Folk Food space for lease

[exnewsman]

Walking to Hemming Park today and saw that the Folk Food space on Hogan Street is for lease again.

[thelakelander]

Yes, they gave it a good go. They even attempted to open for breakfast to increase business, but unfortunately things didn't work out.

[thelakelander]

They started off with dinner, but they didn't get the amount of foot traffic they initially anticipated. Too bad, they had pretty good food.

[vicupstate]

Yes, they gave it a good go. They even attempted to open for breakfast to increase business, but unfortunately things didn't work out.

Never open for breakfast if you need more income. Open for dinner and events.

People will only pay 6 bucks per person for breakfast.  they pay upwards of 30 per person for dinner.

$6 x 20 is still more money than  $30 x 2. 

DT restaurants are in a real Catch-22.  There is a large population to serve between 8 am -5 pm but it drops to almost nothing before or after that.     Until there is a permanent residential population to serve or a steady stream of events programmed to draw people in, they must survive on only one meal. You can only serve so many people in the two hour lunch period, and the mark up on lunch is not what you can get for dinner. 

[vicupstate]

Yes, they gave it a good go. They even attempted to open for breakfast to increase business, but unfortunately things didn't work out.

Never open for breakfast if you need more income. Open for dinner and events.

People will only pay 6 bucks per person for breakfast.  they pay upwards of 30 per person for dinner.

$6 x 20 is still more money than  $30 x 2. 

DT restaurants are in a real Catch-22.  There is a large population to serve between 8 am -5 pm but it drops to almost nothing before or after that.     Until there is a permanent residential population to serve or a steady stream of events programmed to draw people in, they must survive on only one meal. You can only serve so many people in the two hour lunch period, and the mark up on lunch is not what you can get for dinner.

except that the labor on 20 > the labor on 2. And the food cost is more.

Wouldn't someone making a $30 meal be paid more on an hourly basis than a short order cook making scrambled eggs? Ditto on the food?     

[vicupstate]

$200 a day is $4000 a month. That will pay the rent. I don't doubt that Dinner has higher margins and add-ons but how do you get the customers in the door?  Thousands of people are DT in the early morning but once their work is done for the day, how do you keep them DT instead of heading home? Obviously the people that call DT home are too few to fill the void.

[vicupstate]

$200 a day is $4000 a month. That will pay the rent. I don't doubt that Dinner has higher margins and add-ons but how do you get the customers in the door?  Thousands of people are DT in the early morning but once their work is done for the day, how do you keep them DT instead of heading home? Obviously the people that call DT home are too few to fill the void.

Vic.  If everything goes well, a small place like Folk Food makes about a maximum of two hundred dollars in sales a day =
five hours of cook time - 75 to 150 dollars.
food cost - 25% of sale, or 50 dollars
three hours of servers or cashier wages- between 9 dollars and 24 dollars
insurance, electrical, water, permitting, cleaning chemicals, advertising etc - 25 dollars per shift.
merchant services = 2%
marketing = 5 dollars per day minimum.

total costs: between 168 dollars and 255 dollars.
total profit= between 32 dollars and -55 dollars daily. = monthly 800 dollars and -1375 dollars

= not enough to pay the rent.

I merely sated that offering breakfast vs. not offering it would at least cover the rent. Rent being a significant and fixed cost. Doing so allows all profit from Lunch or other meals to cover other expenses.   The point is it is next to impossible to only offer one meal a day and make a restaurant profitable, particularly if that one meal is not dinner. That creates a real catch-22 in terms of DT because it is so difficult to get dinner patrons there.   

[thelakelander]

Folk Food started out trying to establish a lunch and dinner crowd. Dinner never took off, so they attempted to expand to include breakfast. Unfortunately, their downtown location, which seriously lacks foot traffic after office workers leave, didn't work for what they were trying to do. Neither dinner nor breakfast was going to save them.