The sound of silence
The August “menu” or schedule is just about here, which of course means one of the toughest months for restaurants and of course a make-or-break month for many in the meal prep business. Of course your web site needs to be up and running if you’re going to even have a chance of participating in the summer months.
Dream Dinners is going to play the Martha and Emeril card for the summer. Not a bad play, but is that really reaching the right market? I think Martha’s great and Emeril has a great flair for what he does, but are they really the icons of the soccer Mom? It might work, but it seems more cost effective grilling fair may have worked. We’ll see what they pull out for their August menu.
Super Suppers still seems to be MIA. I haven’t heard anything from Judy and crew for the past few months. They hit the ground running by offering pizza to a pizza-saturated nation and then nothing. And strangely, the pizza idea was done many many months earlier by Make and Take Gourmet. And not to be left out Dream Dinners offered their pizza variation a year or so ago. Kinda timely, kinda gimmicky, but this certainly isn’t the road less traveled.
But where is Judy? Where is the summer excitement? What is she going to offer that bring in the customers? For those who pay attention to the meal prep business the end of the month is an exciting time and the menu and flavors change. Why haven’t we seen anything? Why is she waiting until the last minute? MA should be trying to ride the coattails of the Fourth of July celebrations with all sorts of outdoor offerings. I can’t say I get the sense of any of that.
We right at the cusp of the summer downturn and instead of greeting customers with exciting ways to make summer fun and make it easier and more convenient to be outdoors, customers are being greeted with nothing but silence.
Now is not a good time to just be hanging out and hoping for the best or seeing how things play out. The main meal assembly franchisors really are taking a back seat to what very well could be the last summer for many of their stores.
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June 27th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
The sound of silence you hear is the evidence that MA franchisors have NO CLUE what is wrong or how to fix it, and you can bet that each one of them has an exit strategy that is strangely like the one Marcia Hale had when she sold to another clueless Franchisor.
The silence you hear is the shutting of the door, as the last franchised MA store closes. One meal assembly HO told a closing franchisee that the email they got from them telling them of their decision to close was just one of many they had gotten lately. This same franchisor is planning on “taking the country by storm” according a recent entry on the “coming soon”- section of their website. This particular MA company is losing 4-6 of remaining 17 stores. Talk about delusion!
The positive thinking thing is working real well for them!
The sad part is the human toll this is taking on those who have worked so hard for so long for so little, only to be told by the likes of Michelle Belloso of MTG, Stephanie of Dream Dinners and all the other Zors who point the finger at their franchisees and tell them it’s all their fault.
Or the franchisors who buy another MA company with no apparent plan in place to move the co-companies forward and help struggling stores become viable. Or someone who said the pendulum is going to swing in the other direction, and MA will survive. The place that pendulum is going to swing is into all the MA franchisees who are left standing and knock them down like bowling pins.
This is so sad..