So I had this thought the other day.
Food establishments have some fixed costs and some variable costs, I’m sure lots of businesses fall into this category. But food providers like restaurants are in an interesting position, they provide food.
I know little about the restaurant business so maybe my numbers are way off, but I figure you have to for pay rent, and electricity, and gas, and staff. And for food, as in ingredients.
But once you have an employee working x number of hours, they’re getting paid whether they make food or not.
Once you turn on the lights, they stay lit whether there’s 5 people in the room or 20.
Once you pay rent, you have the place for the entire month.
Food ingredients are definitely a variable cost, but I’m wondering what percentage of the cost of doing business make up the variable bits?
My point is this: if you run a restaurant and patrons come in and pay for a meal and some drinks and they tip the wait staff, they are providing your income. They do that based on them coming in. Not how long it takes them to eat, or how much of the fixed costs of the restaurant (like the lights and the heat) they also consume.
So how about this. What if every idle moment by restaurant employees instead of spent waiting for the next thing to do, meal to cook, patron to wait on… what if you had a queue of idle-time work to do, like… making more food.
And what if at the end of the day you had all of this food, that nobody ordered, but cost you little more (extra) than the ingredients and you gave it away.
I figure you wouldn’t want to give it away to the locals, because then why would they bother coming in to your restaurant for a meal? So you’d have to bring it far enough away to a place where nobody is likely to otherwise have come to your restaurant without a reason.
And this is that reason, it’s like advertising.
But instead of flyers and magazine ads, it’s food. People from not-that-close (as in, not in your town, but maybe the next town or two over) would actually get to try your food for free, and if they like it, maybe next week they’ll travel to your restaurant and be a paying customer.
This isn’t perfect, there are lots of variable costs, and maybe they end up costing a lot more than the ROI on a flyer or magazine ad.
But, it’s an interesting idea.
I mean it’s basically what they do at farmer’s markets, why not restaurants.
