Category: 台灣 / Taiwan

2007 Baseball World Cup

Today SUBWAYâ„¢ Xingtian Temple restaurant is busy from the early morning preparing meals for the 2007 Baseball World Cup. We are supplying lunch for the noon games held in Xinzhuang (the games are also being held in Tianmu and two sites in Taizhong) from now through November 18. In Taiwan the games can be watched on TVBS or TVBS-G.

Quick Comparison Guide To Dr.Eye 8.0 Versions

Here’s a quick “Comparison Guide” to the Dr.Eye 8.0 packages available in Taiwan. The feature sets between the different packages has changed since 7.0 and as far as I can tell the feature comparison chart is only available in the manual, which doesn’t help you decide which version to buy.

There are at least four packaged versions of Dr.Eye 8.0 available in Taiwan:

Dr.Eye 8.0 Luxury (Orange Box TW$1090 MSRP)
Dr.Eye 8.0 Professional Upgrade (Blue Box TW$1090 MSRP)
Dr.Eye 8.0 Professional (Blue Box TW$1650 MSRP)
Dr.Eye 8.0 Professional 2-User Pack (Blue Box TW$3300 MSRP)

To find the MSRP (retail price) look under the bar code at the bottom right of the back of the box.

Unlike previous versions, the “Luxury” package no longer contains “Chinese Traditional to English” translation functions. It only contains “Chinese Traditional to/from Chinese Simplified”, “English to Chinese Traditional” and “English to Chinese Simplified”. Because of this, it is probably of limited use to most foreigners who will probably want to translate from Chinese more often than the reverse.

Instead, you will probably be better off with the Professional package which in addition to the above also supports “Chinese Traditional to English”, “Chinese Simplified to English” and “Japanese to/from Chinese Traditional”. The other major difference is that the Professional package also contains more dictionaries.

If you decide to get the Professional package, be careful you don’t get the upgrade version by mistake (unless you are actually upgrading). The easiest way to tell is to make sure the MSRP on the back of the package is TW$1650.

Dr.Eye 8.0 lists in the system requirements that it requires the Traditional Chinese version of XP/2003/Vista but it actually works fine on the English version of XP. (Presumably you would have to have the East Asian support added, but this is a standard feature of XP which can be added from the XP installation disk.) It also comes with the user interface in English, Traditional Chinese or Simplified Chinese all on the same disk.

One other potential catch if you have old computer gear: The package comes on DVD, not CD.

Note: Though the Professional ‘2-User Pack’ list price is exactly twice that of the single-user version, the street price is only about 50% more.

Vegetables are driving me crazy!

Ever since the last typhoon, the vegetable situation here has been absolutely crazy. This is not an unusual phenomenon; after any typhoon prices usually jump up, but usually just for a few days. But here we are weeks later and still having problems. Previously our problem was related to price. Tomatoes were the worst, tripling in price to TW$180/kg. We had been product testing using pre-shredded lettuce instead of shredding it in-store but they announced they’d be going to TW$200/kg for that so we switched back to shredding it ourselves.

Today our main vegetable supplier only delivered half our vegetable order to each of our stores. They cited market shortage as the reason for the cut in our order. But that leaves us kinda stuck. We order based on our sales level, so having our order suddenly cut means we don’t have enough. On the other hand, Subway specifies how much of each vegetable goes in a sub and that we can only buy from authorized vendors.

All this means we are stuck with no good choice on how to resolve the problem.

One Hour: 312 Free Hot Subs Given Away


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcosWu-qzBE

To celebrate the 10th Anniversary of SUBWAYâ„¢ in Taiwan, participating restaurants had a free hot sub giveaway for one hour on 2007-10-26. This is a time-lapse video from SUBWAYâ„¢ Qingcheng Restaurant where we gave away 312 free hot subs in one hour.

SUBWAYâ„¢: http://www.subway.com/

SUBWAYâ„¢ Qingcheng Restaurant: http://jimmys.tw/subway/36096/

The SUBWAYâ„¢ trademarks are owned by Doctor’s Associates Inc. and the independent franchised operator of this restaurant is a licensed user of such trademarks.

Media Coverage of Free Sub Giveaway

We’re getting some nice news coverage of the free sub giveaway. There was a news segment on ERA TV News (Channel 50) covering the event at the Neihu Ruiguang store. Lots of happy customers trying out the found, some great shots of the subs being made, and a short interview with Brendon, the store owner. It is nice to get a good event like this covered by the media.

Wow! 546 free subs in one hour!

We gave away 312 free subs at Qingcheng Restaurant and 234 free subs at Xingtian Temple Restaurant in just one hour today. One of the other owners gave away even more than that and also had two TV news crews covering the event at his restaurant. We also gave away buy one get one free coupons with every free sub in the hopes that we can get some new customers out of the event. All in all I’m very happy we got to give a lot of potential customers a taste of our food and service.

On Board

Every year each Subway market elects an board of franchisees in the market who will decide how to spend the advertising contributions in the market. Our election for the Taiwan board was in September and I ran for a seat (last year I didn’t qualify as I hadn’t been open long enough). Unfortunately I did not earn a seat in the election and was tied as second runner up. Today I found out that one of the board members resigned. The first runner up passed on the seat and the person I was tied with deferred to me, so I’m now on the Subway Taiwan ad board.