h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi folks
I've always had a vague ambition to run a deli shop and with the rats running faster where I am I wondered if anyone could give me some tips on the pitfalls to avoid?
All contributions gratefully accepted

I will help in anyway I can...planning to open a coffeeshop in a couple years.

What do you know so far about the way you want to run your deli? How do you envision it?

Where do you live?...this might effect the advice everyone gives.

Andrea

My after several years in all sorts of food service establishments:

Learn how to do your own books. Even if you delegate the task, you should know how to check the bottom line.

Take a course in food safety and get a copy of the current health codes(this can save you a lot of money in fines later). It is easier to train employees from the beginning that *this* is the way to handle food properly than it is to break bad habits later.

There are more details on the labor/supplies/expenses vs. profit...but, I won't bore you with that unless you want the fifty cent spiel.

Yes...hygiene is a big issue to your customers...and getting your employees to practice it can be very difficult.

I finance my stay here in this university town by working at a restaurant. Today I had to tell a manager to tell an employee to make sure to wash his hands after break. This young man was sitting in his car picking at every pimple he had...when he saw me he moved himself to the back seat to do it...this rather vigorous picking and scratching went on for a whole half hour...and as I predicted he did not wash his hands until he was finally forced to.

This also happened when I went to a Chinese restaurant earlier this week. My server was eating and when my ordered was placed, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand to clean it and then expected to serve my food. I asked his manager to tell him to wash his hands.

One more example...a customer came into the restaurant where I work and said her order was wrong. We knew that she was lying. She proceeded to make a big scene with all sorts of threats. These threats included calling the health department and saying that a person was not wearing gloves...this person was not preparing food at all at the time-he was just standing staring at her and her scene. This is the kind of situation involving hygiene where it is really unclear what to do...someone can just make something up and you could receive a fine.

Then you also run into unethical practices. One restaurant that I worked at the health department employee would tip them off every time he came to do an inspection. This is unethical and illegal. Know the law so you don't get in trouble.

I think the idea about training the employees right from the start is excellent. Developing a training and maybe even a certification system is a good idea.

Here in Iowa, USA for instance if your establishment serves alcohol...a upscale deli could at some point if it was sort of coffeeshop or cafeish in atmosphere....you have to have more toilets to serve alcohol. Buildings have been delayed in their completion for long periods of time to comply with such laws. KNOW THE LAWS>

Excellent examples of hygeine issues. I've worked in one place that never bothered about expiration dates unless the food "looked" bad. That is a great way to cause an outbreak of food poison.

There is a deli here(Louisiana) that specializes in gourmet food packed to take home. This deli also carries wine and special beers. By not serving the food, they kind of circumvent the need for extra public facilities.

I worked for a place that did the same thing...four hours was not an unusual amount of time for a sandwich to sit out...they finally stopped one day when they had enough problems over it but until then I got yelled at when I would throw things out.

I like the idea about not serving the alcohol. I never thought of that.

My beginning in the industry was the usual fast food restaurant cashier/server position. After a few years I worked my way up to Kitchen Manager at a natural food store.

The fast food place was always trying to cut corners, and that policy came from the top down.

The natural food store was constantly short staffed, but that was no excuse for poor quality food. There are ways to save time and money with food prep without compromising quality. I would prep batches of things at the same time that were for different menu items. Some things can easily be doubled and stored in the freezer.

It would be a good idea to get some experience working in a deli shop before going off on your own, at the same time reading up everything on all applicable laws, regulations, ....

Wow, thanks folks! This was a slow-burning question at first, but lots of useful stuff here including a few things I hadn't thought of. I work in a Building Society in the North of England and live in a small town that seems to have a shortage of Deli....
I know it's not going to be easy, as there's a lot of hygiene regulation that needs to be understood. On the cash side, I have a very basic understanding of the accounts!

Thanks again!

Ah - an ambition I kind of share. If you ever want to go into partnership...

As far as delis are concerned, a very important factor would be: know your customer.

For example, if someone opened a deli in my hometown of Scunthorpe, they would more-than-likely go bust within the month (in fact, this exactly has happened). People in that particular locale are just not interested in buying speciality meats and cheeses if the same things are available (albeit at much lower quality) at Tesco.

You'd be wanting to focus your attention on a small market town which is not reliant on the farming industry (no cash there, sadly). Look at the reputation Ludlow now has for high-quality deli food.

B

do a search for delis on the internet,put them in your favorites and slowly work your way through looking at them for inspiration.

.... and draw up a business plan. This fancy wording means sitting down with a (big) piece of paper and working out things like profit margins, how much you need to take in to be able to pay suppliers, rent, employees, taxes, incidentals, shop furnishings and .... if there's anything left... yourself.

Have you found potential suppliers, what are deliveries like, how much credit will they allow you, what is a reasonable mark-up...

You'll need to work out if you can run the shop on your own (difficult to handle cash and food without using up millions of those thrown-away gloves) and whether to employee someone.
See if there are any tax-breaks available for ANYTHING...

You also have to work out how long you can survice on earning nothing/very little and what your absolutely basic bottom line is for income for the 1st year...

Lots of people in the thread have mentioned cutting corners; well, I'd suggest learning where you can "trim" while maintaining quality...

A final word, never pay for anything you can have for free.... (i.e. get as much tax advice as you can from the tax office, employment advice from the JobCentre or whatever).

Having your own business CAN be a lot of fun but it is almost certainly an awful lot of worry and work...

Hope I haven't put you off !

And be prepared for a major constituent of your diet to be out-of-date cheese and meats that no-one else will eat.

B

see if your insurance will allow you to give items that are still good to the poor...most restaurants waste so much either because of their insurance or pure greed...be different ....be compassionate

Andrea(who threw out over 50 salads that where perfectly good...don't know how much it was but it was over 16 pounds...it is my company policy and these were nice salads.)

Not perhaps just "pure greed"..... you have to find an organisation that will handle this produce and comply with their regulations to ensure that you are not giving potential harmful/poorly stored produce to people. Indeed, if you start giving away things DIRECTLY to the poor, many of your customers will become upset (... I'M a CUSTOMER and (s)he never gives anything to ME...), more and more people in the know will become "poor", and you'll have more people standing in line for free food than for buying food and keeping you in business. PLUS, an organisation will attest what you have given to them (to prove that there is no artistic fudging between what you sell and what you give that might be considered as tax evasion). I'm not familiar with your tax regulations, but they may limit your donations in kind to charity to a percentage of your profits.

For someone just starting in business (fighting with VAT calculations, unblocking toilets, setting up employment contracts, getting rid of a mouse you've just discovered in the cellar, .....), this would involve an extra task. And as a small business, you should try to manage sell-by dates and fresh perishables very finely...

Once you've developed a chain of Deli's - or are otherwise rolling in money - obviously it will be easier to work out a system for dignified contributions for charity...

Sorry to seem so harsh but running a small business can be tough!

Too harsh, perhaps, but I'm speaking as someone whose parents worked their guts out between 1980 and 1988, when I was a kid, making their deli *work*. And it did, but those eight years put twenty years on my dad and gave my mum diabetes.

Food shops are intensely hard work, as soon as you start considering the Health Inspectors, who are (IIRC and if they're anything like they used to be) every bit as difficult & hard to predict as the other people in this thread have suggested. "Doing the books" used to keep my dad at work between close of business at 7:30pm and 9:30 or 10pm every night; the Health Inspectors were a continual source of worry for both parents; and customers with a grudge or personal issues came in and made life hard for them. Oh, and the local thugs... My dad was warned by one of the staff, who was warned by his friend on the sly, that a group were planning to bash him over the head and run off with the day's takings. We were located next door to the bank, so he used to go next door with a bag full of money. Very trusting, I suppose, but what are you supposed to do in that situation? Hire Group4 to run next door for you?

On the other hand, I have intensely fond memories of the luxury of my parents giving dinner parties with salads gleaned from the salad bar, cheeses no one else had heard of (they sold 79 there), and exotic wines. I remember Easter Eggs all year (slightly discoloured by February of the following year!) and foreign chocolates - by that time, I turned my nose up at Cadbury and went straight for Swiss and Belgian chocs! I remember how one dodgy part of London was put on the map by the delicatessen - how people came from all areas of London to eat my mum's home-made soup - how it was featured in more than one of the London-wide magazines - how a number of trendy TV stars used to eat there (I was impressed by someone who acted in Grange Hill, but my parents actually did the catering for the opening of ITV's TV-am).

But those memories don't make up for the way it wore my parents out. I'm sure they'd be healthier and hardier now, if they hadn't worked like slaves for 8 years, just trying to make it the place it turned into.

Oh, well, a trip down nostalgia lane for me, but a very real warning for you, that running a small food shop (they served food on the premises by the way) is a HUGE amount of work - and you really should be warned of those pitfalls and others.

Good luck, whatever you decide.

x x Driven By Baby

But what about sending home what is still good with employees???...KFC's in my area divide it up between all employees working??? Okay you don't know what they are going to do with it??? Then let them eat it for free on their break.

Hi Harpo,

you seem to have left the thread or did you just get out your rat-whip for the race you're already in ?

No not left it, but the day job has been all-consuming [pun intended?] for the last week or two, and my children had a birthday!

I'm ploughing through lots of useful stuff, for which I thank all the contributors

great that you are finding something helpful from this thread