It's been a year, and I feel a lot when I come back to read the article. In fact, I planned to write articles from time to time before, but I always used "busy" as an excuse to not come.

So what did I do this year?

I worked in a university coffee shop for two semesters, that is, one year, and left at the beginning of this month. Actually, it's not quitting. Because the business of that cafe was not transferred well, I naturally left.

I have gained a lot this year. I plan to share it to make a summary, talk about beverage making, talk about customer management, talk about store management, and talk about how to do coffee business in universities. It's better to consider it as a repeat study this year.

Through this year's work, the conclusion is that the coffee business in universities is really hard to do, coffee has not been popularized, and the cost cannot be reduced. Students' understanding and demand for coffee still stays at the stage of instant coffee, which is doomed that coffee is not a fast business in universities and can only be cultivated slowly.

1. It is difficult to increase the unit price of customers, and it is necessary to rely on the volume to make a profit.

Cafe is located in a normal university in Changsha. There are nearly 30 thousand teachers and students in the school, with a ratio of 2:8. Most of the students are contracted normal students, and their economic level is not very high. The average price of food in the canteen is 6 yuan, which doomed the price of drinks in cafes to be different from that in 22 yuan and 28 yuan from the very beginning.

Besides coffee, we also have fruit tea, milk tea, fresh milk, pizza, cakes and other snacks, so our average price is about 12 yuan, and we can only sell them by low-priced snacks.

2. The competition is fierce and there is no first-Mover advantage.

The coffee shop is in the life square next to the girls' dormitory, which matches the customers of the coffee shop very well, but on the other side, there are chain drink shops such as Mi Xue Bing Cheng, Gong Cha, Yigu Pavilion and Typhoon Shelter.

The average price of Honey Snow Ice City and Typhoon Shelter is 6 yuan, which is the same as that of canteen. Some products such as ice cream 2 yuan and a large number of drinks from 4 yuan and 5 yuan are listed. The average price of Yigu Pavilion in 8 yuan is lower than ours. The average price of tribute tea 10 yuan is still lower than ours.

Therefore, if the product has no characteristics and is not a coffee lover, it is difficult to compete with them in a short time.

3. The turnover rate is low, especially in the final stage.

There are six tables and eight seats near the wall in the shop. Ideally, this shop can hold 30 people. Usually, unless the weather is very hot or cold, it will be full (because the store is equipped with air conditioning). Many times, there are only three or five people in the shop, and even at dinner time, one person is busy.

However, in the last half of each semester, because it is exam week, students begin to review their lessons in the store, but it is not bad to just consume a drink from morning till night, and a table can be turned over twice.

Every morning, the cafe opens on 10, and the store is full around 1 1: 30. As long as the drinks ordered by these 30 students are finished, they will basically not be very busy this day, with an average daily sales of 1000 yuan, and the average daily sales at other times are around 400-500 yuan, which is far from supporting the operating costs and rental costs.

The boss is a layman and hardly helps the shop.

Cafe is a collaboration between a female boss who knows coffee and a male boss who doesn't know coffee. The female boss is the manager of another coffee shop and works in that coffee shop every day. Unless I have a rest, she will take my place and usually won't come to the store. The male boss used to be a layman in home improvement, but now he is over 50 years old. He helps me make some simple drinks in the shop every day.

In addition to helping me every day, the male boss spends most of his time sitting in front of the computer watching news, such as military news, international competitions and sports news. It can be said that in 10 hour, 6 hours are spent watching news and playing games.

According to our thinking, he should go to the school community to talk about cooperation and join the school community to do a series of promotional activities. Maybe because of my spare time, I'm a little shy. A year has passed, and no community activities have been done, and the publicity activities have not been done well.

Unfortunately, I missed a lot of business.

5. Product update is slow

Drinks are fast-moving products, and the iterative speed of product update must be fast, otherwise consumers will easily lose their freshness, especially after 00 and 90, and their attention will be dispersed quickly. Last month, you seemed to be chasing dirty bread from online celebrities, but this month you are chasing dirty milk tea.

Therefore, in the university campus, if the price of your products can't go down any more, then the speed of refreshing drinks must be fast, so as to attract their attention all the time and let them spend it frequently.

It's a pity that our coffee shop didn't do this.

The menu was updated three times in two semesters, and the last update was in early May this year. However, it was proposed to update the menu in March at the beginning of school, which was delayed for more than a month. Nothing was done in the middle. Finally, I spent a week debugging the new product at the end of April, and then I went online when I came back from the May Day holiday. I didn't do a good job in preheating and promoting new products. Third, I didn't do a good job in the marketing of the whole store.

Therefore, after the menu is updated, the sales volume in the store has hardly changed, but the cost of materials has risen, and there are more materials to be prepared, which makes the waste more serious.

It is wrong to blindly expand the category when the customer unit price and transaction rate cannot be improved.

These are the five main reasons why the store was transferred. In fact, there are many other reasons, such as the taste of drinks is not suitable for school students, such as customer relationship management is not done well, and so on. In the future, I will write another article.

In fact, the lease is still one year, and it is no problem to renew it. However, the female boss felt too tired to run at both ends, and the male boss couldn't see the hope of profit and wanted to stop the loss in time, so the two hit it off and decided to transfer the cafe.

Then I lost my job. But it doesn't matter. With this experience, you can avoid stepping on a few pits when opening a coffee shop in the future.

An old pioneer lost his horse-a blessing in disguise is a blessing in disguise.