Pastries 1/2 price after 4pm

[onocoffee]

As an espresso bar owner who sells baked products (both in-house and suppliers), I disagree with the others.

While I certainly understand the point of "not discounting" your product, the alternative is to take a complete loss on the product you throw away or give to charities. Actually, in the case of the charity, you're losing even more since you have to freeze, store and deliver the product, which costs you.

In our situation, we sell fresh product all day and then whatever is leftover is sold tomorrow as Day Old, Buy Two For The Price Of One. I designed it that way so we move whatever is left (the customer is essentially paying half but we're getting rid of two pieces).

Now, there's the argument that your customers will wait for the cheaper product and we certainly have a segment of our customers that wait to buy the old product. However, as time has gone by and we've tightened our ordering and our understanding of volume, their window of opportunity has diminished while our profitability has increased.

Let's say last year we averaged having six muffins left over for Day Olds tomorrow. Now we've got it down so that on most days all of our muffins are sold at full price and there's nothing left for Day Olds. We've tightened our operations and maximized profitability - and while we were learning our consumption, we got some cash for the Day Olds.

Without a doubt, some weeks just swing differently and we end up with more Day Olds than usual. It happens. Our discount customers finally find the bargain they've been hunting for and it helps to keep them in the game.

To my mind, the key is to differentiate between the offerings. You can have our FRESH PRODUCT or take your chances with the old stuff. The customer has some level of choice and the potential remains that they'll like or dislike the old stuff enough that they'll feel compelled to try the fresh stuff.

[K8memphis]

This just reminds me of the story of the day old day olds.

Once upon a time I worked for this donut place for about 2 days or two hours or something, way too long to say the least.

They fried their doughnuts in the afternoon--don't even ask me.

'Special formula' they said.

Then the ones they deemed 'day old' that would no longer be sold as 'fresh' were then dutifully put last in line of all the previous day olds of which there were legion. If you can follow that. The whole freaking place was day old. But to get to the most current day old you had to wait a few days.

Far beyond truly pathetic.