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Before: Breakfast and lunch were contract-stable. The grab-and-go coolers and micromarket were supposed to be incremental margin. Instead they were a leak: comps for the sales team, unlogged pulls for the early shift, and vendors dropping extras "to try" that never made it to a receiving log. The GM had a friendly relationship with the client. That made honest numbers feel like betrayal. What was broken: There was no line between hospitality and unmanaged retail. Free coffee for VIPs was not tracked. Birthday cakes for client departments lived in a gray zone. Finance on the contract side saw one picture. The operator saw another. Neither was lying. They were looking at different weeks.
We split the world into two ledgers on paper even if the customer still sees one experience: contract meals vs retail SKUs. Retail got the same rules as a small store: open, count, close, variance. We wrote a one-page policy on comps: who can authorize, daily cap, and how it posts. No policy meant everything was a comp. Client reporting moved to Friday noon with the same fields every week. If a number jumped, it had a SKU or a station name attached.
Retail stopped subsidizing the contract. The client actually trusted the reports because they stopped contradicting the invoice footnotes. The GM kept the relationship. The numbers stopped being a fight in the hallway.