You do not need industry statistics for this. You need four numbers from your own till, and an hour.
1. What one point costs you
Take last month's revenue. One percent of it is what a one-point discount costs — every month, forever.
A venue doing 88 mln so'm a month: 1% = 880 000 so'm a month. 10,5 mln a year.
Write your own number down before reading on. Everything below is measured against it.
2. The number you are already fighting for
Food cost from 38% to 36%, on that same 88 mln, saves 1,76 mln a month. That is two percent of revenue.
So is a two-percent give-back.
Two points of food cost and two points of discount are exactly the same money. One takes months of recipe discipline, stock counts and supplier arguments. The other leaves on a Tuesday afternoon, in cash, to someone whose name you never learn.
That is the bleed. Not loyalty — unmeasured loyalty.
3. What you are giving away right now
Count last month's comped items, staff discounts, "for a regular" gestures and completed stamp cards. Convert to so'm. Divide by revenue.
Most owners doing this for the first time find a number they did not expect. That percentage is your loyalty program, whether you designed one or not.
4. Which day actually needs help
Revenue by weekday, eight weeks, one column each. The gap between your best and worst day is the only place a discount can buy you anything.
A free coffee handed over on a full Saturday buys nothing — that guest was already standing there. You are paying to discount demand you already had. The same money, aimed at your worst Tuesday, buys a visit that would not have happened.
The four controls to demand from any system
Whatever you use — paper, a spreadsheet, a POS module — require all four. Without them the program cannot be bounded, and an unbounded program is the 2% above.
- A rate with a floor. A percentage of the bill or a flat amount — plus a minimum bill, so a single cup of tea does not earn.
- A ceiling. The most of any bill that bonuses may cover. The rest is money. A table can never come out free.
- Day targeting, with a cap. Double bonus on your worst day only, capped per order, so one large table cannot run away with it.
- A full record. Earned, spent, refunded, expired — on the guest's own history. So "why is my balance this?" always has an answer, and so you can tell whether the Tuesday offer moved anyone.
A paper stamp card fails three of the four. It has no ceiling, no day targeting and no record — which is why, when the card is finally full, you hand over the coffee without ever learning whose coffee it was. You paid the discount and got no information back.
Run the four numbers on your own month. If 1% is a figure that makes you uncomfortable, that is what an unmeasured program is already costing you.