Economy Barometer

You know, I bet I could tell you what is going financially with our customer just by how much and what kind of business we're doing here at the restaurant. We know when payday is, when a holiday is approaching, when school starts and when school releases for the year. All these life changes and more are felt by our business in different ways. For instance, when times are tough, customers still come out to eat, but they'll lose the extras like appetizers and desserts. After the big spending holidays, business drops off as folks realized how much they've spent and start cutting back (hence the slow month of January). Without looking at a paper or listening to the radio last week, I could have told you that folks were scared about money. When it came to dinner at the ODB, it was a ghost town. Dead. I understand. I wouldn't be going out on the town either if I had just seen my retirement plan drop 25% or so.

So, here at the restaurant we play the guessing game - what we can do to tailor our restaurant to our customers' ever changing emotional and financial needs? Do they need more/different events? Do they need us to be open different/more/less hours? Do they need new/fewer/more menu options? We know that right now the thought on everyone's mind is money. For families and retired folks, in particular, saving money is very important. What can we do as a restaurant to help with this (and stay in business)? We've come up with a few ideas.

-Early Bird Specials
These are special dinner options only available between 4 -6 pm. They are smaller portions, but also involve a considerable price break. For instance - 6 oz Prime Rib for only $10.95!

-A la Carte Dinners
We will be re-doing our dinner menu to reflect an a la cart dinner pricing system - without soup or salad. This seems to be the trend these days with restaurants anyway. With the ODB, our huge portions make soup and salad unnecessary space fillers prior to the real meal. We've found that people take a lot of food home in boxes and rarely have room for dessert. With the a la carte system, dinners are priced without soup or salad, but soup or salad can always be added back on for those customers who prefer the full experience. We'll be able to decrease waste and lower dinner prices all around. This will help everyone!

-Lower Priced Options
In addition to the a la carte dinner system, we will be adding a few salad and sandwich favorites from the popular lunch menu.

I know all of you are familiar with the trickle down system of how cost increases get past onto the consumer. We all suffer from it. As you can imagine, we at the ODB are a consumer for many products which all seem to have increased in price lately. We're right there with you struggling to make the same income buy our increasingly expensive necessities. Like you, we do what we can by cutting out the extras, searching for the best deals before buying, and saving wherever we can! First at our business, then at home.