Restaurant collapses within 11 days because of 'too much patronage'

Owners of a hotpot restaurant in Chengdu, China have closed down the company 11 days into a badly planned one month promotion to win customers for the relatively new restaurant.

Christened all-you-can-eat promotion, Jiamener asked all prospective patrons to visit its premises to eat any food of their choice until they could not eat anymore. All they needed to pay for filling their bellies for a whole day was 120 yuan (US$19) per day.

However, the promotion which started on the first day of June and was scheduled to last for a whole month had to be brought to an abrupt halt, and the restaurant closed down after its owners realised that they had already mad a loss of 500,000 yuan ($77,000) within the first 11 days alone.

Initially, when the promotion was in session, Jiamener workers had a difficult time handling the long queues of people fighting for chance to eat.

According to odditycentral.com, the restaurant could serve about 500 patrons per day for which reason one of the owners of the company, Su Zhe is reported to have said that, in the first 11 days he only got 2-3 hours of sleep per night, and the staff had to work 10-hour shifts to keep up with demand.

Owners of the restaurant had actually expected to make losses, but not to the extent and rate they experienced in the first 11 days of the promotion.

At a point in time, they even realised that they were nose-diving, but they took consolation in the likelihood of increasing their customer base at the end of it all.

Odditycentral.com quoted one of the owners as saying: “We knew we would be losing money, but we wanted to accumulate more loyal clients through this strategy.

“For instance, if I had lots of customers and many of them have to drink beer, then I have to import lots of beer. By relying on a huge sum of money and bargaining with the merchants, I could lower the price of the imported goods.”

What cause the collapse of the restaurant was the fact that its management did not put in place any means of checking possible abuse of its membership cards.

The cars did not have any photos or anything to figure out if any patron intended to use them more than once.

Reports say some of the patrons visited Jiamener several times on a daily basis with the same card, while others gave their cards to relatives and friends to eat after they had used them.

The Jiamener restaurant is now a history, unless owners decide to revive it in future.

Restaurant collapses within 11 days because of 'too much patronage'

Owners of a hotpot restaurant in Chengdu, China have closed down the company 11 days into a badly planned one month promotion to win customers for the relatively new restaurant.

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