Just as they shrunk their pizzas down to 14" over the years, Pizza Hut and Dominos in my town are no longer selling orders of 10 wings. 8 is their standard order now. I have to imagine they will pi$$ off quite a few customers who are expecting 10 wings with the pizza an wing special they have been ordering for years.
I just want to know if they are “CHICKEN” wings? All of these places advertise their “WINGS” but I rarely see the word chicken in that ad! Makes you wonder. Remember the whole McDonalds chicken nugget fiasco a few years back. Can they call it a chicken nugget if chicken is not the main ingredient? Hmm? :shock:
Just like all the food manufacturers slightly reducing their can sizes, pack sizes but raising the prices ever so slightly as well.
No one will say anything, or not too much in the beginning, then they will just continue ordering and Doms and Pizza Hut increase their profits. BUT … different story if an indie does the same thing. We are abused and called rip off merchants.
Try reducing your pizza size and charging the same like they do. In Australia Doms and Pizza Hut’s large went down to 11", and now it is about 10 1/2" but people still flock to them, or Doms at least. PH is not the entity it used to be here.
Dave
I have to believe that we all may do that in the near future
if we don’t want to scare customers with the price. If we
could, it would be better to sell them by the pound, as that
is how we buy them. However that would never fly. The wings
that I use were so big this week, that they cost me 5.39 per
order. That is just the chicken wings. Wow! How long can I sell
them for 7.99? In order to make money, I will have to raise the
price or lower my count to 8. How much wil ppl pay? Wings
are crazy. I really wish I could get away from having them on
the menu. No way that’s gonna happen.
We also use huge wings… We raised our price on a dozen, went to five sauce choices and started advertising them and talking about them being huge. Even with our price increase, sales are up.
Since wings take no prep what-so-ever and are an add-on sale I am happy with 40% food cost on them (includes container, sauces and dips)
I know we all have seen and purchased the smaller sizes of everything that companies have put into the market… Ice cream that went from half-gallons to about 80% their size… my kids granola bars… used too have 12 in a box…now 8! Same size box. I didn’t realize for a couple months why she was eating them so fast. The thing that got me the most…which touches on all of your comments about the size of the wings…was eating out at Chilis last week. Had ribs. Full slab. 18 bones. If I had to guess… there was less than 8 oz of actual meat on them. I know ribs vary a bit…but come on. I asked the server and she said they were getting a lot of complaints the last month or so. The manager… a guy that I knew from years ago… I had a friend that worked for him at Lonestar back in her college days… he recognized me when I started to talk about it and he said they have a new supplier for their ribs. Funny thing is he told me to only order the dry-rub in the future and ask for sauce on the side. He went and grabbed a rack of both to show me…it was amazing. The dry-rub had 3-4 times the meat on them. He said they were all like that. It’s all cost savings I know… but I am still concerned that people complain about paying $20 for a pizza but we should pay the same for half a pound of rib meat? Oh…it must be the frys or baked apples that really jack up the price! :shock:
.
.
Why not? $7.99 for two pounds of Wings! (Or something). People would adjust to the change, and would even be happy that they know exactly how much (if not how many) Wings they would always get.
and then we would be right back where w ev started… 2 pounds
of these wings is 7 or 8 wings.
It should be noted that I, like the chains, am using
a precooked wing which is substantially more expensive.
I do not have fryers in my store.
YIKES!! Those are turkeys you are using that have 8oz wings . . . . cooked weight!
The biggest we get here raw are 6-9ct and we feel your pain when we average 6.5 pcs to the pound rather than 8.5 pcs. There are a growing number of places in metro-Atlanta that sell wings by the pound, but I do not know how many pizza shops are doing it. The hook is telling people how many wings are in your pound versus what the “other guy” is selling with his tiny wings.
In Canada Boston Pizza sells a line of “plump , one of a kind” wings made just for them…The couple orders I have had so far really impressed me…They were very consistent in size…I would think they they buy in huge quantities Canada wide so they probably get the 1st pick…
so what can we learn here? If they cut down their # of wings, for the same price, and people still go to them…
does the customer realize it?
does the customer care?
do they figure it’s just the economy?
do they assume they can’t do anything about it?
are they so pre-programmed with constant marketing messages that they don’t stop to think, they just continue do what they’ve always done, gone to dominos and pizza hut, even though the wing count has been reduced?
if this is their mindset, can you change your pricing and they will accept it as the “new economy”?
more importantly, how can you compete against this?
are you communicating one of your advantages in your marketing, i.e. our wings are bigger, healthier, tastier, more meat for your money, our service is more personal, etc?
are you using loyalty programs to reward frequent buyers with discounts?
does any of that work for you in your market?
if you have a dominos or a pizza hut in your area, you can be sure that they think your area has the potential, so why can’t you take that potential from them with your better quality, etc?
True words spoken.
Everyone is always thinking we have to bigger than the chains - bigger pizzas, more toppings, bigger/more wings.
As said do people know or care?
Here in Australia Doms and PH dropped their large size pizza down to 12’, then 11’ now they are about 10 1/2’ but people still flock there. When they do ribs as a special they do 4’s and 8’s at a price that would work mine out at around $14 instead of the $11 we currently charge. They only do ribs for a month or so once a year so it is not a big deal, but the point is people still buy their undersized pizzas, ribs, pastas and everything else they do and do’t care about the price.
On our new menu we have substantially raised the price of ribs - mainly due higher wholesale cost, but also increasing profit margin - as we are the only one in our area selling them all year round. We sell the “sizzle” to get the most out of them and this is the way Iwantpizza has highlighted as part of the marketing strategy. We get people ask how many ribs are in a pack and our reply is it varies due to weight but they average from 7 - 9 pieces depending on size.
If I were selling wings I would go by weight as this is how you buy them in and if you get ever changing sizes then you lose money when they are bigger than normal.
Just my 1.9 cents worth (the aussie $ is now worth more than the U$)
Dave
Geez Dave…can you break a penny down for me. I need to tip the delivery driver! 
just to add my 2 cents worth…
Over here in Ireland the economy is pretty much shot, all the marketing research is telling us that there’s two factors that are guiding buyers, Branding and price point… D`s have a great marketing machine so no point trying to compete on Branding so the only thing we can do is compete on price , …
Ouch. If you have to compete on price, is it a race to see who can go out of business first?
You’ll have no profit left over to advertise at all when things get even slower.
Or when gasoline prices go even higher and cause delivery prices to increase on your product.
What is Branding? Why does Dominos do it so well? Why can’t you?
I refuse to believe pizzeria owners would give up this easily :x
Going down the price track is like following the path into the bushfire.
Set your prices where you make money and put out the best qualty product you can. It doen’t mean you have to spend huge dollers on extreme quality ingredients but how you make your product, how you present it, and, more importantly ho wyou market yourself.
Market to a profitable price point, i.e. emphasise your pizza size as bigger, ingredients fresher and pizzas or whatever tastier.
Often you can take a sizeable dip involumes but end up making more money.
Read articles on profitable marketing and sales growths without volumes and see how many very successfull businesses made it against price choppers.
Get the “price mentality” out of your thinking and forget how cheap your competitors are. Be your own price person and set a new focus called PROFIT.
Dave
you can also consider marketing by painting your pizza in a better light, not neccessarily accusing your competitors outright by their name, but highlighting the favorable aspects of your pizza, versus their pizza, and you can associate your pizza with a benefit they want to have. i.e your pizza uses real fresh cheese, dough without additives, so they won’t get fat from your pizza, etc, something the customer can understand, it makes sense to them, and associates your pizza as an advantage, and your competitors pizza as an evil thing that will cause them “pain” if they buy it.
Study the story & marketing behind Sam Adams beer. They market on the catch phrase “better beer”, implying their beers taste better, it’s not cheaper, it’s better, and now the mass market buys it because it portrays them (the beer shopper) as a person with good taste and able to afford a great tasting beer. That is where you want to be with your pizza.
I go with a very people oriented way of raising prices. I have a rule to raise my prices after every 2 years. But not reduce the quantity. I give them brochures and some discount coupons in case they order as per the schemes, right 2 months before I am going to raise the prices. This way when I even do raise my price, my sales are still stable.