Lowell Frame

Build a reduced-service plan and write it down before you need it, because you will never design one well at 7am with a queue forming.

Mine is a laminated sheet: on a solo day the menu drops to four items that can be made in under three minutes, the table service stops and everything becomes counter and collect, and a sign goes on the door saying limited menu today. Turnover on a solo day is about 60% of normal instead of 30%, and crucially nobody walks out angry because expectations were set at the door.

Second thing is a paid on-call arrangement. I pay one person 20 to be reachable on Saturday mornings whether or not I call. That has cost me maybe 400 a year and saved two days like yours.

There is your answer, and it is a scheduling problem rather than a sickness problem. Cheaper to fix too.

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.

Agreed. I split my main lines across two suppliers at roughly 70/30 purely so the 30 exists when I need it.

Read the agreement before you do anything else, specifically for a price variation clause. Plenty of wholesale agreements let them adjust with notice, in which case the term you thought you had is a delivery commitment rather than a price lock. If there is no such clause, an 18% jump mid-term is something you can push back on, and pushing back does work more often than people expect — usually not to zero, but to a smaller increase, a phased one, or the old price honoured on your top two lines.

When I have done this the thing that worked was being specific: your volume, how long you have bought from them, and a number you can live with. "This is difficult for us" gets nothing. "We buy 340 units a month, we have been with you four years, we can absorb 8% now and the rest in March" gets a phone call.

Also check whether Monday clients simply rebook to Tuesday or Saturday rather than disappearing. In my shop about 60% of them did, so the real cost was much lower than the headline.

Renting it out for evenings had not occurred to me at all. That covers the 300 immediately even at a modest rate.

It has crept up from about three to eight, so it is climbing, just slowly. That is more encouraging than the raw number felt.