dude what
even with the beer that seems astounding to me.
This exactly. Or pit stop mid ride at a place you know your sweaty body and muddy bike are tolerated.
Shop was in a larger store (SB) and the owners were kind of shortsighted retail people who didn’t initially think of bike shop labor as something they could make money off of, as far as I could tell. The original policies all seemed to indicate that they’d be willing to give away a certain amount of labor if it meant people were in the store, buying stuff.
Based on the motorbacon update, I guess eventually ownership listened to the bike shop managers and realized that, since they were paying the mechanics to be there anyway, they might as well actually make money on the labor. People are gonna buy stuff anyways, if they are standing around stuff that can be bought, good little consumers that we are.[/quote]
At its core this isn’t necessarily a dumb idea. Retail does this all the time. One immediate example would be traditional organic juice bars in natural foods store. It is essentially impossible to make money with those at a price people will pay.
I’m not sure flat repair is quite the same. Most people coming in for a flat repair are going to come in anyways since the only reason many of those customers are going to that shop is because it’s convenient to where they got the flat. Might as well not lose money.
Also pricing any service or product to lose money is not a winning strategy even for loss leaders or ancillary services you provide to customers.
dude what
even with the beer that seems astounding to me.[/quote]
I paid that in Iceland for one. It was worth it. One of the best tourist things I did.
I’ve had various women in my life who have been willing to cut my hair for free since roughly 2005. I’m not getting $75 quality haircuts but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Juice bars work because they can actually be used to reduce waste. Less than perfect produce has a 2nd shot at being sold rather than thrown away.
But yeah free tube installs are nuts.
I’m not convinced that that strategy moves a juice bar to being reliably profitable. Unless you have your produce guys making juices in the produce backroom to sell out of a reach-in, you still have to buy lots of fresh produce to always have what customers expect. And the labor is absolutely the fucking profit killer.
I think you just have to be prepared to break even most of the time, which is a tough sell for me since in order to install one in my store it would cost many thousands of dollars.
dude what
even with the beer that seems astounding to me.[/quote]
That’s actually less than I expected, it is San Francisco after all.
Profitable, maybe not. But when in part of a larger natural grocer it absolutely helps the bottom line. I can speak from experience that produce generally is a profit neutral endeavor at best. Converting any percentage of waste back into viable inventory is a big win.
Plus, with a set menu and some purchase history, it would be pretty simple to develop a buying strategy that should make the juice bar pretty close to zero loss.
The majority of produce waste in American grocers gets pulled because of looks not because of if it is “bad”. Funky looking bananas, soft carrots, apples with dents? Juice that shit. Produce when comparing wholesale to retail has the highest gross margin in the store. It’s the waste that kills the net profit.
This model does require high foot traffic though. Wouldn’t work here at Outpost but at the big urban natural food store in town I bet it crushes.
That’s less than we pay for cat hair cuts. Way more than for my own hair though.
To be fair, $75 sans tip is probably slightly above average mens haircut price here, at least without shave or beard trim. I pay $25, and another $20 if I want the beard done.
I haven’t paid for a haircut in 20 years and don’t plan to start now.
Sometimes being a baldo pays off!
I’m at $22 haircut, $12 beard trim, $5 tip.
Wife cuts my hair with the $30 Wahl set, and she’s good at it. I do not trust myself to cut her hair, so I feel OK about her spending 100% of our annual haircut budget.
Cut my own and the boys’ with the Wahl. I’m pretty good. probably been 20 years since I paid.
I’m at $17 for a haircut with tip.
Wahl clipper cru checking in (25+ years deep).
I picked up a Wahl since male pattern baldness went into effect.
I convinced sup to be my barber by trading a dinner out at a restaurant for her time. She was very stoked and I’d rather drop $30 on a meal with her vs $30 at a real barber.
Same here, but only for the last 13 or so.
So the two main things I go to bike shops for now are headset installs and wheel-building stuff.
I brought a hub in to the shop next to work to get it built into a wheel. Probably cost about as much as buying a new wheel but I want to support these guys. I drop back in two weeks later to check how it’s going. The guy was about to call me because they ordered the wrong length spokes and the guy was mumbling about having an hour and a half into the wheel already.
Now I feel like a jerk because they are probably losing money on me bringing that hub in lol