General

You sell service. At the heart of any successful restaurant operation is the soul of service. Customers walk in, drive through or pull up to our businesses dozens or hundreds of times a day. If those people are exactly the same when they leave, that means we’ve failed. “Product expertise can be duplicated,” says author Martha Rogers, “so any competitive advantage based on products eventually will go away. But customer expertise is competitively defendable, unique and permanent.”

More wisdom from Jim Sullivan

UK supermarket chain Tesco is introducing the Trim Trolley, a grocery cart that offers a workout while you shop. The shopper can choose the resistance level on their cart, thereby making pushing a cart feel like an uphill battle. The cart also has the technology to monitor the number of calories burned after any shopping workout.

https://reveries.com/cool_news/2004/october/oct_29a.html

Shanghai Surprise II. Back in the 1940s, it was known as the “Paris of the East,” but today some are calling Shanghai, “The People’s Republic of Starbucks,” reports Veronica Gould Stoddart in USA Today. Consider this: In “the room where Mao founded the Chinese Communist Party in 1921,” is “now a yuppified entertainment complex of restored traditional houses called Xintiandi,” where “tourists, expats and moneyed Shanghainese, palming cellphones, pack its hot jazz clubs and cooler-than-cool eateries to dine on risotto of mud crab with black Chinese truffles.” Even more dramatic is the change in Shanghai’s skyline.

The owners of France’s 60,000 bars, brasseries and cafes have said poor service is driving customers away, and have promised to do better.

After a particularly difficult summer, the industry has decided to work hard at attracting customers.

It will set up a new institute to tackle the problems and a charter of quality to improve service, comfort levels, products and hygiene.

The project will be presented to the tourism minister next month.

https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3661636.stm

Seems that what we in the industry have known for year is now… well trendy… i guess

“Drinkers v. Diners. “You can’t be just a great mixologist — you have to provide hospitality,” says Paul Grieco of Hearth, a N.Y.C. bar and restaurant, commenting on a trend toward people having dinner at the bar, as quoted by William L. Hamilton in The New York Times. “You can’t be a bartender anymore … You have to be a top-notch sommelier, a top-notch waiter, a top-notch food runner,” he says. It’s not that Paul Grieco is unhappy about that, though. In fact, Hearth anticipated bar diners in its design, including “stations for plates, napkins and silverware below the bar as well as for barware. And bars, from front to back, are wider, to accommodate table settings.” Indeed: “According to bartenders, managers and owners across New York, bar space at most restaurants has become de facto dining
space.”

Read the article at https://reveries.com/cool_news/2004/august/aug_18b.html

A former computer programmer quit his job and became the Soup Peddler

AUSTIN, TEXAS ? David Ansel, aka the Soup Peddler, is standing on the back patio of his magnificently funky south Austin home, dressed only in shorts and a smile, his mop-top of curls pleasantly unruly. He unsheathes a machete, holds it high above his head (both for power and dramatic effect), and then whacks down hard, halving the acorn squash on the tray before him. [Read more…] about Texas's freewheeling soupmaker

FoodBALL by CAMPER (24/05/2004)

22 years after the opening of the first shoe shop on Calle Muntaner in Barcelona, CAMPER has begun to diversify in the same city, by opening a health food shop

[Read more…] about FoodBALL by Camper

https://www.reveries.com/reverb/revolver/obesity_marketing/

What is the relationship between marketing and obesity? What should marketers be doing to address the issue? Which marketers are doing the best job of turning the obesity issue to their advantage?