Category: 生意­ / Business

I haven’t updated on how the Subway store is going in a while. Some of you assume that this is because I’m busy. The actual reason is that really, there’s not a whole lot of interest to say.

Things have been going pretty well. We’re at the one month anniversary today. Yesterday finished our fifth business week (Subway business week is Wednesday through Tuesday). Our first (partial week) we lost money, the second week we broke even, and the following two weeks had a decent profit.

I just finished the paperwork for last week and it was the first one where we ended with a very good profit. It’s also the first week that I made more than my manager.

There’s two main factors that made it a good week. First, productivity has increased through a combination of workers performing better and the work schedule being more efficient. The second is that sales have been steadily increasing.

It also doesn’t hurt that the weather has been pretty good, except for some afternoon rain.

Got a few complaints about a lack of updates, so here goes.

Things have been slow this week mainly due to a steady rain most of the week and also Wednesday was a holiday here (Dragon Boat Festival). I’m told other Subways are also slow this week so I’m not too worried. It has also been a good opportunity for everyone to get up to speed without so much pressure. And it’s not so bad that we’re losing money.

Meanwhile things are going smooth enough that I’m pulling back from working myself and letting the staff take care of most things other than the weekly paperwork and banking.

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.