Business question. You run a local fast food chain restaurant, which of these customers is the most valuable to you?
- Crusty old man: He comes in every morning, buys a coffee and a cheap breakfast sandwich, $3.50 total, 7 days a week, and then talks to a couple of friends for 2 or 3 hours, and then leaves.
-Working woman: She comes to your drive-thru 4 days a week on average, every week, and buys a $3 coffee drink, and a $4 breakfast sandwich.
-Family of four: They bring the kids once every two weeks, the parents each get an $8 combo, and each of the two kids gets a $5 kids meal.
-Traveling baseball team with adults chaperones: Twelve of them pull off the freeway, and everyone gets an $8 combo. They live in another state, and never come back.
The restaurant's employees should be professional to everyone, unless people are complete idiots. I've worked three years in restaurants, and dealt with the public in other jobs. There are a bunch of idiots out there, the customer IS NOT always right, and shit happens. But being rude, screaming at, and actually fighting customers ALWAYS costs the company money. Sometimes a huge amount, in lost business. That's my point. I get treated like shit all the time, at restaurants I spend a lot of money at. Yes, I'm currently homeless, and I sit and "work" for a couple hours usually. I'm polite, I don't steal, I pay for my stuff, I throw my trash away when I leave. Hell I even put out a fire at a McDonald's the other day. It was a tiny bush fire from a careless cigarette, no big deal, but I'll be helpful now and then if needed. I get along with the employees for the most part. I'm pretty much the crusty old man. Yet, I get attitude from managers ll the time. Of the four examples above, that's the one most like to get an employee acting rude to them.
So what does the restaurant lose if they piss off these customers, and they go somewhere else?
The Working Woman wins, she brings $1,456 annually to the restaurant. You give her a hard time the one time she brings a cold sandwich back in and asks for a new one, this business is out nearly $1500. Ouch.
The Crusty Old Man comes in as the second most valuable customer, with $1,277.50 in annual business. He doesn't buy much at one time, he sits there a lot, but he brings a good chunk of continual, and dependable, cash to the business, just like the Working Woman.
The Family of Four is the most likely to be seen by managers as the "prime customer," managers tend to think these groups are their "bread and butter." They're important customers, but they bring in $676 annually, less that half of the money the Working Woman or the Crusty Old Man spend.
The Traveling Kids' Baseball Team is a boon to the restaurant's daily numbers, but their one time spend of $96 pales in comparison to the regular customers, and that's my point. I haven't seen a fast food manager in a long time who understands this basic concept. If you had to piss off one of these customer/groups, it's actually the best to have the big spending Baseball Team upset, they're never coming back anyway.
My point... take care of your regular customers, the best you can. Teach your managers to do this. You'll make more money, which is the point of a business.
I got my first taste of running a business a week or two before I turned 18. As a graduating high school senior in Boise, Idaho, way back in 1984, I got a job at the Boise Fun Spot. It was a cheesy little mini-amusement park, inside Julia Davis Park downtown, near the Boise Zoo. We had two kiddie rides, a Merry-go-round, a kiddie roller coaster, a Tilt-a Whirl, a Ferris wheel, a snack bar, and a miniature golf course. My friend Doug, also 18, was the manager. He actually managed the day-to-day operations. The Fun Spot was owned by a man who ran a local construction company. He'd found, that with good initial training, kids that were 18 or 19 could actually do a good job running this small business.
Doug got a higher paying job working construction, and tapped myself and this high school junior, Brian, as co-managers. He'd been training us all summer, and we took over. Tim, the owner would stop by in the mornings, drop off the cash drawer, ask how things were going, and then go run his construction company. He stopped by randomly, and for big repairs, but that was it. We ran the place.
So as I was turning 18, I got a raise to $3.05 an hour. Federal minimum was $3.35, but the Fun Spot, because of some Idaho farm worker law, could pay $2.05 an hour. That's what my employees were making. I made the (ahem) BIG BUCKS. Suddenly I had 13 employees under me, 5 acres of grounds to keep up, rides to run, and a business to make a profit at. Tim looked for young people who wanted a chance to be a boss, and took it seriously, and Brian & me, for the most part, took it seriously. That's the best business experience I could have had at that age.
Now, in my sketchy current situation, I spend a lot of time in fast food restaurants, either doing my artwork or working on the computer. McDonald's, about 12 years ago, made a brilliant corporate decision, to position themselves as a inexpensive alternative to Starbucks. Smart move. They started selling fancy coffee drinks, but $1 to $3 cheaper than Starbucks, they made a more lounge type store, added TV's, added wifi later on, and got rid of the playlands.
I know this, because I was having a breakfast in a McDonald's in Huntington Beach, CA when they were planning one day, explaining the new concept to the manager of that restaurant. But most managers today, don't seem to have been told this, and all fast food places just have a bunch lazy, unprofessional, largely incompetent people, and one or two good employees. The managers, and I'm talking all fast food places, simply aren't taught to be managers in most cases. One out of every 6 or 8 does a good job. They can to the paperwork needed, but not actually RUN a business well, which is their actual job. If you don't run your business well, especially in this transition time when new technology is changing business practices, then you go out of business eventually. We'll see what happens with fast food places. I think many big names will fold a lot of stores in the next decade.
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