I live in Fairfax County, Virginia, smack dab in the middle of the Virginia “Dulles Tech Corridor” made up of Reston, Herndon and a few other towns. It is a very Internet-friendly place.
How is it possible that a restaurant with a significant delivery business in an Internet-friendly area does not have a web site with their menu and contact information?
It flat-out boggles my mind.
Let’s do some simple math.
I order out 4-5 times per week, average about $40 per order. That works out to about $200 per week, or $800 per month.
Because I am not the greatest at recovering from interuptions, I have most of my meals delivered. When I get hungry, I don’t dig through drawers for outdated, food-stained menus. Instead, I hop over to my del.icio.us bookmarks, pull up restaurants that deliver, and choose from the menus online.
It’s important to note that NONE of the restaurants I regularly get delivery meals from are my favorites. There are restaurants that a) deliver and b) I like better all around me … but because of the extra hassle of finding and holding onto the menu, my money goes to their competition instead of them.
I know for a fact a restaurant can get a kick-ass, easy to maintain web site that will bring them plenty of new business for around $1500-2000, probably cheaper if they go with “lesser” providers. The business they’d get from a single customer like me would pay for it in a few months … and there are plenty of “me’s” out there, not to mention full offices of workers (the Oracle people in Reston eat up a storm, I hear) and plenty of tech-saavy families.
A restaurant web site doesn’t have to be fancy to be insanely profitable … but it does need to be a) present, b) have a menu and c) be “findable.”
Sometimes businesses go out of their way to avoid making money.
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