At Greve de Lecq, Jersey
Over-delivery
As I said the other day, restaurants so often show the best and worst examples of how to do business, all in an hour or so.
On our recent trip away, my wife and I visited another bar-restaurant for lunch, looking for a snack to leave plenty of room for dinner later. My wife ordered squid and I ordered a steak sandwich. A steak sandwich is rather more than a snack you might think, but it was priced at £6.95 which is about US $11 at the time of writing. At that price I thought it would be only a small snack-sized sandwich, but when my dish arrived it consited of an absolutely enormous steak with fries, an excellent dressed salad and Dijon mustard, plus a long bread roll. The squid dish was of very generous proportion too.
The meal was delicious, but it was a really big meal. On those grounds I would absolutely recommend the restaurant, so please ask if you are going to Jersey. (Channel Islands, not USA).
Don’t be too cheap
So what is the problem? Well, none for me except I had no room left for dinner, but for a meal of that quality and size I would have paid twice as much, especially to eat it in that setting. The problem is that the restaurant owners are not valuing themselves and their business highly enough. At the price they sell their food, their margins surely cannot be great, yet they could make far greater profit selling quality food in good surroundings and still have very happy customers.
The race to the bottom and staying on top
In terms of competition so many businesses compete in the race to the bottom on price, when often if they checked properly, they are not comparing like with like. If you have a great product or service you really should sell it on its true value to the customer. You can make yourself more money which you deserve for your hard work, and if you feel really guilty about making a good profit (and no one should) you can reward your employees better too, so everyone will be happy.
Have you sold yourself short in the past?
