Month: May 2006

The store web site has two more pictures added to it today.

Oh, forgot to mention that the store web site is now a bit more spiffy with a picture, map and contact info.

We’re on our fourth full day of business now and things are starting to get smoother. We managed to get through our weekly inventory and sales report which was a bit of a chore to get through, but will be easier now that we know what we’re doing. Tomorrow I get to send in the first royalty payment.

Someone already broke the crank & handle on the tuna press last night. Fortunately a replacement can be ordered for US$15 plus shipping, plus it was a bitch to get it apart.

I’m trying to cut back from 15 hour days to only 12 hours.

Now is just before the lunch rush but already we are much more organized today. We were even able to open early at 9:30 and had 6 sales before official opening time. We will probably need to open early because there seems to be demand for breakfast. We put in 24 trays of bread last night and this morning we put in 10 more trays for baking this afternoon. I hope we won’t run out of bread today.

We had a really amazing first full day being open. Unfortunately though we thought we were being optimistic about putting bread in the retarder last night, we way underestimated. We also were late putting bread in the retarder this morning, so we ran out of bread mid-afternoon. That was also insufficient so we ran out of bread again in the middle of dinner. When we realized how badly we were behind on bread we did some shortcuts to get bread out earlier so we’ll have some for evening and tomorrow morning. If you haven’t yet figured it out, that means we did *way* better than we expected for the first full day open.

Tonight we’re filling up the *whole* retarder full of bread for tomorrow.

Last night we had a pretty good opening. We had a lot of workers on hand so things were pretty chaotic and inefficient, but not too bad for the first day. We opened a bit past 5pm and with no advertising and everyone having been told we open Monday morning we had 33 sales with a total of 45 sandwiches sold.

Now it is Monday morning and we are getting ready for our first full day. We’re all worried we’ll have a very busy lunch time today.

We were pretty ready by Sunday evening so we opened for dinner.

Today we had one group of employees in to do training on the high speed toaster oven and to clean up the store in preparation for training. We cleaned pretty much everything top to bottom, unpacked most things, etc. We had the delivery of the main food and supplies in the afternoon which was a lot of stuff. Found out that the toilet is still leaking a bit and a guy came by to do further repairs. We may end up being short on employees at first, though we’re trying to get enough in.

My manager is Vincent Chen and he started work for me yesterday helping finish up lots of loose ends and get prepared for opening. We also needed to call more people to come interview. With all the delays some of the people we hired already found another job. Now we have all the equipment up and running and most of the non-food supplies. Tomorrow the bulk of the food and vegetables will be delivered and the branded items like cups and sandwich wrap paper. Tomorrow we have some of the employees coming for training on the high speed toaster oven and also do cleaning of the shop to get ready for opening. Then Saturday and Sunday we will split into two groups for training each day 12-5 and 5-10. Then Monday morning we will open for business!

Everything is coming together now. We’ll have training Friday through Sunday and then open on Monday. We have all the equipment now. The high speed toaster oven and bread oven were installed today, and the tables and chairs were delivered. There are a few odds and ends to be installed or fixed, but nothing major.

People walking by have been very interested in the store now that it is looking more complete. We even had a few people walk in today thinking we were already open, lots of people asking when we are opening, and asking for “DM” (which I have no idea what it stands for but are store leaflets). I set up the floor stand at the door stuffed with leaflets after a bit of this and lots of people have been taking them. Things are really looking up.