Thoughts on a friday morning
2005.09.30
- I have this most awesome idea for a sandwich shop. It should use gourmet bread and nice ingredients like Panera, and should have a set menu like Panera. But you know how Panera introduces new sandwich/salads every now and then? Well, instead of that, we give the customers an option to make his/her own sandwich. Kind of like how you make your own pasta at Macaroni Grill. You get a sheet of paper, with say, 24 lines, and a list of all ingredients. Aside from the bread, which you choose from a list, you can put anything you want in the sandwich. You should enter the ingredients in proportion. So if you only want half ham, half swiss, you should bracket 12 of the lines together and write ham and bracket the 12 lines to note swiss. It's like divv'ing up the available ingredient space of the sandwich by 24 portions and you enter how many portions you want dedicated to each ingredient. The prices of a portion of each ingredient is also listed. The price gets tallied up and rung up at the register.
Now this is only the first step. So far it is just an extremely precise version of "make your own sandwich". The kicker is that the owner of the store will pick one sandwich he likes most from the "customer entries" every month (or biweekly, or whatever) and put it up on the board next to the set menus as "the Owner's Choice from Fan Entries". The "winner" would get, say, a 30 dollar gift certificate/card to the store. So at the same time we - encourage people to come back by introducing variety in the sandwiches
- save the trouble of inventing new sandwiches by delegating it to the customers
- making the store feel like part of the "community".
- I've found out how the construction workers for the new library have lunch. It seems that they have a caterer come in every day. The "caterer" is one of those "food truck" things and serves pizza, wings, etc out the back.
- Yargh. Condi Rice is visiting. They disallowed parking along the Armory (lot 15). And there were plenty of Yellow Jackets directing traffic. (Actually, I didn't find out about Rice's visit until I saw all the Yellow Jackets and started wondering why parking lots are blocked off.) This reminded me of that one time when Mr. Bush visited Argonne and secret service stopped us from even walking across the Argonne campus (they stopped us about fifty yards from our lab).
Posted at 12:18:02 EDT by W