2026: AIN’T NOBODY COASTING.

2026 has been a weird sonofabitch.

Not catastrophic. Not dead. Not some dramatic end-of-the-world situation where nobody is spending money or every business is empty. Just hard. In some ways, I think that’s worse. When business falls off a cliff, at least you know you have a problem. You react. You cut. You change something. This year has been more like death by a thousand tiny paper cuts. One good weekend convinces you everything is fine, then Tuesday through Thursday makes you question every decision made since the doors opened.

December through the end of February is always tough around here. It’s cold. It gets dark early. Nobody wakes up on a 38-degree Wednesday night thinking, “You know what sounds fun? Leaving my couch.” Fine. We know that going in. Spring normally brings everybody back to life. The weather gets good. Tourism picks up. People spend time outdoors. New Braunfels starts feeling like New Braunfels again. Spring 2026 was fine. Not terrible. Not great. Just noticeably softer than 2025.

Then summer showed up. If you own a bar or restaurant around here, summer is its own strange animal. Thousands of people come to 78130, but that doesn’t mean thousands of people are sitting in bars. They’re on the river. They’re at the lake. They’re floating for six hours, baking in the sun, drinking whatever they packed in a cooler while spending money somewhere other than your cash register. By the time they get off the river, half of them are sunburned, exhausted and one Whataburger away from going to bed. Tourism does not automatically equal hospitality dollars. That lesson has been pretty damn clear this year.

Duesy’s isn’t alone. Everywhere we look, somebody is announcing that they’re closing. A restaurant. A bar. A little shop somebody poured their savings into. A place that had been around forever. A place that opened two years ago with every intention of being around for twenty. Then the comments fill up with the usual stuff: “So sad!” “We loved that place!” “Why is everything closing?” Well, because loving a business and spending money there are two different things. Businesses cannot survive on Facebook condolences.

At the same time, new places keep opening. I love that. Somebody signs a lease, hangs a sign and bets on themselves. It takes some serious balls to open a hospitality business in any year, much less right now. But those businesses are going to have to weather the same shit the rest of us are weathering. Customers are watching their wallets. The cost of running the business sure as hell isn’t watching ours.

Restaurants and bars live in a very small space between what something costs us and what the public is willing to pay for it. There is a ceiling. I cannot raise the price of a beer every time insurance goes up. I cannot add two dollars to a cocktail because the electric bill sucked this month. I cannot hand every government fee, payroll increase, repair bill or vendor increase directly to the customer and expect them to keep smiling. At some point they say, “Nah. I’ll stay home.” Plenty of people are doing exactly that.

They still go out. They’re just pickier. Maybe they go out once instead of twice. Maybe they have two drinks instead of four. Maybe they eat at home first. Maybe they skip the appetizer. Maybe they look at a eight-dollar cocktail and decide Tito’s tastes just fine in their kitchen. That shit adds up.

Then there’s government. Before anybody gets their panties twisted, this is not a Republican post or a Democrat post. I genuinely do not give a shit which team gets blamed. Businesses do not pay bills in red or blue. We pay them in dollars.

Every level of government affects small business whether people want to admit it or not. Federal policy affects tariffs, lending conditions and the cost of goods. State government affects taxes, alcohol rules, insurance markets and regulation. Local government affects permits, property taxes, utilities, signage and whatever fresh piece of paper somebody decides needs a fee attached to it. Some of it is necessary. Some of it makes sense. Some of it is stupid as hell. Almost all of it costs somebody something.

Tariffs are a good example. Support them or oppose them, I really don’t care. From where I sit, the question is what they do to my costs. If equipment, supplies, building materials or replacement parts get more expensive, somebody pays for it. Usually us first. Eventually you. Same thing with interest rates. You can argue all day about where they should be. My beer cooler does not care. If borrowing money costs more, expansion costs more. Replacing equipment costs more. Consumers carry more expensive debt. When they have less left over, Duesy’s is competing for what remains.

That is the part I think gets lost whenever politicians start telling us how wonderful or terrible the economy is. Meanwhile, the small-business owner is standing in the middle saying, “Cool story, bro. Payroll is Friday.”

That is the economy I understand. What came into the bank. What went out. How many people walked through the door. What they spent. Whether I can pay everybody, pay the government, pay the vendors, fix the broken shit and still have enough left over to justify doing this again tomorrow. That is Main Street economics and 2026 has required a whole lot more attention to it.

This has been the year of looking harder at payroll, entertainment, operating hours and every recurring charge that quietly hits the account every month. It means looking at something we have “always done” and asking the uncomfortable question: does this actually make us any money? If the answer is no, sentimentality is getting expensive. That doesn’t mean panic. It means running the business.

More owners are doing exactly that right now. Cutting hours. Reducing menus. Delaying projects. Doing more themselves. Booking less entertainment. Renegotiating contracts. Watching labor, inventory and waste. Watching everything, because the margin for being sloppy has gotten pretty damn small.

There is also a weird disconnect happening around New Braunfels because the place is still growing like crazy. New rooftops. New neighborhoods. New businesses. New developments. New people. So from the outside, everything looks fantastic. Growth is fantastic, but growth does not guarantee that every existing business gets a bigger piece of the pie. Sometimes it just creates more places cutting slices.

Every new bar, restaurant, food truck or entertainment concept gives customers another option. Again, I am not complaining. Competition is healthy. Bring it. But let’s stop pretending that adding thousands of residents and opening twenty new concepts automatically makes every hospitality business stronger. There are still only seven nights in a week. People still only have so much money. Everybody is fighting for their Thursday night.

That is why I think the businesses that make it through whatever this economy is doing next will be the ones that know exactly what they are. Not the ones trying to be everything. Not the ones spending money because everybody else is spending money. Not the ones copying whatever place happens to look busy on Instagram. The ones that know their customer, know their numbers and are willing to change course when something stops making sense. That is what I am trying to do with Duesy’s.

I have no crystal ball for 2027. Neither does Washington. Neither does Austin. Neither does Wall Street. Despite what that guy on Facebook with the American flag profile picture says, he doesn’t either. We could get lower inflation, higher inflation, lower rates, higher rates, new tariffs, different tariffs, tax changes, insurance changes, another stupidly hot summer, a wet summer, a dry summer, a fantastic tourism year or a weird tourism year. Who the hell knows...

That is kind of the point. You cannot run a small business waiting for somebody else to make the world predictable. It isn’t. So we adjust. We cut what doesn’t work. We keep what does. We try new things. We stop doing dumb shit just because we’ve always done dumb shit. We take care of good employees. We give customers a reason to spend their money with us. When we have a good Saturday, we enjoy the hell out of it because Tuesday is coming.

2026 has not been easy, but hard years have a funny way of stripping the bullshit out of a business. You find out what matters, what doesn’t, what people actually want and just how badly you want to keep the lights on.

I do.

So we’ll keep adjusting, keep watching the numbers and keep figuring it the hell out. Yeah, “support small business” looks great on a bumper sticker. Keeping one open is a whole different motherfucker.