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The reality is that the traditional fish and chip shop is rapidly becoming a general purpose fast food takeaway and why not? You are doing this as a business with the objective of making money not because you are being precious about the identity of the nations favourite dish.
The market in the UK for Fast food and takeaway is in excess of £8billion per year so there is no doubt the market is there, but you will find unless you are a rare exception or unless you live in a rural area, 90% of your customers will be from within a few miles of your premises. That is a very important fact to understand and take into consideration for the following reasons;
1) Most of your business will rely on repeats, this is where customer loyalty schemes can be invaluable and there are hundreds of possibilities when it comes to customer loyalty.
2) You are very vulnerable to competition on price as well as quality, you can guarantee that your competitors are spying out your business on a weekly basis, checking to see what deals you are doing, new products you may be introducing and trying to keep one step ahead.
3) The perception of your business is vitally important, you can see this in the UK over the last few years in the way that fish & chip shop owners have in the main had to smarten up their premises and make them look modern and clean with major investments in new frying ranges which can cost up to £70-80,000
My local chippy owner, a Greek gentleman who had been in the business all his life, had told me that he had doubled his business for one week just by doing a specially priced family meal deal. He knew he would not keep that up long term, but what it had done was to bring in customers that up to that point had been loyal to one of his competitors with a shop less than a mile away.
A month later his takings were still improved and he reckoned that it had brought in at least 20-30 new repeat customers.
Whilst this is one way of improving your business it is only as good as long your competitor is bad, and at worst it could start a price war that you may not win.
Chip shops and takeaways in general can be very profitable business, but they do have their downsides;
1) They are expensive to start
2) They involve long term commitment to property
3) They are generally open 7 days a week meaning you won’t get a lot of time to spend with the family/freinds etc
4) They require your constant attention, to put managers in charge is to potentially invite disaster
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