On KC’s Southwest Blvd., no World Cup crowds, business bad: ‘Where is everybody?’
Caitlin Benedict, the owner of Bisou, a French coffee shop off Southwest Boulevard, said she became so convinced that the 2026 FIFA World Cup would bring a wave of customers to her bistro — 650,000 visitors coming, city promoters repeatedly said — that she hired extra staff, ordered more pastry and increased her inventory.
But one week after the FIFA Fan Festival on July 11 opened just blocks away on the grounds of the National World War I Museum and Memorial, Benedict’s business is so dismal, worse than during any normal period, that she sent out an appeal on Instagram.
Terrible sales
“Our sales are down 50%,” Benedict posted Wednesday. “And speaking with other small business owners, I know we are not alone. While the public messaging suggests downtown is packed and thriving, that is not what many of us are seeing. … The streets are quiet, restaurants are empty, and foot traffic is far below expectations.
“We are not asking for sympathy. We are asking for honesty and support.”
In other words, Benedict was calling on even regular customers who may be staying away, perhaps fearful of a crush of World Cup fans, to return to the business at 2122 Jefferson St. On Thursday, business was buzzing, perhaps partly because Brittany Mahomes, spouse of Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, shared the post on her Instagram page.
But otherwise, Benedict said, business has been awful, “very slow.”
“The first week of June was great,” she said Thursday in front of her business, hung with flags of nations playing in the World Cup. “As soon as FIFA Fan Fest started, it was like a dramatic decline. Kind of Kansas City turned into a ghost town. … The whole point of the post was that not only did we not see travelers come in, we lost our regulars due to the hype of FIFA being in town.”
To be sure, the World Cup experiences for businesses in and around Kansas City have been mixed. Hotels, which worried about occupancy before the tournament, have watched reservations grow. Some business have gotten a bump. Others have not.
This week, social media was rife with videos of fans from Argentina in Kansas City for the match against Algeria in high spirits, chanting and waving flags in places like Jack Stack Barbecue.
New menus, new furniture … few customers
On Southwest Boulevard, only a half-mile north of the Fan Fest, merchants said they are already worried that, for them, the World Cup could end up being a rerun of the 2023 NFL Draft, when, from April 27 to April 29, a massive surge of business was promised, never to materialize. Fans instead spent their time and dollars inside the borders of the NFL Draft Experience, also held on the lawn of the museum.
“Business is definitely not up, not like we were led to believe it would be,” said Kelley Schuberger, manager of La Bodega, a Spanish tapas restaurant at 703 Southwest Blvd.
In fact, she said, business is slightly down. In preparation for the tournament, Schuberger said, the restaurant bought multiple sets of new patio furniture for its outdoor dining. It invested in new menus with a QR code that translated the menu into multiple languages.
“We had some other things planned,” she said. “We were going to do some outside barbecuing of some of your pinchos and stuff. But there’s no reason to do it.”
Because business has been slow.
“I mean we’ve had a few, you know, Argentinians. I mean I’m not going to say we haven’t had any,” she said. “And they’ve been absolutely lovely guests. But it was by no means what they had told us to expect.”
Regarding Benedict’s Instagram post: “I mean, everything she said is spot on,” Schuberger said.
Other business owners said the same, including Cindy Romo, owner since 2018 of Tacos El Gallo, 806 Southwest Blvd.
In preparation for a throng of World Cup fans, Romo set up a separate event space two blocks away from their restaurant and centered on their food truck, which Romo assumed would serve fans walking along the boulevard, perhaps to and from the Fan Festival.
“To accommodate some of the World Cup rush that we would get,” she said. She paid for a city permit for the spot to last six weeks, She rented an outdoor portable bathroom and paid for a liquor permit for the truck.
Romo’s plan was to keep the truck open from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.
So far, virtually no one has showed. She cut its hours from 4 to 9 p.m.
“It’s like, ‘Where is everybody?’ There’s nobody on the street,” Romo said. She bought extra food, extra liquor, but estimates she has sold two beers. If she didn’t have her regular restaurant, she said, “I would be crying.”
“I still have what, four or five weeks left of the World Cup? It’s awful,” Romo said.
‘No one was there’
Early on, she thought the crowd would be so large that she would open her restaurant in the early morning.
“We were going to stay open and do like 8 o’clock to like 1 o’clock to get some of the people maybe that were going to get breakfast burritos or walk to get in line somewhere,” Romo said. “We did it twice. There was nobody here.”
Roma said she remains hopeful that business will pick up. On Thursday, Mexico was scheduled to play South Korea in Mexico at 7 p.m. Kansas City time.
At midday, business was slow. While on a normal weekday, parking spots in front of Tacos El Gallo tend to be full, they have not been since the World Cup began.
“I mean, it’s lunchtime,” Romo said. “I have more locals coming in than I have anybody from out of town. Like, we’re not having any language barriers. It’s a typical Thursday.”
