Marketing / Supervision

We started the day with a rambling odds n' ends. Slovak Ricky Martin went to Perry Street, loved it, and didn't really say anything too enlightening other than impressing on us that he must have real hi-falutin' taste. Based on the pizza restaurant menu layout the class developed, Guy brought our suggestions to his graphic designer, to which the designer got offended and acted really defensive. In Guy's own words, the guy is a serious guinea (ginny?) and is old school. As a designer myself, I suspect the guy's skill set is out of date and his defensiveness means he should have been fired a long time ago. I told the class about the poster I saw in the window of a Burger King (above) for apple fries -- fresh apples cut and packaged to look like french fries, with caramel served in a packet like ketchup. Basically, the least healthy way of serving apples possible. On one hand, cool, they're selling fresh fruit to kids. On the other hand: they're training them to associate french fries with health. It's like trying to make healthy food look like porn food to make it appealing, when really what makes it healthy should be enough. Like sex -- does sex need to be porno sex to be appealing? Come on!

Next we reviewed a marketing case study of a fictional restaurant called the 'Juicy Rib' (ewww!) The place is trying to figure out the best way to roll out new products, but need to know demographics to determine what it should be: cheap? expensive? lunch? dinner? eat in? take out? beefy? veggie? butchie? girlie? By using data sets from the census and in-store polls of current customers, the details of income, age and living area kind of filtered into a logic that answers the questions. Wednesday we'll pick this apart farther.

Richard gave out an outline for a basic restaurant business plan, and reviewed it. It wasn't that big, and we have a whole 4 months to complete it...fictionally if desired....and still some students were twittering like it's so much work. Jeez, people, you don't have to work very hard to write your plan, but don't expect any investor to give over funds to pay for your half-assedness.

We closed out class with a short case study out of our supervision text. A shmoe at a restaurant is a hard line worker for a few years, gets promoted to manager, is determined to be a nice guy, unlike the hard-ass nit-picker who was the previous manager, and promptly becomes hated and steamrolled by his fellow employees who once were his friends. Why? Well, management should have promoted him to a a place where he wasn't working with his ex-equals, they should have given the employees a heads up, Shmoe should have thought more of being effective and less about being nice and, in my opinion, if moving him to another department wasn't an option, they should have given him a salary raise without a promotion. And Shmoe should have quit and gotten a management job somewhere else. Like, say, me!