Friday, March 23, 2012

2002 - Email to Roberta & Sid

Sid's nephew, Tom King, writes Roberta and Sid an email with interesting information about restaurants and food markups. He runs [still?] Country Junction Restaurant in Dyersville, IA  – only five miles away from New Vienna (Iowa)!

From: Tom King
To: Sid (at his webtv email address)
Sent: Monday, March 4, 2002
Subject: Greetings from Dyersville

Hello Sid and Roberta!

Thanks for the article on the food markups.  I'm always interested reading that kind of stuff, so thanks for thinking of me.  I'm not sure what criteria they were using for determining their markup, but our markup on main dish items would normally be around 300%.  I know that seems like a lot, but by the time you get your side dish cost included, the labor to prep the food and assign some overhead expense to it, that 300% can be eroded pretty quickly.

Let me give you an example:  one of our best selling dinners is cod, we charge $9.50 for it [now $11.99 for 2 pieces, $10.50 for 1].  The cod costs us $2 for 2 pieces, the side dish cost is about $1.50, labor cost is $3, overhead is about $2.50.  That leaves us with a profit of about 50¢.  not bad, but we have some items that have more or less profit, so then it really depends on how many of each item you sell.  Obviously, we prefer to sell more of the higher profit items, now if we could just get our customers to always order those items!  Anyway, I hope you find that info interesting.  Didn't realize you were going to get a lesson in restaurant profitability today, did you?  Ha!

Hope all is well with you two, sounds like you are adjusting to your Sun City surroundings.  Sounds like a neat place.

We just had our first major snowstorm over the weekend.  Lots of snow and blowing.  Pretty much shut things down Saturday, but today the sun is shining and the wind isn't blowing so I'm sure everyone will get dug out.

Sid, did you get any more info on the Alabama land?  I'm curious as to what you found out.  I'm still working on getting our portion of that property into our names, proving to be kind of a lengthy process.  We just received a check not too long ago.  That well has done pretty well the last couple years.

Well, time to get to work.  I'm sending this from my work account.  Have you ever checked out our website?  www.countryjunctionrestaurant.com [same today].  Take care!  –Thomas

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