If your bread is square, and if each side is 4 inches long, you have 16 inches of crust. Cut that bread down the middle, and you get 8 inches of crust-free surface. Cut that same bread diagonally, Calter calculates, and you end up with almost 11 inches of crustless surface. That's a substantial increase.
The number 3 has always been more popular than 4, says Calter, who writes about the intersection of math, art and culture. Three is mother, father and child, he says. Three is the beginning, middle and end. Three is birth, life and death. Without three, there could not be a best — only a good and a better.
As they struggle to keep customers and pay the monthly bills, restaurants are swapping food for services like oven-hood cleaning and pest control.
Bartering helps restaurants fill seats, reassuring prospective customers who might be turned off by the sight of a vacant eatery. It also attracts new customers when tradespeople bring friends along, reduces some costs, and helps retain employees who can't scoop tips off empty tables.
Scramblers, a breakfast diner in Springfield, Mo., got a roommate last June: Andoro's Pizzeria.
The Italian eatery moved into the same restaurant as the bacon-and-eggs joint to keep costs down for both businesses. The arrangement has allowed a new restaurant to open, and an existing one to stay afloat in a tough economy.
The idea is not new, however just like a lot of people are moving back in with family or taking on boarders to help defray the cost this restaurant rented out the night business which was laying fallow. Forget the logistics for a moment and concentrate only on the concept piece. Is this a workable business idea? I think it is, we are not taking about a hot dog stand also serving pizza, salad, and beer. We are talking about two distinct concepts sharing a space, sharing customers, and sharing infrastructure. It can work when dayparts are distinct, however it can also work when it isn't such as lunch in this case. It will not be long before savy entrepruneurs start testing new concepts with the confines of their exisiting ones
We added—yes, I said ADDED—51 million jobs.
And we lost 57 million jobs.
That is, bizarre as it may seem, in the space of a year there was a churn of over ONE HUNDRED MILLION jobs. (Micro-tizing the math, we didn't "lose a job"—on average, we created 8 jobs and lost 9 jobs for a net of minus 1—and repeated that musical chairs drill enough times to end up 6 million in the hole.)
And this is how it always goes, though typically, thank God, the pluses exceed the minuses.
Write it down. Post it on the wall. What would happen if you spent 100% of that amount on each of your next ten new customers? That's more money than you have to spend right now, I know that, but what would happen? Imagine how fast you would grow, how quickly the word would spread.
Imagine if your staff embraced customers as lifetime partners in the business. Actively tried to build a book of business by their service and in doing so grew the restaurant. Imagine that every customer is not a single transaction, but a continual stream of transactions. How do you treat that customer? Why are you not doing that to every customer that walks in the door? This is a cultural discussion, your establishment either treats all their customers as a relationship or it does not.
It is pretty obvious which establishments value the lifetime customer!
This confirms a tip I've heard before that when doing a presentation you will be more successful if you stand to the left (as you face the audience). Of course then more of what you say will reach the right ear than the left ear.
The explanation is that sound in the right ear goes to the left brain hemisphere, which is used more for verbal communication. The left hemisphere also has been associated with approach behaviour as opposed to the right hemisphere avoidance tendency.
Now a team of chemists at McMaster University in Ontario have published a paper in Analytical Chemistry that describes a new biomonitoring technique using treated paper on a stick that can quickly identify trace amounts of pesticides in your chicken soup, or your first early morning cup of joe.
As reported in R&D:
The scientists describe the development of a new paper-based test strip that changes color shades depending on the amount of pesticide present. In laboratory studies using food and beverage samples intentionally contaminated with common pesticides, the test strips accurately identified minute amounts of pesticides. The test strips, which produced results in less than 5 minutes, could be particularly useful in developing countries or remote areas that may lack access to expensive testing equipment and electricity, they note.
