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[Restaurant Community]

With tough economic times, has anyone thought of cutting back hours during slow business times to cut cost? If so, have you seen positive results?

[ccdse]

We have been at this restaurant for over 15 years. In the beginning we were open 5 a.m. to 8 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and open 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Friday and Saturdays. We changed our hours to 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. for the week days and 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. on the weekends. We have seen no ill effects from this. At first there were some gripes but now customers know when we are opened. It makes for a much pleasanter evening for all.

[lunchguy]

i manage the kitchen at our little jr/sr high school, (200 meals a day or so), during the months that school is in and during the summer i help out at one of the local restaurants.
in my experience, cutting back on employees during the, (mostly), slow times in fall and winter is a must, though you really have to work at getting qualified people to work part time, and cut back when you know that business will be slower. nothing is worse than having a bunch of cooks stumbling around each other, trying to find things to do.
i think that having a solid skeleton crew of permanent full time help who can bite the bullet and support the restaurant in lean times is great. keeping overtime down as much as possible during any time of year helps, also utilizing dishwashers and wait staff to do prep and bussing, extra cleaning, etc. helps. i've always thought of dishwashers as potential apprentice cooks, hehe, "hurry up and get those dishes done and i'll show you a little about cooking". i call stuff like that "tom sawyer-ing" someone. it really does make people feel more needed, and more important in the grand scheme of things. let employees know that it is critical to the financial health of the restaurant to use as few employees as possible at any time of the year. minimize waste and maximize leftover usage, try to keep leftovers to a very minimum. no unauthorized grazing!

tim

[StopIn]

We own a 88 seat Family Restaurant, we are a full service restaurant. We serve Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner. We serve breakfast all day. We also have Pizza & Chicken is our specialty. We bought the restaurant 26 months ago. But the restaurant has been in continuous operation for almost 25 years. When we bought, the restaurant was profiting decently. But since these hard economic times business has dropped about 30%. We have gone from 11 to 6 employees. Our hours of business is Tues. - Sat. 6am til 8pm & Sun 6am till 2:30pm.

Our busiest days of the week is Friday and Sunday, Saturday morning we also do very well, but Saturday evening business 60% of the time is non-exsistant. Tuesday and Wednesday is the same way. We do have our die-hard regular customers. We have been throwing around the idea of closing at 2:30pm on Tuesday and Wednesday and offering our Restaurant for meeting and gathering Sunday - Wednesday. But were not sure how to go about letting the public know without hurting the feeling of our regulars.

If anyone has any ideas on this, all suggestions will be entertained.

[mojito]

We have been in business only 21 months, and thank God we have been doing extrememly well!!! We recently added opening on Mondays as of August 4, 2008. And we have had increasing better Mondays since first trying it out. One reason for opening now 7 days a week is continuous demand by our guests, coupled with the knowledge that many people have off on Mondays; especially government workers. And we are located just 45 minutes outside of DC, in the burbs at the foothills of the Shenandoah mts.
I think the key to doing well in this tough time is offering something UNIQUE & DIFFERENT. No one wants the same old vanilla. We do pride ourselves as being the only authentic CUBAN/SPANISH restaurant in Virginia..We are a specialty destination restaurant, and frankly people actually travel up to 2 hours from bordering Maryland & Delaware to dine with us. Unbelieveable but true, considering gas prices...
My best advice is if you want to stay in business; is forget about competing with the next guy or big box restaurants and set yourself DIFFERENT from the rest. Make your restaurant a place where people "have to go". Offer something no one else has. Make thier experience an unforgettable one; one that they will shout out about positively!!!