Campus Dining Today 2024 Winter - 15

Throughout this series, we have covered site preparations: placing shelves
and organizing and stocking products on those shelves. The site is ready
to go. You open your doors, and your customers are coming into your
site and buying the products you have for sale! Time to celebrate? Well,
almost.
Know your numbers
From one of my early manager meetings, I learned the simple, yet farreaching
rule for all managers: " know your numbers. " This means every
number-your sales, labor costs, sales by department or category, and it
could include all the overhead needed to keep your business running.
For our purposes, we will focus on product movement, sales, and
profitability. Let's start with the beverage category. (You can't have
enough of these, right?) Many beverages come in numerous different
flavors, and, of course, you're asked to have them all. There's a reason
for this-the more flavors, the more spaces in coolers they occupy, and
therefore the more space allocated to a specific company. Every brand
usually starts out with an " original " flavor, and then come the new flavors,
or " line-item extensions. "
" Oh, it's just a line-item extension, " is what you will hear. Meanwhile,
you're trying to figure out where to put it.
Movement reports
" Movement reports " track the movement of items in and out of a store
system, showing what was involved in a transaction, the type of
movement, the item's location, and the quantity of items moving. You can
run movement reports daily, weekly, monthly, or any frequency you like.
Most point of sale (POS) systems offer a myriad of reports, but the first
and most important, in my opinion, is pure movement.
Let's keep digging into beverages, starting with energy drinks.
A little category management
Say you have five to 10 brands of energy drinks (maybe more), and two
to eight varieties of each. That's up to 88 total facings. When you run a
report, you find that, out of eight varieties, only three to four are selling
well. That observation is the first step in category management. You may
not need to offer all eight; you could choose to sell just the top four. One
could argue that some customers will take their business elsewhere, but
it's been my experience that college students are willing to select their
second favorite choice.
This can be a key step in minimizing unneeded products from your
offerings. Fewer varieties means fewer products in your cooler, and if
you're having trouble keeping up with sales on some items, this could
allow you to " double face " them-create two rows, or more if needed.
If you're constantly filling the varieties that sell out, and others are just
sitting there, that's your cue to make some changes. That's lost revenue,
which leads us to our next topic: profitability.
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Campus Dining Today 2024 Winter

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