Moveable Moneymakers

From Tubs to Table Tents, Portable is Profitable


By Mandy McAnally


The initial challenge of luring patrons into a venue can be easily overcome with attractive and intriguing advertising, but once inside promoting the product is the key to profit.


Once a customer's foot is in the door, portable merchandisers, like logoed merchandise — items used to advertise specialty drinks or products that ease the flow of traffic through the bar — seal the deal on sales for an owner or operator.


Even Flow

Glory Days Water Street Tavern in Kent, Ohio, is a popular hot spot with sports fans and college kids, so those crowded college Thursday nights can make maneuvering from the lower level to the upper level main bar a traffic nightmare.


To eliminate the pile-ups and take pressure off the main bar, Glory Days' staff began using portable beer tubs to accommodate their crowded upper level bar area.


From the beer tub, the staff sells domestic beer, such as Coors, Budweiser and Miller (in cans onl)y and requires all sales to be cash sales.


Brett Sinning, manager of Glory Days, says within three months the staff has seen an easing in the flow of traffic throughout the bar because of the beer tub. He also says the amount of customers who choose to buy beer from the tub instead of the bar has picked up.


“The bar that we have is somewhat hard to get flow to because of the shape, so we used to have the beer tub downstairs to try to get people to move a little bit instead of everyone being so upstairs,” Sinning says. “I think we mostly started using (the beer tub) to help out with the flow of traffic, but in turn it's getting more popular.”


Glory Days' staff also took the idea of the portability a step further when they built a portable bar downstairs that offers more than just the basic canned domestics.


Sinning says when the downstairs portable bar is in use, the staff switches the tub's location to the upper level to provide support to the main bar.


Mug Money

Monday is traditionally a slow day in the bar business, except at Boscos Brewery locations. Thanks to a unique marketing and merchandising scheme that combines the sale of a signature Boscos mug and a club membership, Mondays are one of the biggest nights of the week at all Boscos locations.


Every Monday the Boscos location in Memphis begins filling up with Mug Club members around 4:30 p.m. Each of them comes toting their large porcelain mugs, which bear the Boscos emblem, to join a crowd of nearly 250 fellow club members.


The $60 Mug Club membership fees buy the Boscos customer a signature mug, which allows for a larger pour at a cheaper price, a one-year membership, and invitations to special Christmas and summertime parties thrown by Boscos' staff and other benefits.


Chuck Skypeck, founding partner and head brewer of Boscos, says their promotion stands out because members of the club keep their mug when the year is over as opposed to venues that either hold on to the majority of their mugs for display or use the same design year after year.


“We produce a new mug, with a different design every year,” Skypeck says. “That's what we like about our yearly club, it's fresh, so our customers buy a new mug they can keep.”


Boscos Mug Club has been growing in size and popularity since 1996. This year Skypeck says, the Memphis location's staff began promoting the sale of the 2004 mugs around mid-October. Patrons were given the option to pre-order the mugs and by Thanksgiving, the entire stock was sold out before the mugs were even available for in-store sale.


Stand-Alone Sales

Bennigan's Grill and Tavern saw a tremendous customer response when they removed table tents from their venues and replaced them with a new stand-alone drink menu a few years ago.


The stand-alone drink menu is a 9-by-12 inch leather-bound book that sits on the dining room tables, where you would usually find a table tent, but strictly features Bennigan's drinks and desserts.


Jim Barnett, director of media relations for Bennigans, says they switched to the stand-alone menu to de-clutter the dinning room tables and to increase customer focus on the venue's drinks and desserts.


“The response was tremendous,” says Barnett. “(The stand-alone) drink menu allowed us to maintain our beverage mix, which we boast to be the very highest.”


A significant difference was noticed in lower volume Bennigan's restaurants, Barnett says, where the new drink menu increased beverage sales up to 5 percent.


“(The stand alone drink menu) re-instilled the focus on our beverages,” Barnett says. “It created a buzz with operators and bartenders and made customers realize that Bennigan's really does have great drinks.” NCB