First January with the cafe open. December was excellent, and takings for the first three weeks of January are running about 40% below the December average and roughly 25% below October. Same hours, same menu, no obvious change in the street. I cannot tell whether this is an ordinary seasonal dip that everyone knows about or a sign that something is wrong with my business.
Use the quiet weeks rather than trying to fight them. January is when I do deep cleaning, staff training, supplier reviews, photographing the menu for the year, and taking my own holiday. Trying to discount your way out of a seasonal trough mostly trains your regulars to wait for discounts.
If you do want to do something, make it a reason to come rather than a price cut. A new hot dish for the cold weeks worked far better for us than 20% off ever did.
I had a half-formed plan to run a January promotion. Rethinking that.
Plan for it in the accounts rather than emotionally. I now treat December's surplus as January and February's float and do not touch it, which turns a frightening month into a boring one. The first year I did not do that and spent December's takings in December.
Also worth trimming hours rather than the menu if the drop is footfall. Look at your takings by hour for the last three weeks — the first and last hour of the day are often costing you more in wages than they bring in during January, and closing an hour early for six weeks is invisible to most customers.
Second year is much calmer purely because you have last January to compare against. Write down this year's weekly numbers somewhere you will find them, and next January becomes a data question instead of a panic.
@lowell_frame · 6mo ago · 3 replies
Comparing January to December is the mistake. December is the anomaly, not January — it has parties, gifts, people in town shopping, and higher spend per head. Almost every food and retail business drops steeply in January, and 30-40% off December is squarely in the normal range for a cafe.
The comparison that tells you something is January against your own October and against the same month last year once you have one. You are 25% below October, which is a real seasonal dip but not an alarm on its own.
What I would actually look at: is the drop in customer count or in spend per head? Fewer people is weather and seasonality. Same people spending less is a menu and pricing question. Your till data can tell you that in ten minutes and it changes what you should do about it.
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@till_and_tally · 6mo ago
That split is a healthy sign. The version that worries me is flat footfall with falling spend, because that usually means people are trading down for a reason.
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@smalltalk_sol · 6mo ago
Customer count is down about 18% and average spend is down about 9%. So mostly footfall, which I can live with.
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