Problem
You own a high-end seafood restaurant located in a prime spot on Pensacola Beach. At the peak season parking becomes a headache because your customers can rarely find a parking space, and when they do, it's about a mile away from the restaurant.
Then you came up with the bright idea of starting a free valet service during the peak season where customers simply dropped off the car at the front door of the restaurant, received a tag for their car keys and entered the restaurant looking cool, calm and collected...as opposed to looking tired and disgusted after walking a mile in the hot sun prior to the valet service. This gave your restaurant a major competitive advantage, and as a result, monthly revenue increased 15% after starting the valet parking service.
The free valet service began about 6 months before the Covid pandemic hit. Restrictions under Covid guidelines forced many restaurants to close, or only offer very limited service. Once the Covid restrictions subsided, your customers came back in droves - however, you were not able to continue the free valet service because you couldn't find enough staff. You had to pay a higher wage to the valet employees because they could easily get another job offering better pay at other beach establishments.
So now you have the problem of inconsistent valet service because it can only be provided if there's enough staff to manage the service; and on top of that, customers were now being charged $5 for valet service. Soon afterwards, you start to lose customers because many of them chose to go to other restaurants rather than pay the $5 valet fee. The walking distance from the parking lots to other restaurants was about the same as the walking distance to your restaurant.
Briefly describe how you would use marketing research to address this situation.