Submitted by RIffstaurant t3_11dlxk7 in RhodeIsland
I am a worker for a restaurant in Rhode Island, and I want to speak on anyone who's hesitant to take part in RI Food Fights events. There's been quite a few threads I've seen from customers complaining about their service, but not as much from restaurants.
Don't do it. The organization is offers a poorly managed partnership with diminishing returns, and from a profitability standpoint, your restaurant has a lot to lose while the RI Food Fights owner has everything to gain.
It is sold as a "free" marketing opportunity, but it's not fully "marketing" and it's not fully an "event." And it's certainly not "free."
Rather, it is a coupling of deals sold as a coupon book. The owner is slick enough to sell it as a marketing opportunity, but he is entirely reliant on an equation he calls the "new customer acquisition cost," and he claims that the events can lower your new customer acquisition cost. It's the cost of sales and marketing / new customers acquired.
In his long-winded sales pitch (i.e an email through Instagram), you get told that x amount of people will show up to your restaurant. It could be 200-300 people based on the event. However, many friends have reported up to 600 people showing up for an event, overwhelming their staff, and skyrocketing their food and labor cost while lowering overall profits for the month.
To the Acquisition cost, I say this: Your POS system will do this work for you whenever you ring out a purchase from a new credit card. It can also check how often those credit cards are being used at your restaurant (your customer retention). His description of customer acquisition is freshman-level knowledge sold in a neat package. He's depending on you not knowing your own profitability.
To the passports, I say this: the deal is good for his customers, but the likelihood of them becoming your customers is much, much lower than Food Fights is claiming. We know it to be true: free is free, and free is good. Companies cannot offer tremendous amount of free goods and survive through this inflationary period, it's simply not sustainable. Especially when he oversells events and doubles the proposed customer base. A Food Fights customer is more likely to wait to return to your establishment until they can get more free food.
His posts are very, very infrequent on Instagram so you will not get the benefit of visibility on their account. You may get curated content from his customers, but they're HIS customers, not yours. He will take your content and post it to sell tickets, not to get his followers to your restaurant.
If you are a restaurant owner, take the time instead to study facebook ads, targeting, and retargeting ads. It's all Food Fights does to continue ticket sales, and they make up to $30 per passport while banking on your willingness to bleed money. Mind you, Food Fights depends on YOU to spend money so that THEY can sell tickets with no overhead. The man worked on Wall Street, he has no ties to the restaurant industry beyond this.
Look to their Portland Food Fights Instagram for example, a LOT of frustrated customers and he's ghosted the community after grossly overselling tickets there as well. They don't even make their own content, it's 100% taken without permission for the sake of sales.
TL:DR You're doing Food Fights a favor and helping them make money, they're doing nothing. There's no science or advanced knowledge behind the platform, and you're being taken for a fool.
Would love to hear from other restaurants.
bradshaw1992 t1_ja9x93r wrote
Agreed. Food Fights is not some charitable organization founded to support local restaurants and communities. It's a for-profit scheme to make money off of restaurants. He wants a slice of your profits, and he provides no evidence of ROI. Don't encourage this kind of predatory startup idea.