First, I’m an idiot. I obviously meant to post this in the POS Roundtable forum. Posting here was, apparently, a habit.
Second, thanks for the help. We’re having all sorts of issues as we get delivery going. But it gets better every night. How many deliveries is “a lot”. Last night, we had to work in 12 deliveries with one driver and a back up driver and it seemed like a stretch. What do most of you sit-down/delco’s do in delivery on a busy night?
Third,Indie, I’d love to have you in. Ask for me when you do come in as I could probably learn a ton from you. You’ve been at this longer than I for sure.
Next up is Groupon. First, this has been a success for us. Over 60% of the customers are first timers and that makes it well worth it for me. My business experience with Groupon has been less than stellar, but they are a growing company so I have some sympathy. The first time we were on Groupon, we were supposed to be the “feature”. We attended a webinar hosted by Groupon which told us to order 250% of our normal inventory and to double our staff. We were told to to dedicate a person to answering the phone on the day the Groupon came out. Imagine my dismay, when I woke up and discovered we were the third deal in a sidebar for my market. I called to complain and was eventually told that my deal was only sent to men (about 75,000 of the 250,000 KC Groupon users). I complained and they agreed to run it again (a fair resolution). However, on the most recent run, Groupon’s site went down from 5:00 on (it was somewhat up but our feature was moved to the third deal again).
Now the real bad… Groupon is moving to personalized deal. In their mind, they want to target the people most likely to buy your Groupon (based on zip code, gender, previous purchases, etc.). While this inures to their benefit, it probably does not inure to mine. The closer you get to my demographic, the more likely you are to just sell the Groupon to my existing customer (a total waste of money, of course). So, unless I am the exclusive deal to the entire subscription base, I would not do Groupon again. There are 2 local sites similar to Groupon. We used one and had very good success.
Again, I do want to stress that the quality of the Groupon customers has been great. Our check average is higher than usual and they tip well for the most part. I think I’ve generated many new repeat customers already and probably will have many more in the coming weeks. It has not been a net-positive experience.
