Things That Annoy Me, But Shouldn't

Oh shit, did somebody ask a liquor cost question? That's like one third of my life....

My liquor cost is exactly 25.8%. That includes cans of Bud Light, shots of Jameson, $3000 bottles of Romanee-Conti, and Tito's, Tito's, Tito's. I sell 16 bottles of Tito's vodka a week. I sold $1100 in just Tito's drinks in a weekend once.

25.8% is essentially a 400% markup. Buy for a dollar, sell it for four. But we don't look at it that way. We look at the cost, which philosophically filters everything through what we spend... not what we make. It's an important distinction. My restaurant is going to do $2.6 million in sales this year. Guess how much of that was profit? Zero dollars. We're going to break even, which is a fucking miracle considering the state of the place when I took it over 29 weeks ago.

Here's how bar/restaurant math works:

Take a dollar and split it into one hundred pennies.

For every dollar Homer's overlords make, 31 of them pay for all the food and booze we bought (69 pennies remaining).

26 pennies go to labor cost (43 pennies remaining). That includes the GM (me), my executive chef, sous chef, sushi chef, two assistant managers, seven line cooks, four prep cooks and stewards, seven servers, six bartenders, and five-ish FOH support staff (and if you've never had the pleasure of managing 35 personalities--including three Mary Sue chefs--in a building full of open alcohol containers--go break a glass rod off in your urinary tract... that will closely approximate the experience... seriously... what I tell all new/young managers is that you earn promotions based on your own skills and abilities, but once you're in charge of people, you're judged only by how everyone under your supervision performs... it's not about you anymore... it's about everyone else, and your only job is put them in a position to succeed and to remove any obstacles that might prevent them from achieving that... ).

Probably 10 more pennies are spent to pay for chemicals, paper goods ($500 a week), toilet paper, fresh flowers, pens, computer ink, etc. (33 pennies remaining)

Take another 10 pennies and toss them at rent, utilities, permits, and licensing fees. God forbid I don't have good WiFi so my dishwashers can have Facetime sex with their wives back home in Guatemala. Not a joke. I've seen this more than once. Actually, I think that's the coolest thing ever, just don't be doing it dry storage. (18 pennies left)

And are we going to pay taxes? Payroll, unemployment, property? Bet your fucking ass we are! And will we need to maintain our equipment? Low-boys, dish machines, stove hoods, grease traps... nothing can go wrong there. A room full of fire producing devices surrounded by grease and old wiring that is wayyyyyy out of code. There go your last 18 pennies... an we haven't even addressed the money you borrowed to open the joint and how you're going to make the loan payments.

Long story short, when you go to a restaurant and order a drink or a meal you don't see all the expenses that are needed to pour the booze into a cup.

 

Fucking A - and if you've hired a useless moron because your boss insisted, then when she doesn't perform that is also your fault ... this closely resembles what happened to me in my last job, and is directly related to why I took my current post with more pay and no line management responsibility

 

the thing about homers liquor cost applied to my issue is that there's no way a shot of gin and a blurt of tonic costs 26% of 11.50 ... you get about 20 shots to an optic bottle and the bottle costs £15, the tonic is about 20p per blurt.. so that's an ingredients cost of 95p which is somewhere south of 10% ... I don't have a problem with paying a 400% mark up - that's what you get fro drinking on a night out, but a 1100% mark up is taking the piss

 

That's overall for the year, and averages out the good weeks with the bad. So when it's busy as hell (like now for the Holidays) that'll drop down into the 15% range. When it's slow as fuck (like in the summer) it'll creep above 35% and my overlords burn me in effigy. They don't seem to understand that I can't tell all the cooks to go home.

Everything is my fault. That's the owner's favorite saying. Even when we had a tree blow down into the street he told me it was my fault. He was half-kidding, but he's right.

You're right. Mixed drinks cost pennies, which is why college bars make a fortune. But the liquor cost is an average of everything, and we sell a lot of martinis (5oz of booze) and high end wines that you can only mark up so far before they become prohibitive, even to the rich idiots we cater to.

Haha... you don't want that. I've been paying an accountant to do my taxes for as long as I've been able to afford one.

Nope. It's the same price. It varies a little by state, but in general, liquor is never discounted at any point in the sales chain. We occasionally get case deals though... like buy six cases get one free or something. We do that with Grey Goose. I think I bought twenty cases a few months ago and got three free. The bill for that was something like $6k, but it wasn't my money, so fuck it!

 

It's a controlled substance so there are civil and government regulations all over the place.

 

I think a tricorn sounds like a plan