I agree completely with you mcfly,
In a bar like CDC was and Mugshots is, alcohol is a lagniappe...it's not paying bills, it pays bonuses. I imagine rent in the Cotton District is ridiculous and the volume of
alcohol you'd have to sell would have to be redonkulous to make it strictly
on majority alcohol sales. It got me thinking about actual numbers an this is what I came up with...
A bottled beer (domestic) bought from Mitchell Dist, Clark Beverage or Better Brands costs .77 cents. A keg of Bud Light costs $91 and contains 140 beers which puts it at .65 cents a mug.
A fifth of house whiskey is gonna cost you $9. If you pour 1.5 ounces of whiskey per drink you get roughly 17 drinks out of a bottle. Which is basically .53 cents at cost per drink.
So broken down, if you sell a bud light bottle for 2.50 it's a 31% food cost, a 12 oz bud light draft for $2.00 is a 33% food cost, a house whiskey and coke sold for $3.50 is a 16% food cost. Liquor is where it's at, no doubt. I think this is why Mugshots is so successful. I bet they go through 30 bottles of whiskey on a busy night, but let's say they only go through 20. At $3.50 a drink that would be 1190.00 in sales minus $100 is people ordering doubles and bartenders giving away drinks (it's inevitable) that gives you $1000 in sales on just whiskey. If you look at beer, if you sell a keg in one night, you only make about $180 a keg. If you sell 10 cases of bud light, you only make $415...assuming everything gets rung up.
The problem is, restaurants in Starkville only sell in this quantity for maybe 40-50 nights a year. When you're open for lunch and not selling much alcohol at all, you have to rely on your food. Labor costs put more restaurant owners out of business because it's not justafied to even open your doors in you are only doing $500 from 11-5. That means after food costs you're only putting $350 in your accout and that plus a lot more is coming out to pay utilites and labor. CDC had crappy food, that's why they failed.
Any bar and grill restaurant has to run as close to a 30% food cost as possible to succeed. You have to sell food to make it, especially in Starkville, MS. If your food sucks, it doesn't matter how much alcohol you sell....you will fail. Think of the most successful restaurants in the Golden Triangle and what do they all have in common....good food. I wish I could say the same about service in most of these restaurants, but I'd by lying if I did....but good food with below average service will pay bills.
Relying strictly on alcohol will not 9 times out of 10. The Flying Saucer is one of the few bars that I know that probably doesn't sell nothing for food that is successful in the relative traveling area.
Food is where restaurants make ends meat, liquor + food is where a restaurant bank rolls. Liquor is the cherry on top. But you can't have a sundae with only a cherry.
