Comments on: A Funny Thing About Positive Reinforcement

By: Amazing What a Record Day Can Do For Spirits - Adam McFarland

Amazing What a Record Day Can Do For Spirits - Adam McFarland — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 21:44:00 +0000

[...] I mentioned last week, weekends have been our busiest time (which does seem counter-intuitive, but whatever, we’ll take it). Friday afternoon Mike [...]

By: nethy

nethy — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 01:54:45 +0000

I just read that and I think it didn’t make sense. Let me try again. This is the opposite of what we’re talking about:

A hotel, a fish n chip shop and a drop shipping e-merchant walk into a bar. The barman says ‘I can tripple you Sunday sales if you you half your Saturday sales.’ Assuming that Saturday & Sunday Sales are 100 each now, here’s what they say:

-Hotel-
“No. I’ll be overbooked Sundays. I can’t sell rooms I don’t have (unless he’s at a lot less very underbooked to start)”

-fish n chip shop-
Well, I’ll need an extra 2 cooks on Sunday and an extra 3 counter girls. I can take 1 cook off saturday but I need…” “OK” “No, wait a minute” “Got a calculator?”

-Drop shippin’ E tailer-
“Yep. i’ll take it”

There are other factors at play here, but you get the point. An e tailer can take sales when they can get them. They are pretty much the most flexible on this front.
Others have a certain amount of ’sales when I have them.’
So Tuesday specials only have more value then Sunday specials if they increase sales more then Sunday specials.

By: nethy

nethy — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 01:15:11 +0000

“what about a “Two-for-Tuesday””

I’m not necessarily saying that’s a bad idea. But the reason a lot of Businesses have mid-week specials is that they have to pay the fixed costs during the week as well and their capacity doesn’t scale down past a certain size (1 shop, 1 cook, 1 delivery boy, 1 bar staffer). A hotel is an intuitive example (they’re cheaper when they expect high vacancy) but the principle also applies to fish n’ chips.

Retailers have less of a straightforward incentive because a weekday sale is likely to have a cannibalisation effect (you won’t buy a third shoe cuz its on special and you can put things off till tuesday.

Any promotions and specials can still be good ideas. But like Nev said, weekly sales are what count. So they need to be on whatever day they’re most effective.

By: Adam McFarland

Adam McFarland — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:54:49 +0000

Nev – glad to hear I’m not the only one

Anthony – you’re completely right. We most definitely need to do a better job of that. For some reason I never thought of this (duh) – I’ll bring it up to the guys next time we meet. One of the fringe benefits of blogging about your business: other people can see often obvious solutions to problems that for some f’ing reason I don’t.

By: Nev

Nev — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:15:11 +0000

I get this same thing too. I’ve been learning to stop looking so much at daily sales and focus on weekly sales.

…although I know how hard it is to totally tune out daily sales. Right now I’m looking at a small, pithy amount of orders this morning, whereas yesterday I had a kickass day.

It’s just the ebb and flow of things.

The ebb usually kind of sucks.
-Nev

By: Anthony

Anthony — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:19:43 +0000

Good points all around here. This doesn’t have to do much with the actual point you’re making in the article, but why not put some effort towards increasing sales on the slow days? For example, you have your “Daily Special”, “June Specials”, etc. The point of all of these are to increase sales. But it would probably make just as much if not more sense to concentrate on having not only steady specials, but specials that only exist on slower days. For example, what about a “Two-for-Tuesday”, where select accessories are buy one get one free, etc? Maybe that’s not feasible – I don’t know the circumstances. But I’m sure you can think of dozens of more similar examples.