We just visited a fun place in New York- Junior’s Cheesecake, the original Brooklyn location….the picture is their counter and you can see the sky high lemon pies in the window…amazing and well worth a visit.
Andrew and I love the saying, “winners celebrate and losers read the rules”. It is a heartless yet truthful way of saying that people who come out on top do not usually say, well, shucks, this was because I had so many advantages…no way…we usually say that we had quite a bit to do with our success.
But when things aren’t going so well, it’s easy to look for someone or something to blame.
This summer’s sales were below plan for us. After we did our analysis, we realized it is almost entirely due to the sluggish sales at First Canadian Place – the other 2 stores beat their plans! So I was tempted to entirely blame the Pan Am Games during which many people chose to stay home rather than come downtown.
But with the brusque “losers read the rules” motto in mind, I asked Amy to brainstorm with me about ways in which we could better serve our busy FCP customers. She came up with the idea of offering to hold customers’ purchases so that they can just pick them up on their way home (many people do not trust their office fridges, it seems!).
We’ve avoided doing this in the past because our FCP store is the size of a closet and there’s very limited space. But Amy has made it work and customers appreciate the change. Whether this will actually make a difference to FCP sales in the long run, I don’t yet know. But I think that when something is off-kilter, it’s a good habit to look for one’s own role in the problem, not just “read the rules” to find something “out there” to pin it on.
