I've got to quit reading PMQ!

Pizza Shop Talk The Think Tank
1

Okay, Wednesday night I was looking at all my specials that I run and wondering what it is that I could do to bring in a lot of money quickly for the restaurant.

I couldn’t think of anything more so I thought I would get on Think Tank and look at what’s going on and what I could learn.

I read in an older thread something about a $3.99 large pepperoni special that made a $20,000 wk for a pizza store . . . .

Guess what I did??? Flying off the cuff like I usually do, I printed up about 600 door hangers (not much I know) from my computer advertising a $4.99 large pepperoni Pizza for my Friday the 13th Madness special which lasts through the 18th. I had my manager put it up on the signs Thursday. I called in my troops and had them out door hanging on Thursday. Thursday night my store was getting calls asking if it was really true that we were selling pepperoni pizzas for $4.99 or was someone messing with them. My manager assured them that we were having this special.

Bill made the food order and we made dough. Guess what Bill forgot to do??? Order 14" boxes . . .

My question to my fellow pizza owners - do you think we’re crazy for running this special and WHERE CAN I GET PIZZA BOXES??? My vendors can’t get them for us now.

2

Ask if you can drive to their warehouse and pick them up. You are gonna need them. Call again and beg for them to get you at least a case or two.

If that doesn’t work look up paper suppliers in your area. I know you are about 1 or 2 from st. louis, you can find a couple of places there. Trust me Gob you will need them. When is your next order? How many do you have?

Just my opinion…when you think you have done enough roll ups…do more. Have someone literally just do roll up and keep em stocked. Don’t forget extra sauce and cheese will be needed.

We did this one day a week and got blasted. Our other location is still running the special and they sell around 130 every thurs. When we did it our highest was 180 in one day.
Be ready. It will be worth the trip to go get those boxes.

Good for you. Even though you did 600 flyers once word gets around you are going to get killed. Trust me!

3

Hey just thought of something else… Are you by a Sams? They carry 16" pizza boxes, at least you would have something to put it in. You can tell your customers you sold out of 14.

4

Way back in they day before I worked where I do we used to get these big, awesome, goofy boxes from GFS (goofy because of the awful artwork, so awful that I loved it), I think they still have them too, if you run into a sticky situation.

5

Yeah you can get pizza boxes at GFS Marketplace… or do a will call at any distributor. Most should have plain boxes.

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Believe it or not, our Farm Boy vendor called us just after my post and told us of a local wholesale place about 35 minutes from us who had pizza boxes. Not only do they have the pizza boxes we use, they are 5 cents cheaper per box and they had a truck coming to Benton and would deliver them within the hour!!!

You guys didn’t answer my other question about ARE WE CRAZY??? Thanks for the quit answers and I didn’t know that Sam’s club had pizza boxes that’s good to know!

7

no,not crazy
i plan on running the same special when my new ovens arrive,

8

I think sales like that are the best! I ran a big ad in the paper, did $4.99 lg pepperoni pizzas for the families and 2/$6.00 heavy topped personal pan pizzas for the seniors, I had myself a blast that week. Keeps me busy!

9

What is interesting Gobpile, you CAN make money selling pizzas that way if your portions and costs are in line.

I hope your sales go through the roof and the momentum continues.

I also hope you STILL consider the buffet pricing.

Maybe if this makes nice sales, you run a 4.99 weekday special, 4.99 large one cheese pizza OR 4.99 buffet.

Just think of how much money you would make that way!

:wink:

10

I think the promotion is will be considered a success, but you could have done a lot more with it if you had given it more thought and planning.

Putting together a promotion on Wed night for a Friday roll out doesn’t give you much time to get the word out. Something like this (a deep discount) is going to reward your normal customers which is going to cut your cash flow. However, the hopes are that you reach several new customers who become regular customers.

You did at least limit it to 5 days, and have a reason for the promotion. Both are very important. Go to the sign shop and have some signs made up to have the employees “shake” about the promo. No sense in starting something and not finishing it!

11

you must b in a great market, because EVERYONE around me runs that $4.99 large pepperoni pizza EVERYDAY! Some are even down to $3.99 and I heard of a new place doing them for $2.99 for the first month they were open. Mostly crap pizza, but as someone in my college class said the other day,

“Americans would buy shampoo from Bin Laden Mart instead of WalMart if they could save 10 cents a bottle.”

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Let Us know how the promotion goes! It should be a success!

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Pizza Hut is running 1 topping mediums for $5.00 and Dominoes is running medium any toppings for $7.00 - if that answers your question about the market.

We have an employee out on the square downtown shakin a sign. He’ll be doing that for the weekend - plus more door hanging.

I hope this works - looking at our lunch sales today - it’s not great.

14

We do a $3.99 buffet on Monday nights and the first week it went pretty good, but since then it’s been a typical Monday sales. Not worth opening for on Monday.

15

LOL, Gobs… I hope you understand what you’re about to get yourself into. It might be too late since today’s Friday but PLEASEEEEE make sure you’ve got boxtoppers on every box. It makes no sense to create new customers without giving them marketing material to entice them into coming back.

-J_r0kk

P.S. That was $20,361 by the way.

16

I wouldn’t EVER run that kind of special, I would practically be giving pizzas away. the lowest I would go is 7.99 and that is iffy.

17

Gob,

Yeah I remember you saying the Monday night deal…I am talking about PERMENANT pricing, not the slowest day of the week and not one friday night. Run somthing that people can know any time they want to order that on Sunday night to Thursday night you can either get a 4.99 large cheese pizza or a 4.99 buffet, their choice.

I think what I am steering you towards is a marketing theme, somthing you can base your future marketing on…that you can make box toppers for, do regular door hanging for, run radio ads, send out post cards, magnets…whatever.

To that person who said a min of 7.99 a pizza, well if you load it up and arent smart with costs that is true, but there are plenty of places selling at 4.99 or less AND making money doing so.

I wish I lived in Illinois, not that I would be a cash partner but I would pound the point into you guys all the time that you need to price the buffet right, stock it right (both appealing to the customer and cost appealing to YOU) and go forward with a consistent marketing theme, rather than jumping here and there from time to time.

:wink:

18

I am excited about your sale and hope it goes well. As a couple of people said already, I also believe that a planned and strategic marketing system will ultimately do the best for generating customers for you . . . and this can be the start of it!

I personally would run the low price specials on nights that DO NOT begin with “friday”. I am bum rushed most Fridays already, and I would want to provide good service for customers coming in for the special. I am only referring to my market: I will run this sort of thing as a ‘weekday’ special and not on weekends. we need to bolster weekday sales most.

We are also planning some neighborhood nights to cluster deliveries to one area on a given special night. Doorhangers and flyers to the subdivisions, and off we go.

Big props for going courageous on the sales . . . be ready and let us know if you get any surprises. Sorry to hear about the boxes (see planned and systematic above :slight_smile: )

19

I guess it all depends on your strategy…I prefer to sell a quality pizza at a quality price instead of cheap pizza at a cheap price…I think we all agree that $$ can be made both ways, but I have found that the cheapos also tend to be the biggest pains also and have no loyalty whatsoever…whatever you do I suggest you do not try to sell a quality pizza at a cheap price b/c that is when you are sure to fail

20

As you all know, when I first posted on PMQ we were in terribel financial trouble. We changed a lot of things and we know so much more now. Had we known when we opened what we know now, we would probably being doing pretty well.

I have been making desperate attempts to bring sales up, get ourselves known and bring in new customers.

You can’t market a good product if you don’t have the money to market. I needed that $60,000.00 to get bills caught up, bills paid off, cut my overhead and have working capital so that my sales could build up and I could start my diret mail again and do some good marketing.

The newspaper did not work - we still owe them $3900.00 for all the advertising, the radio didn’t work - we had months of radio advertising, we even had t.v. commercials - the ONLY thing that worked for us was door hanging and direct mail.

My desperate attempt at the $4.99 sale was to generate enough reveune to be able to meet my payroll this week . . . that’s how bad of shape we are in.

Bill gave up a long time ago and we will probably close our doors Sunday night - we are flat broke.

I know the ONLY reason we failed was due to poor management from the beginning and relying on someone else who said they knew how to run a pizza place call all the shots. Hind sight is 20/20 and although we know what we need to do and how to do it now - time has run out for us.

I want to thank all ofyou on PMQ for all the ideas and help, it got us through to this point.

I think it’s safe to say that Gob-Pile Pizza is for sale. There is a person out there that can bring it back to life and make it work - we just learned everything we needed to know months too late.

There was someone in PMQ land that stated that getting the loan that we needed probably wouldn’t help, but how wrong they were. It would’ve brought back hope to Bill, me and our employees, we would’ve been able to really market our product, we would have been able to re-invent ourselves to get out of the reputation of Papa’s Pizza to Go, and it would’ve cut our expenses going out by 1/2 of what we are paying now.

The Great American Dream . . .