In our previous post, we painted a picture of the chaos that ensues when a restaurant’s internet connection goes down. Now, let’s get down to brass tacks and talk numbers. The financial impact of losing restaurant connectivity is a full-blown disaster that can leave businesses reeling for weeks or months.
The Money Pit of Lost Revenue
- Cash Flow Crunch: Every minute your POS system is offline is like watching dollar bills fly out the window. An hour outage for a restaurant with an average order value of $30 and 50 orders per hour translates to $1,500 in lost sales. That’s money you’ll never get back.
- Online Ordering Evaporation: If online ordering makes up a significant chunk of your revenue, an outage is like slamming the brakes on a speeding car. Those orders disappear, leaving a gaping hole in your daily income.
The Unexpected Expenses That Pile Up
- Food Waste Frenzy: When orders can’t be processed or the kitchen gets backed up, perfect ingredients end up in the trash. That’s money going down the drain.
- Labor Overtime Avalanche: Suddenly, your staff is working overtime to deal with the mess. They have to take manual orders, process payments by hand, and clean up the chaos. Those extra labor costs add up fast.
The Lingering Shadow of Reputation Damage
- Customer Exodus: What constitutes a customer nightmare? Long lines, slow service, and the inability to use loyalty rewards. And unhappy customers will tell their friends (and leave scathing online reviews).
- Brand Erosion: Negative word-of-mouth and social media posts can quickly tarnish your restaurant’s reputation. Rebuilding that trust can be a long and costly process.
The 1% Downtime Disaster: A Real-Life Horror Story
Consider this: Even with a 99% uptime guarantee from your internet provider, you’ll still have 58 hours of annual downtime for a restaurant open 16 hours a day. If your average hourly sales are $430, and even a 50% reduction during downtime occurs, that’s over $12,000 in direct lost sales. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Add in lost profits, increased staff turnover, and the long-term impact on your brand, and the real cost is exponentially higher.
Don’t Become a Statistic
In our next post, we’ll explore how different types of restaurants – from fast-casual joints to upscale dining – face unique challenges during internet outages. Stay tuned to learn how to tailor a mitigation strategy to your specific needs and discover the game-changing solution that guarantees zero downtime for your restaurant.
We’ve explored the effects of connectivity loss in restaurants in our white paper, ‘The Actual Cost of Internet Outages on Restaurant Operations.’ You can download it here.
