Hospitality advocacy = better business

Last week Megan Rickerson of Someday Bar spoke about how she first got involved in advocacy for the hospitality industry. (Spoiler: Covid kicked it off.)

This week Megan covers how she actually got involved in local politics, which has now landed her on the executive board of the NYC Hospitality Alliance and a part of the NYC Mayor's Small Business Council.

Here are some takeaways from the interview:

• Government is intimidating, daunting, complicated, and frustrating.
• It's especially tough to advocate for hospitality for a number of reasons, from demographics to politicians' experiences.
• To get things done you need to not be a people pleaser. You need to be the squeaky wheel that gets attention.
• Once you take the first step, it gets easier. So write an email. Or even just figure out who your city council rep is. Once you start, you've got momentum.
• Don't ever feel like asking your rep to advocate for you means you're putting them out. It's their job to advocate for you.
• Getting involved really does work—Megan and the orgs she's a part of have found some real success through advocacy.

Check out the interview clip to hear more about how to get involved and the wins Megan's accomplished through her advocacy:

❓ Why?

Because there are QR Menu flows that suck and actually make things worse for customers.

Here are the 3 biggest offenders of a bad post-scan QR Menu experience:

1. Customers are brought to a PDF. Hands down this one's the worst. PDFs are hard for customers to deal with because in order to enlarge the menu (almost always necessary on a phone), they have to pinch to zoom. This is tough to do, especially for folks on the less-tech-savvy end of things. It just so happens these are the same people for whom enlarging is most important.
2. The menu doesn't include item descriptions. It's tough to stay on top of website content, so businesses just include item names rather than researching, vetting, and pasting in item descriptions. This means the menu doesn't do any salesmanship work. As with a paper menu, it's best practice to include descriptions for everything you sell.
   
3. The menu doesn't include all items. Similar to the last one, but even more egregious. Updating website content can be time consuming, so instead of having to update every time a beer or cocktail changes, folks just say something like "Ask your server about our rotating drafts."

All of these harm sales because it makes the ordering process harder. Best case scenario it takes longer to decide what to order. Worst case customers just don't want to deal with the QR Menu at all. Which, depending on your service setup, can really throw a wrench into things.

❓ How to do it?

You could create and stay on top of a manual QR Menu experience.

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