As I have posted for years, the holiday week from Dec 26th through Jan 1 is the biggest seven day run of the year for us and has been every single one of the 16 years we have been open. We wound up yesterday with a +30K week (not a record) but with an all-time record night last night. We did nearly 2K over forecast… so we were ready for a big night but not as big as we got. What we did not know was that one of our competitors was closed for the day since they RAN OUT OF FOOD Wednesday and could not get a truck until today (Friday) Wow what a night!
We had 8 in the kitchen and 5 drivers and were running 60 minute deliveries at 10 below zero, but if we had known what was coming we would have had 10 inside and 6 drivers. Luckily the average ticket was nearly $50 so the sheer numbers of deliveries did not kill us! I was called in for the first time in over a year.
Lot of fun! I tipped out the kitchen $30 each for the night.
Love it!
We are looking like we are going to have the biggest week in about 7 years unless tomorrow night is a dud. Had to close a little early New Years Eve because we ran out of dough and we closed on dayshift New Years day to give the young ones a chance to party and us old ones a chance to rest, and we are still on track to have a killer week.
This week has been quite a challenge. With New Years Eve/Day landing on a Wed/Thur it has created a scenario where we have have 4 Fridays in a row. We thought we were ready but ended up posting nearly 50% increases over last year. Every store got killed during rush hours. We went over 60 minute deliveries quite often and also had 45 minute pickups. During the busiest of rushes on NYE we had a driver lock $250 worth of pizzas in his car and then loose the key. All had to be remade and sent out for free. Then on NYD a driver got into fender bender with $150 worth of product in his car. We had to dispatch another driver to fetch his pizzas and give those out free of charge. Both incidents backed up deliveries even more witch resulted in another $300 in freebies and discounts totaling a good $700. What a nightmare. Its slow so far today, so time to put things back together.
A challenging week for sure, it seems no matter what day we close, someone will harshly complain about it.
The crew had lost their edge from the less than busy weeks we have seen leading up to this week, so when we did got clobbered, everyone fell apart for the first 30 minutes until they got back into their grooves.
The worst incident, a cashier who got a call for an add-on for an open delivery order, she started a fresh ticket, I requested that she combine the new ticket with the add-on into the existing open ticket so the driver didn’t need to collect on two receipts and close 2 delivery orders, and so the customer wasn’t charged 2 delivery charges,
I have no idea what she was thinking when she combined 2 completely different tickets, for different deliveries in different counties, into 1 ticket, I only found this out when I have a driver saying "Theres no order in my dispatch screen for this ticket, what do I do? Of course we had a line out the door and a full dining room when this all went down.
I think I’m going to go take up drinking alcohol as a profession real soon.