Category: SUBWAY™

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.

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.

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.