federal bailout program would allow large chains and franchises that might not otherwise qualify as small businesses to apply for PPP aid on a store-by-store or location-by-location basis. The Wall Street Journal reported that dozens of publicly traded firms, including Accelerate Diagnostics Inc. and DMC Global Inc., received $500 million in PPP funds. The New York Times and Bloomberg News reported that a group of publicly traded luxury hotel companies controlled by lodging magnate and Trump donor Monty Bennett received more than $50 million in PPP aid. Bloomberg has also reported that IDT Corp., Universal Stainless and Lindblad Expeditions Holdings Inc. — all companies that have more than 500 employees — received nearly $27 million. (IDT said it’s returning the $10 million it received.) I wrote earlier about the complaints targeting Shake Shack Inc., Potbelly Corp. and Ruth’s Hospitality Group Inc. — all large restaurant chains — when they disclosed they had received PPP funding.All of this is just for starters. Much still seems to be amiss with the $729 billion avalanche of federal funds that have cascaded toward banks and small businesses, and we’ll undoubtedly learn of more problems now that we’ve entered the program’s second act. And we still don’t know whether federal aid it will have its desired effect: supporting workers left in the cold by the pandemic while also ensuring that the unprecedented crisis enveloping small businesses doesn’t become an apocalypse.This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Timothy L. O'Brien is a senior columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinionSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

Potbelly Corporation (PBPB) today announced that it has reached an agreement (the “Agreement”) with shareholders led by Vann A. Avedisian (the “Shareholder Investors”) to appoint David J. Near and Todd W. Smith to the Company’s Board of Directors (the “Board”), effective immediately. Near and Smith, the Board will be comprised of 10 directors, 9 of whom are independent.

Darden (DRI) same-restaurant sales continue to suffer from the coronavirus pandemic. The company is bearing nearly $20 million in losses every week due to the crisis.

The Treasury Department says Paycheck Protection Program loans are not meant for “a public company with substantial market value and access to capital markets” and given big borrowers a May 18 deadline. Here’s how the returns are going.

Q1 2020 Potbelly Corp Earnings Call

Potbelly Corporation (NASDAQ: PBPB), the iconic neighborhood sandwich shop, today announced the date for the release of its first fiscal quarter 2020 financial results. Potbelly will report its unaudited financial results for the first fiscal quarter 2020 on Tuesday, May 12, 2020 after the close of the market that day. The Company has scheduled a conference call and webcast for investors at 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time that day to discuss the unaudited financial results.

Chipotle's (CMG) first-quarter 2020 results reflect improvement in comps, digital sales and restaurant openings.

Of the public companies that disclosed receiving the loans, 48 manufacturing businesses, secured $162.5 million in loans, according to Morgan Stanley. Accommodation and food services ranked a distant second.