📝 If you’ve eaten at Worth Takeaway in downtown Mesa — and if you haven’t, please fix that immediately — you already know that Jim Bob and Kelsey Strothers run one of the finest sandwich shops in the Valley.
The small Main Street shop was pretty much an instant hit when it opened in 2016, built on a foundation of locally sourced bread, community-minded pricing, and sandwiches that kept people coming back.
Home of a chicken sandwich worth traveling across the Valley for, Worth Takeaway has earned its reputation the hard way – one ciabatta roll at a time.
Now the Strothers are doing something rare: explaining themselves.
The couple recently posted a lengthy, 10-page note on Facebook laying out, in unusual detail, why running a small restaurant in 2025 and 2026 has become so brutally difficult.
The statement reads less like a PR move and more like an open letter from people who are exhausted and want their community to understand why.
They tick through a staggering list of rising costs – beef, poultry, produce, to-go supplies, insurance, point-of-sale software, credit card processing fees, utilities – and note that vendors are now tacking fuel surcharges onto every single delivery.
On top of all that, they cite tariffs as a new accelerant, warning that fertilizer prices are the next domino to fall.
“All of these things have a ripple effect,” they write, with the weary confidence of people who have watched that ripple firsthand.
What makes the note remarkable isn’t the content – every restaurant owner in America is living some version of this story right now. It’s the transparency.
Most owners quietly raise prices or shrink portions and hope no one notices. The Strothers have done the opposite: They held prices flat for three years out of loyalty to the community they built Worth to serve, and now they’re explaining exactly why that’s become unsustainable.
They even cop to the frustration of reading negative online reviews about prices, noting that they personally respond to each one.
This kind of radical honesty is vanishingly rare in the restaurant business, where vulnerability can feel like a liability. But it’s very on-brand for Worth Takeaway – a place that was never really about craft sandwiches and clean decor so much as it was about community.
When the Strothers say it hurts their team and their families, you believe them. And when they say the prices are going up, you should probably tip a little extra.
📧 Subscribe to the free MXSW Daily Email here for the latest news about food & drink in the Phoenix metro area.
