Home / Mother’s Day is still an opportunity for restaurant sales
Be creative and make people happy. You’ll be rewarded when your restaurant reopens again.
Typically, Mother’s Day is the most lucrative holiday of the year for operators, with millions of families dining at restaurants. According to National Restaurant Association research in 2018, approximately 87 million adults said they would dine out on Mother’s Day. That, of course, is under normal circumstances.
Things are anything but normal now, so customers are looking for new ways to celebrate the special day and restaurants are answering the call. Although many are operating takeout-and-delivery only under the nation’s stay-at-home orders, there are ways to capitalize on the holiday.
The goal, restaurant consultant Larry Reinstein says, is to satisfy consumers’ pent-up demand for restaurant food, give them a “special occasion” experience at home, and make them smile.
Reinstein says restaurateurs should look at Mother’s Day as one tactic in a larger, strategic plan to start rebuilding business while taking care of guests. If you create a special Mother’s Day promotion, and do it well, it will not only be good for your brand, but also create an opportunity to ramp up your game.
“I’m not saying that if you do X specific things on Mother’s Day, you’ll have spectacular sales,” he says. “I’m saying your object should be to make mothers and their families happy. If you approach it in that way, they’ll associate your brand, and you, with trying to do good for people.”
How do you create that special experience? Reinstein suggests four options.
“The great majority of us out there just want to provide services and take care of our guests,” Reinstein says. “Yes, try and make a few bucks with this, but, mostly, make people happy. If we do that, I think our guests will be very loyal to us when we do come back.”