Wednesday, July 12, 2017
Today's Specials:
MARKETING: 3 Ways Sports Bars Can Cash-In All-Season Long with Fantasy Football
Fantasy football is the perfect marketing opportunity for sports bars, but cashing in isn't always easy. Here are three ideas sports bars can use to keep fantasy football players coming back all season long.
DID YOU KNOWS…
Battle of the Views
Psy’s Gangnam Style music video has long been the most-watched video on YouTube with 2,147,483,647 views but has now been dethroned. Wiz Khalifa’s video See You Again just surpassed the wacky video with 2,894,373,709 views. If listened to consecutively, the user would have needed to start during the last Ice Age.
NFL Loses Their Viagra
Big name advertisers Viagra and Cialis are pulling out of the NFL for the next season. Both pharmaceuticals are leaving the league’s sales a bit limp, shorting the network roughly $50 million. Erectile dysfunctions ads have been airing on NFL games since 2004.
Google Menus
Google is now adding more tab options to the local panel, seen using a Google search. Just recently, the top search engine has added a Menu tab which will feature a restaurant’s menu items drawn from their individual website. Soon, users will see your menu via a Google search.
WHO ARE THE BEST TIPPERS?
Why it matters to you: which guests will tip the best when dining?
There has been debate over who the best tippers are in restaurants. We would like to think that people in the service industry tip fairly well based on their understanding of being on the other side of the check. According to a recent study in affiliation with CreditCards.com and Princeton University, the best tippers had a few common traits. Some of the patterns found among the best tippers were that they were mainly men, from the northeast, Baby Boomers, Republicans, or those using a payment card. Those groups generally were seen to leave a median tip of 20% of the total bill at U.S. restaurants whereas women left a 16% tip and Democrats and Southerners tied at 15%.
The survey was conducted in June and interviewed 1,002 adults on their experience tipping. About 2% of those surveyed said they never left a tip in a sit-down restaurant and 7% said they tip “only sometimes.” Roughly nine in every 10 of those who paid with credit cards said they always left a tip for the wait staff, but that dropped 76% for those who paid cash. There are a variety of factors that lead to how individuals tip while dining including age, income level, and location. Overall, this information does prove useful for looking at trends in recent months, however, it does not epitomize every guest dining in your restaurant.
IS THERE REALLY A ‘MINIMUM’ WAGE?
Why it matters to you: The impact of the minimum wage is a complicated conversation.
There is no shortage of stories about rising (and falling) minimum wages these days. This issue is as important as it is confusing to most operators and any clarity should be welcome. Unfortunately, some recent economic news only adds to the uncertainty surrounding the minimum wage. This past month our economy created 222k jobs, and the good news is that a disproportionate number of those jobs were in food service (close to 30k or about 14%). The most obvious conclusion drawn from increased hiring in our industry is that things aren’t that dismal. What industry continues to add jobs that isn’t growing?
However, there is a downside to increased hiring in the industry. The increased competition for quality staff causes rising wages, irrespective of the minimum wage, as competition grows for quality candidates. As we have observed before, very few employees that work in full-service dining make the minimum wage, unless they are eligible for tip credit income. Consequently, our wage levels should be viewed through the lens of getting the best staff we can muster and balancing our wages with that goal.
If you are looking for a great host and the minimum wage is $7.25 in your state; what will be the quality of that candidate? If you answer, not acceptable, then you are already paying more by choice than the mandated minimum. Consequently, you need to think in terms of what the price point for the quality person you are seeking. That becomes your minimum wage no matter what the state mandates.
