Getting busy

Well, I’ve been getting busier as the opening date approaches. I’m still aiming for second week of May, but it all depends on when the rest of the equipment ships from the US. Outdoor signs are up and look really spiffy. Ironically enough the best vantage point to see the signs clearly is the front door of McDonald’s. 🙂 I’ve set the signs up on a timer so they’ll automatically come on from 6p-11p daily. Already I’ve heard a lot more people talking about the shop as they are walking by now that the signage is up.

104 Job Bank is sending me about 100 job applicants per day in email, so it’s gonna be a huge help in finding staff.

Tomorrow morning I’m going with the accountant to the tax office to get invoices. Here there is a VAT of 5% that is included in prices, and you have to use official receipts to be legal. Like most things in Taiwan there are lots of small shops that don’t use official receipts and hence don’t pay sales tax on the purchase. To encourage compliance they have a receipt lottery every two months where if you match all the numbers on the receipt with the draw number you win TW$200,000 (about US$6,000), and smaller prizes for winning fewer matched numbers.

Today I went out and bought an LG LX-M340A bookshelf stereo system for the shop. The shop has three speakers in the customer area which I hooked up to the stereo in the back room, with the speakers it came with also hooked up. It’s a pretty basic system, but it has 30 watts per channel of power which is plenty for background music in the restaurant. It has a cassette deck (do people still use those?), a CD player with MP3 support, radio, plus an aux input for hooking up an iPod, etc. Pretty nifty system and not very expensive. Sounds pretty good in the shop too.

Tonight all three of us hopped on Maggie’s scooter to drive to the Yongkang Street area for dinner. Maggie recently picked up the scooter second hand from one of the guys who ran a vegetarian restaurant next to her shop that recently went bust. First we went to a Tainan style restaurant where I had fried fish soup, which shouldn’t be too unexpected if you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, then over to the Vietnamese restaurant where I had beef ball soup, and then to The Italian Job to finish up with a Chicken Parmesan roll and Peroni beer.