Category: 生意­ / Business

Oops…

The ice dispenser on our Coke machine has busted a couple of times recently. The ice machine was fine, it was a motor inside the coke machine that was busted and not dispensing ice. Last Tuesday it broke again and the Coke maintenance guys couldn’t commit to a repair date any sooner than ‘sometime next week’. Since it had been broken multiple times we asked if they’d replace the whole machine. That also seemed to be impossible.

After several back and forths without any resolution, I asked the local Subway office to help out. They were able to quickly get a commitment to change out the Coke machine on Monday.

Meanwhile we had also asked them about them upgrading our bottled drinks refrigerator to the one specified in our new contract (previously we used a fridge from Bessie Byer but we are transitioning towards selling more Coke branded products). We were supposed to get it in July, then August, and then it seemed to be kind of forgotten. We reminded them of this and they finally delivered it on Friday. However, after it had been powered on for several hours it still hadn’t gotten cold (the light worked fine though).

The real fun started on Monday afternoon when the Coke technicians showed up with a new Coke machine. They brought in a height-adjustable cart which they were going to move the Coke and ice machine (on top of the Coke machine) onto, then lower it to take off the ice machine. Unfortunately while moving them onto the cart the top of the cart collapsed and both the ice machine and Coke machine went flying to the floor with parts and ice flying every which way. Fortunately nobody was hurt (it was afternoon so only two customers in the shop), but both machines were pretty much totalled.

Now the Coke machine belongs to Coke and they had a new one right there to replace it, so that’s no big deal for me. The ice machine is mine though, and it cost somewhere around US$3000, so it’s not a trivial loss. The Coke guys promised that they’d take care of getting it replaced. However, this still leaves me with no ice, going on almost a week now. And even though I didn’t have ice last week the soda was still cold because the water for the fountain drinks is cooled by the ice tank. Now we don’t even have that, so only warm soda from the machine now.

The guys also were unable to find the problem with the bottled drinks fridge so we had to put back in the Bessie Byer fridge. At least we have cold bottled drinks.

Other Catching Up

So what else has been going on…

Maggie went to Korea for a week for a beauty equipment class. Emily and I got to hang out a bunch. Maggie brought back a giant box of Choco Pie back (picture coming).

There’s a new chain of Japanese Curry Rice restaurants started up by Japan’s House Foods called CoCo Ichibanya. They have 7 levels of spiciness and a whole bunch of toppings! One is near Taipei Main Station and the other near Nanjing East Road Station. I love the Japanese Curry Rice, and I have found memories of House Food’s socal Curry House chain.

After going to the Nanjing one a couple of weeks ago I popped over to Asiaworld Center to get a gelato and ran into Maoman from Forumosa.com who was having lunch with his wife. It turned out he had been meaning to talk to me that day anyways. To make a long story short, I was invited to be a moderator of the Legal forums on Forumosa. So far I’ve managed not to let the power go to my head.

Last week after getting my gigabit switch replaced (see previous entry), I ran into miltownkid back at my Subway™ restaurant. He’d actually sent me email before hand, but since I’d been out I hadn’t seen it. Good thing I decided to drop by the store. He was there to meet one of my regular customers, Elliott, who I hadn’t yet introduced myself to, one of the Hess crowd. Elliott also has the same laptop as I do.

After Elliott left, miltownkid and I talked for a while and then I showed him around the restaurant a bit, then went back to my house to let him borrow some books. He seems to have gotten really excited by one of them and posted a big old blog entry about it.

Subway news: We had our tax withholding on the royalties changed from 20% to 10%, then they decided they didn’t do all the right paperwork so they switched back to the 20% rate with the extra kicker that those of us who did what we were told had to go revise the payments and paperwork with the tax office. Fun. We also had two boxes of wheat bread which didn’t rise last week. Apparently a problem with that lot. Also after getting the equipment in I was told they needed more money for the shipping costs which I wired over. Now they are ready to close down my equipment account and the money’s still there. I ask what’s up with that and turns out the shipping was in the original quote after all, so they shouldn’t have asked me for more. So yay I get money back, but boo US$22 in fees blown. Otherwise things going fairly well. The end of the July/August tax period is coming so there’ll be a bunch of invoice sorting at the end of the week.

Next week is APNIC22 in Gaoxiong. The spam session is Tuesday so I’ll be going down Monday night and returning Tuesday night. I got together today with Arthur Shay, one of the advisors on spam issues in Taiwan to get the latest scoop so I can give an update (we couldn’t find anyone local to do a Taiwan update other than me so far). He’s going to put me in touch with some other people so hopefully I can talk to them too. The conference is actually covering registration and room this time. Usually I only get registration covered as a speaker. (And in case you haven’t been paying attention to this blog, Gaoxiong trip means Liuhe Night Market Fried Fish Soup!)

Then at the end of the week my Dad will come for a visit to see Emily (and I assume the rest of us too). This time he’s decided to actually stay with us in the new guest room we remodeled last winter.

Grand Opening Sale

Yesterday was our Grand Opening Celebration Sale. Our promotion was a buy one get one free sale on footlong sandwiches, though we allowed it for 6 inch sandwiches, deli sandwiches and salads as well for those who requested it. Anyways, here’s what we went through yesterday:

598 Footlong sandwiches
35 6-Inch sandwiches
5 Deli sandwiches
3 Salads

Total of 641 ‘units’.

Or in other words, a week’s worth of volume in one day. It was, by any way of looking at it, a wild runaway success.

Fixing Things

There was a lot of fixing things this week.

First thing up was the one of the inside air conditioning units in the shop. Each unit has a drain line to get rid of condensation. The drain pipe flows down to another pipe that runs along the top of the drop down ceiling and out the back of the shop.

On Tuesday when the workers came in and turned on the AC, water started dripping from the ceiling. When I took a look I found that the main drain pipe had become detached from the AC’s drain line. For some reason the installers had taped those two together. Since the main drain pipe was being held on just by the tape, gravity eventually did its thing and the tape gave out. (Gravity is very patient.)

We left that AC unit off and called up the contractor who sent out a crew to fix it on Wednesday morning. This time they used something called “adhesive” to join the pipes together. (I checked the other three AC units and their drain lines were all securely attached.)

On Wednesday a package came from my US mail forwarder. One of the contents was a replacement handle for our tuna press. Getting it back together was as much of a pain in the butt as taking it apart, but now it’s working again!

Also in the package was a set of gears for our digital camera. Last month Emily decided the zoom lens on the camera looked like a nice hammer and was using it to bang on the table. After that the zoom wouldn’t open or close which made the camera’s software very upset.

Sony wanted TW$4500 (about US$140) to repair it which is getting close to the replacement cost with the prices of digital cameras these days. I took it apart and found that the problem was just one of the plastic gears in the zoom mechanism which had gotten stripped. I found a seller on eBay selling a set of replacement gears for my model of camera and bought them.

I got around to replacing the stripped gear today. The surgery was a success and the camera is now working fine again. As a test I took some pictures of the Landis Hotel which has all the windows boarded up in preparation for the Typhoon, and the small hospital kitty corner to the hotel which had some sandbags set up outside.

The hotel also has large metal gates for the front and side doors which they can bring out if flooding is expected. I saw them doing a practice drill a couple of weeks ago where they boarded up the windows and put up the flood gates. This neighborhood has flooded twice due to typhoons, so I’m a bit worried about the shop.

Anyways, the camera seems to be fine now and will be ready to take any pictures of the neighborhood after the Typhoon goes through.

碧利斯 / Bilis

It’s Typhoon Season! Earlier this week Typhoon Ewiniar passed just east of Taiwan which only brought an afternoon of heavy rainy here in Taipei. Today we are awaiting the arrival of Typhoon Bilis (碧利斯). This one looks like it’ll cross straight over Taiwan. While these things are never certain, it’s close enough now that it looks like we’ll get a pretty direct hit in Taipei.

It’s already been raining with some moderately high winds today. For the first time I had my umbrella pop inside out due to the wind. Not that the wind is that strong yet, but it was a combination of holding the umbrella the wrong way when the wind suddenly shifted, and also the fact that it’s a cheap ass umbrella. Someone needs to figure out how to make a typhoon-capable umbrella. Regular umbrellas are too damn aerodynamic. Rain jackets aren’t suitable because they get very stuffy in the hot and humid weather.

We are probably going to close the restaurant early tonight and open late tomorrow, but since these things are constantly changing, we’re not sure of the exact times yet. My best guess right now is that the storm will gain strength here tonight at 8pm and keep up until mid-morning or as late as noon tomorrow.

Our buy one get one free sale is scheduled for Saturday and while the Typhoon will be gone by then, it’ll likely be a fairly rainy day. The big problem is that we had planned to have flyers distributed in the neighborhood today. Because of the typhoon the flyer distribution company told us yesterday that they weren’t sure they could do it. Eventually they realized that the typhoon was moving in slower than expected, so they picked them up for distribution today anyways. It’s kind of nerve-whracking to have the plans thrown up in the air though.

Busy Day

Today started off being woken up by 小左, one of my employees calling to say that nobody was there to open the door. Apparently it was my assistant manager 阿凱’s day off but someone forgot to send me a memo. Anyways, that resulted in a quick dash to the shop to open things up.

Then the neighbor who lives in the building behind the shop came to complain about our air conditioner. I hadn’t really noticed it before, but one air conditioner’s exhaust points straight at his rear window, and the other points straight at his rear door. The result being that his back room was roasting these hot days with the AC frequently on.

Being a good neighbor, I got a handyman to come over who installed some fin-like gadgets to the AC which redirected the airflow up instead of straight back. The nice thing about Taiwan is you can get stuff like that done with a moment’s notice, so within 2 hours the problem was solved.

If you’ll recall, shortly after opening someone dropped the tune press and broke off the handle. I ordered a new one but to save money on shipping costs I had it shipped to my mail forwarder. I hadn’t heard anything in a while so I asked the Subway coordinator for my store to check up on it. She replied that it showed as having been delivered on June 19th.

My mail forwarder has a nifty system where any new arrival results in an email to me and then is logged in my web account with them. Needless to say, it hadn’t shown up there. I wrote to their support address and they reported back that they didn’t have any record of a package with that tracking number on it, and requesting more information.

I replied with as much as I could and the key piece of information turns out to be that it was for a Subway store. It turns out that somewhere along the line both the mailbox number and my name were dropped from the address on the package. It also so happens that right next door to my mail forwarder, there’s a Subway restaurant. In the confusion it got delivered there instead.

I’m very impressed with the response from my mail forwarder. They were able to figure out what happened even in a fairly complex problem like this. If anyone is looking for a US based mail forwarder, check out US Global Mail.

Also check out this satellite picture from Google Maps. The red “C” is the Subway restaurant and the building to the left is presumably my mail forwarder.

That mystery solved, it’s now on its way here thanks to Fedex.

Subway is having a special promotion tomorrow with the local baseball team the Chinatrust Whales. You can read more about it, or at least you can if you read Chinese. Basically they will have an eating contest to see who can eat Subway sandwiches fastest, and they will also give out gift certificates to some lucky fans.

I also found out today that we did the invoice logs incorrectly for May and June. We were told to write down the gross receipts for each day, but it turns out we’re supposed to write down the gross amount minus the value of voided receipts. Fortunately the Subway paperwork has all this information, but it means redoing a bunch of work.

Business Update

(Warning to Merlin: This post may revive some traumatic memories.)

My manager is off on holiday in China so I’ve been doing closing each day which means I’ve had to do all of the daily paperwork at the end of each day. It also means that Tuesday night I had to do inventory myself. The paperwork isn’t that bad, but doing inventory is a pain in the butt.

The newly promoted assistant manager has been taking care of opening most days, but on Wednesday he had the day off too, so I had to do opening and closing. Otherwise things have been running pretty smoothly.

Today we got a bit of a shocker. The main Subway office notified me of a complaint by a customer they had received. Let’s just say that the customer found something in the sandwich not normally included on the menu. It was also quite surprising because the additional ingredient is not normally seen in our shop and also is something that would be kind of hard to overlook when making a sandwich.

Once my wife contacted the customer the story got even more bizarre with her claiming things that couldn’t possibly have happened at our store. Eventually the customer changed stories and said it happened at a different Subway store. I still have my doubts about the whole episode. It’s a good thing that Subway has training on handling such incidents.

A few days ago I got a schedule of radio ad spots for Subway. Tonight we finally heard our first ad on “Hit Radio”. The advertising for Subway in Taiwan hasn’t been all that great, so it was nice to see some advertising show up.

There’s a new shop going in two doors down from us. It has been under construction for several weeks now and we just found out that it will be a second-hand luxury clothing store. It’s looking quite attractive and they are really putting a lot of effort into it.

I felt that this area was improving when I rented the location and since then there have been a few new stores open and some others remodeling, so it seems my hunch was correct. When the new MRT (subway) line goes in three years from now things should hopefully get even better.

Today I finally got a checking account for the business. Most of you reading this will wonder what the big deal about this is. In the US you can register a business and have a checking account open immediately after. Checking accounts in Taiwan are almost unheard of for individuals and hard to get for new businesses.

After first being turned down due to lack of credit history in Taiwan, my wife and I talked the bank into considering my US credit history and once they did they approved it. I got my check book today.

Press, Release!

My friend’s new business, AsianParent.com has issued a press release:

AsianParent.com’s New Website Helps Parents Preserve Chinese Culture and Language for Their Children

AsianParent.com launches to help parents share the Chinese language and culture with their children.

San Jose, CA (PRWEB) June 28, 2006 — AsianParent.com today announced the launch of their new website designed to provide a large selection of books, DVDs, and educational products to help parents to educate their children in their native language and share their cultural heritage.

(more…)

Another good week

I just finished up the weekly paperwork and we had another good week, though not nearly as good as last week. The upcoming week will be interesting. My manager is taking 10 days off to go see his wife in mainland China. We have two employees who will be taking on most of his responsibilities, but I’ll need to come do the daily paperwork each night, and inventory next Tuesday.