How To Bring More Customers,

to a struggling restaurant?

the owners of the said restaurant had a great idea, change from a 'normal' restaurant, into an all you can eat venue for a month, then revert back into a normal restaurant, hoping you will keep some of the new customers that you attracted with the offer, the restaurant, Jiamener, is in Jinjiang District, which is one of nine districts of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, China,

the restaurant offered a loyalty card at 120 yuan for the 1 month trial, great idea, but it had a couple of flaws, they just issued simple membership cards that featured no photo and no way of limiting people’s access into the restaurant, and it didn’t take long for patrons to figure out that they could exploit these faults to the extreme,

although on the back of the card it reads 'only for my use', some of them visited Jiamener several times per day, which was sort of OK, as it appears there was no number of visits indicated, but some took food to go, and others just passed the card to their family and friends, technically, their all-you-can-eat promotion worked, Chinese media reports that at the height of its popularity, Jiamener served around 500 customers per day, with many of them lining up at the door several hours before the restaurant opened, and refusing to leave until midnight! Su Zhe, one of the owners, told reporters that in the 11 days that the offer remained active, he only got 2-3 hours of sleep per night, and the staff had to work 10-hour shifts to keep up with demand, the owners of Jiamener had planned to run the promotion for a whole month, but only 11 days into June, they realised that they were already 500,000 yuan ($77,000) in the red, which was way more than they had anticipated, so they just decided to close the restaurant and cut their losses, so great idea, but the attention is in the detail! the two owners of Jiamener admitted that their failure had less to do with the uncivilised behaviour of their customers, and more to do with their poor management, note to others thinking of doing the same type of promotion, limit use to once a day, and use a photocard!