Mirus Reporter

The Future, Now?

All restaurant businesses strive to improve and streamline operations and increase profits by cutting expenses and recovering resources. A common reaction to increased wages by some restaurant executives has been to replace human labor with machines. In the ever-changing climate of the restaurant industry, it makes sense that some restaurant companies would implement the use of machines to grow productivity and cut down on labor costs. But are robots equipped to give customers the same level of service as a friendly employee? Are automated machines destined to take over restaurants?

"POS, Meet BOH"

In today’s restaurant space, the business of owning and operating a restaurant is more challenging and competitive than ever before. This means it’s more important than ever to leverage technology to your advantage and no better place to start than using your Point-of-Sale system’s (POS) sales data combined with your Back of House (BOH) to help more tightly control your two biggest controllable expenses – food and labor costs.

Looking more closely, restaurant food & beverage purchases plus labor expenses account for 60 to as much as 68 cents of every dollar in restaurant sales. The combined total is referred to as; “Prime Cost”, and it's at this crossroads where the battle for restaurant profitability takes place. Why, because you have the ability to control these expenses. Unlike your fixed costs (lease, utilities, insurance, etc.), you can directly impact your food cost percentage by more effective purchasing, product handling and menu pricing and your labor with tools to help with allocation, scheduling and overtime reduction/prevention. More on the labor from an earlier series of Blogs.

The official numbers for July are now out and it was a bad month for restaurants sales, down by -4.7% according to TD2NK. I thought it would be good to take a mid-month check on the Mirus Index to see if August could be the month to turn things around. Based on the first 14 days of the month, the sales slump continues in August.

Same Store Sales in Mirus Index were positive in both Q1 and Q2 of 2017, and you can see the trail end of that in the chart above. The positive gains were declining in June, and July 4th was a great weekend, but by the middle of July the month to date numbers were negative and they haven't budged much.

All of this is focused on sales, but what about traffic? Q3 will be the seventh quarter in a row of negative customer traffic into restaurants. TD2NK measures that traffic fell -8.7% from July 2015 to July 2017. The Mirus Index has traffic down -2.7% at the mid-way point of Q3 2017. You can manipulate same store sales, but you can't manipulate customer traffic.

We will keep an eye on things, and keep you informed. If you would like to learn more about how you can get the Mirus Index every day, click on the button below.