Posted in Cost Control, Direct Operating Costs, KPIs, Labour Costs, Management, tagged Accounting, Labour, Labour Costs, Minimum Wage, Operations, Pricing, Profitability, Restaurant Management, Value Proposition on June 19, 2017| Leave a Comment »
In my last post, I wrote about a study that predicts increases in the minimum wage will lead to significantly more restaurant closures. Clearly, many restaurants and bars are unable (or failed) to raise their prices in response to increases in the minimum wage, resulting in their ultimate demise. (more…)
Posted in KPIs, Management, tagged Analysis, Atmosphere, Customer service, KPIs, Operations, POS, Profitability, Quality Control, Restaurant Management, Service standards, Value Proposition on June 18, 2017| 1 Comment »
Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of work implementing KPIs for restaurants and bars. For those of you who may not know, KPIs are Key Performance Indicators. Statistics, or metrics, about your business, that you can track to monitor your performance toward key objectives, such as profitability and growth. (more…)
Posted in Cost Control, Coupons, Customer Comps, Marketing & Promotion, tagged Coupons, Discounts, Groupon, marketing, Operations, Profitability, Promotion on June 26, 2012| Leave a Comment »
If I had been the founder of Groupon when Google offered up $6 billion for it, the door wouldn’t have hit me on the back-side as I rushed to the bank to cash the cheque! While I think Groupon is an interesting concept, they are really greedy, and ultimately, it will be their downfall. Let me explain.
Groupon seeks out businesses that are willing to offer deep discounts for their goods and services. Usually, the discounts are around 50%. Groupon takes another 25% or so for publicizing the offer and collecting the funds from the bargain-hunters. That leaves the business with only 25% of what it would normally take in on a sale.
Groupon talks businesses into signing up by claiming that they may lose a bit on the first sale, but they will make it up on subsequent sales. Nonsense. Alternatively, if businesses have excess capacity, they can accommodate lower-paying customers, because they only have to cover the incremental (or marginal) cost of servicing the customer. This works for spas and other similar businesses. There aren’t too many businesses that have a marginal cost less than 25%.
What about restaurants? They are probably the most popular Groupon category, based on demand. Is it worth it for a restaurant to sign up for Groupon?
Posted in Cost Control, Coupons, Customer Comps, Internal Controls, Theft, tagged Internal Controls, Operations, Profitability, Theft on February 14, 2011| 2 Comments »
The first three posts in this series covered fraud and theft of products entering the establishment, food theft, and alcohol theft. Now, we’re going to look at outright theft of sales receipts. While it’s unlikely that your servers are grabbing handfuls of dollars on their way out the door, today’s post looks at several more sophisticated methods of achieving the same result.
Canadian Restaurateur 