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newsletternewsletter 287
Restaurant Startup & Growth Restaurant Startup & Growth
The website is free. Go to: http://www.restaurantowner.com/ The magazine is $39.95 per year (and worth every penny). You can get a free issue at the above website. The weekly Profit Tip of the Week is also FREE, very helpful, and can be emailed to you weekly by providing your email address at the above website. Read articles about how to emulate successful franchisors, how to keep your employees, how to handle a bad restaurant review, restaurant mapping, menu makeovers, building employee morale, and setting up your bar area. Download templates including a training manual, and help in analyzing your weekly cash flow. It’s a great magazine for every restaurant owner. If you know of a similar website or magazine for general retail owners, write to me at: Retail Sales Show Steep Drop The news is not particularly good. Shopper traffic is down by 9.3% (September of this year compared to September of last year). Sales dropped 1.2% in September (compared to last year). Retail sales for October appear to be down 2.7%. The biggest loser is auto sales which is down 4.2%. Both clothing and furniture sales are down by 2.3%. On the positive side, convenience store sales with gas stations are way up mainly due to the price of gas. Given that gas prices have dropped drastically in the past month, retail stores are hopeful that gas savings will flow into other types of retail business. Annualized, and based on the past 3 months, retail sales are down by 8.7%. It’s not all doom and gloom. All of the local retailers and restaurants that I have visited this month have had sales that are equal to or better than their sales last year. Most of these retailers are using Cash Register Express or Restaurant Pro Express. I will admit that it is not necessarily our pcAmerica software that is helping sales. These are retail stores owned by highly positive entrepreneurs who spend a good part of their day figuring out how to better market their retail establishments, motivate more customers to buy by changing the way they do business in these hard times, and by treating each of their customers as royalty. 5% to 10% of all retail stores will close as a result of our recession. Many of the remaining stores will thrive by overcoming the slump and getting the sales missed by those stores that are closing. The Retail Cycle Yes, we are probably in a recession, but it is not as bad as it sounds. Let me give you two examples. The auto industry is really slumping. When people don’t have money (or have less money), they keep their cars an extra year to two. At some point, people will start to buy cars again and the auto industry will flourish. In the past few years, many people have been enticed to buy new cars due to some great incentives and low interest rates. So many people have newer cars that sales naturally had to decrease. Add to that the tightening of money, high gas prices, and the industry has been temporarily paralyzed. In two years or so, people will need to replace their older cars. The clothing industry is in a slump. People are only spending on necessities. Eventually people will need clothes and the cycle will reverse. Do Restaurant Workers Gain Weight? CareerBuilder.com says that retail, leisure and hospitality workers have the lowest percentage of employees who gain weight at their job. 53% of financial service employees and 52% of government workers say they gained weight at their present position. Hospitality workers had the lowest percentage of weight gains in their present roles. Cornell University School of Hotel Administration Reports Many interesting and free reports that you can read on the FREE website including A Consumer’s View of Restaurant Reservation Policies and Exploring Consumer Reactions to Tipping Guidelines; Implications for Service Quality (in short, tipping guidelines reduce tips for the best servers). See summaries and more information about the reports at: http://www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/chr/pubs/reports/2008.html
We Mean Business I urge all newsletter readers, retail store owners and employees, and restaurant owners and employees to watch We Mean Business on A&E beginning every Saturday at 10 AM. It’s fun to watch and helpful. Episode #6. With a glut of upscale salons in the Los Angeles area, the stylists at Jazyhair needed to do something special to stand out from the competition. The salon was known for its dedication to client satisfaction. Yet, it was getting buried under $125K of debt. Although the struggling salon had excellent stylists, the business was being severely limited by its less-than-posh interior. The customer waiting area was uninspiring; the stylist portfolios were unwieldy to review; and even the checkout experience felt incredibly clunky. To attract an exclusive clientele, the salon needed to get brought into this century — and fast. If you missed any episodes, you can watch entire episodes online at: Look under Shows (you will have to click on more to see the entire list). Select We Mean Business. Select Watch Full Episodes Online! See complete summaries and more We Mean Business online videos on the Dell website at: http://www.dellmeansbusiness.com/ The show is sponsored by Dell, and pcAmerica and Dell do have a business relationship. pcAmerica will be featured as the P.O.S. software provider in 2 of the weekly episodes.
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