With Cinco de Mayo coming up, many Mexican restaurant owners are salivating like a kid at Christmas. They see it as a celebration that will increase their bottom line, in come cases it will make their month. A word of advice — DON’T BLOW IT!
For some restaurants it’s the busiest day of the year. It’s the one day that more people will visit their place of business for the first time. Their game plan better be laid out, in advance, or they will fail miserably. A good friend of mine owns two Mexican restaurants. Last Cinco de Mayo, I brought a group of people, most of who had never set foot in the restaurant before. Unfortunately, none of those people have come back because the service was so poor. They lost over $100 in drink sales for our party alone! One one group!
Of course, the owner was apologetic. The wait staff was apologetic. I was apologetic to my guests. The damage had been done. They were understaffed and had a new manager on duty. Critical error that’s hard to recover from.
Another Cinco de Mayo, I joined a group of friends at a local Mexican restaurant near our homes that we went to at a minimum of twice a week. The average check for these visits was $35 or more. There were 20 of us. That means, at that one table, excluding the $800 bill today, $17,500 worth of revenue right there. Almost a $20,000 bet. I had offered to act as cashier for the group, but I was in no way n charge of the group. Shortly before the waitress came back with the check, one of the couples daughters’ arrived and ordered two meals. We had been at the restaurant a total of maybe 90 minutes.
The owner came over to me (since it was my credit card on file) and started to read me the riot act about moving along and how we were taking too long and there were a lot of people waiting for these tables. Now, I saw him coming over and thought he had spotted us and wanted to thank us for coming in. I was in shock to say the least. I stood up, told all it was time to go, and walked out. It was seven years before any of us set foot in that restaurant again. His decision to throw us out cost him at least $120,000 in revenue! (We still have never gone back for Cinco de Mayo — and we won’t)
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