My business partner and I were just debating this same thing in relation to orders we take through and local online-ordering student website. We spend about $1 in advertising for every $9 in sales and is that worth doing?
The debate we are having centers around whether the labor to do this business is “free” or not. Management costs are the same. What we can’t decide is if that extra %5 boost to sales makes a difference in the way we schedule kitchen, prep and drivers or not since these are steady sales and they are reflected in our average-hourly reports off of which we schedule. Are those extra orders we get every day enough to shift the numbers above the “schedule another worker” thresholds or not - that is the question we are trying to answer.
Anyways, what Seth is writing about makes me rethink getting involved with Twitter finally. If you are slow and “below capacity,” you could send out a tweet with an aggressive deal and take advantage of your margin. Maybe a POS system could be programmed to do this automatically: “beep, boop, beep… labor is too high… initiating aggressive social-media posts.”
