I opened a new shop last week. Never thought I would get back into owning my own place, but the opportunity was too good to pass up, and I got it up and running with cash. There are a few pictures up on my facebook page.
I thought a lot about menu and pricing, and actually for as much as we disagree about discounting, Boatnut had me really thinking about pricing. This is the 21st pizza shop I built out in Japan, and I have the sales data for each of them. I increased prices across the board by about 40%.
The results were kind of surprising. My sales are higher (and the contribution margin is much higher) and I am selling about half as many pizzas as I did in the other openings. Of course, we are still in the first week of business, and what happens now remains to be seen, but sales are about 170% of what I projected based on other openings, so things seem to be moving in the right direction.
So far, the only marketing I did was to get a thousand coupons for free beer printed out, and hand delivered them to the neighboring businesses. My liquor distributor showed up last week with six kegs, so that cost me nothing. The next few months are going to get interesting.