The Restaurant Doctor - Electronic House Call

ELECTRONIC HOUSE CALL - May 21, 1999

I am in the Atlanta airport on my way from Pensacola, Florida (where I just did several staff training programs for the McGuire's Pub group) to Chicago for the National Restaurant Association show. I get a lot of questions sent to me and I do my best to come up with workable suggestions. This last week, I got two that are probably better tossed out to the readership for comments and suggestions. If you have advice to offer, please send it along and copy me. I will post the collected wisdom sometime in the future.

STOW ME THE MONEY <ap.terry-shogun@worldnet.att.net>
We are independent operators in a medium-size southern city. We have two locations and my husband travels back and forth between the two stores regularly. In the past two years, we have been broken into at one location three times, the other location once, and my husband held up at gunpoint once at one location. My question is..... what have most of your independent operators found to be the best way of making the deposits of sales at the end of the evening? My husband is very reluctant (afraid) to take a bag of cash to the night deposit of a bank at 1 o'clock in the morning (alone). And we are also very reluctant to have our employees (or ourselves) take large amounts in cash to their houses overnight. We have left cash in the restaurant overnight in the past, and were robbed. I know the larger chains have the Brinks truck come around on a regular schedule and pick up the sales. What do you hear from the other independents as to the best way to handle the money at the end of the night? Holiday weekends are especially bad because we have unusually large amounts of money at our house sometimes for three days because the banks are not open on Monday.

If you have any advice or any of your readers have any suggestions, we would surely appreciate hearing them. At this point, we live in an extremely modest house, have absolutely no valuables that would be worth stealing, yet my husband is intent on getting a guard dog to keep in our house in case the bad guys follow him home from the restaurant at night. His paranoia is beginning to worry me.

SING ALONG, MOVE ALONG <princess@CustomNet.Net>
On Friday evenings at 9pm, we have been hosting a Dick Clark Karaoke contest at my restaurant. As we get closer to the finals, I've noticed many new faces coming in at that time. The singers are so good, I will hate to see this event end! The only problem is, some of my diners, who are already finished eating, by that time, just sit there with their food boxed up, and listen to the singers. These are customers who ate at 7pm are still there at 10pm or later, while I have customers anxious to have their seats to eat, and also enjoy the show. By the way, my normal dining time is about 1 hr and 20 minutes or so. We are not fine dining, just Italian menu, pizza, kids meals, etc.

I have my karaoke finals coming up on June 11th, and people are making reservations for that dining room to be there that evening. How may I gently and kindly ask these early patrons who are done eating to leave by 9pm? Do I give them a card to say we are closing the dining room at 9pm, and they will have to be done by then?

This is a new situation for me. I don't want to offend anyone, but I will need to put my reservations somewhere. Do you or your readers have any suggestions? Help!

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