I agree with the marketing around a college town or similar is its own monster…and that if you are going against the big 3 directly that you have to fight this one head on. All that said… sorry, but from strictly a business standpoint some of the ideas I hear can be just outright crazy at times. You establish a business with a price structure that offers you a return of $xx per dollar brought in. Why should the person requesting a product be delivered get a better deal than the one picking up? You all talk about how it is unfair to the pickup customer to pay a higher overall food cost that is there to offset the delivery ones…but all you are doing is now giving the delivery customer a discount that the pickup does not get…and also takes the profit out of the bottom line of the business. The idea is too make a decent profit all the while not having to do so by putting out 1000 pies an hour at $1 profit per! Work smarter not harder! The sooner the pizza industry adjusts the idea of cheap and free being associated with itself the better off we all will be. I know this will go against almost all of the business plans currently out there is the pizza world but it is time to make pizza a real meal option once again and not a groupon without the coupon! Offer a great product and put a fair price on it. Make a decent profit off that sale. The same price to those that pickup, eat-in, or have it delivered. Then charge for the service of having it delivered. In reality there are 3 prices for foodservice these days. The baseline is pickup. A $20 meal is $20. No additional fees. The second is dine-in. That same $20 now turns into $24 with tip…but the establishment is out a little more with additional overhead for the inhouse service. The third is delivery. Same food cost as pickup but now with additional overhead of driver, insurance, etc. Not wanting to get into the driver wage debate…not where I am going with this… but what is fair to charge for this same $20 meal? The driver is due something as they work off of tips but the house also should be compensated for offering this service. The base price of the food should cover the hourly pay of either a server or a driver so that is covered for the most part. Personally, and again not going into the wage war, but a 10% tip for a delivery should be acceptable, more if it was an out of the norm but otherwise should do. So we are now at $22 for this meal plus the actual cost of delivery. Again, just my thoughts on things… but it seems that on average delivery costs around $3-4 per run. Half being in house expenses and the other being driver costs of gas and vehicle out of pocket expenses. I know that when we base this off a $20 ticket that we are at $25-26 for this same $20 meal but we are getting a service provided at a fair price. As the ticket price goes up the delivery cost is a constant and only the tip should rise at this point. So how to cover something that is so straight forward when explained but has since been warped out of reality by “free” and cheap"??? I know most would not but I would charge it like I stated it here. Pay my drivers a base wage on par with the servers. Charge a delivery fee of $xx per order with a minimum order charge. Then split the delivery charge with the drivers to cover the actual costs they incur but also cover my expenses as the business. This is fair and not out of line to all parties involved. Yes the cheapest of customers will not like or probably pay this route…but then they are not your desired customer base anyways… Other food based businesses that deliver…ie: delis, etc… in larger and more competitive markets all charge or use separate delivery services and the orders keep coming in. Why should this be different in a smaller market or one dealing in pizza? The industry needs to retrain the general public to understand that this costs the business money and that it is only fair to be charged for it. :idea:
