or lack thereof can really screw up a holiday.
Every Memorial (Decoration for you older folks) Day there has been (NOTE I said has been) an event held here in my town. Yes my town is an the below medium size town BUT we can still hold our own for a "large event".
In years past the local arena has hosted a fairly large (regional maybe) religious convention over the Memorial Day weekend. It usually began on Friday at 9am and ended on Sunday at 5pm. The persons attending this convention were nice, tipped well, and not the preachy in your face types.
A couple of years ago there arose some sort of conflict between the organizers of the convention and the venue. What I heard was the venue was not going to allow outside food into the arena or something like that. There might have been other things also but we did not hear about those. There was a huge pushback from the organizers and the venue relented.
Fast forward to the last weekend. The weekend as a whole was brutally SLOW (my numbers were down by at least 40% from previous years) even Memorial Day itself which is a traditionally busy night. Most of us could not understand the lack of business. We began noticing that all of the hotels were half empty which was VERY unusual and the arena/stadium parking lot was EMPTY.. Saturday night I closed and had only 16 runs from 5pm till 2am.
It then dawned on us that the convention was NOT being held in our town this year. Overall our numbers (ie. sales labor and number of carry-outs and deliveries) sucked rocks.
Every Memorial (Decoration for you older folks) Day there has been (NOTE I said has been) an event held here in my town. Yes my town is an the below medium size town BUT we can still hold our own for a "large event".
In years past the local arena has hosted a fairly large (regional maybe) religious convention over the Memorial Day weekend. It usually began on Friday at 9am and ended on Sunday at 5pm. The persons attending this convention were nice, tipped well, and not the preachy in your face types.
A couple of years ago there arose some sort of conflict between the organizers of the convention and the venue. What I heard was the venue was not going to allow outside food into the arena or something like that. There might have been other things also but we did not hear about those. There was a huge pushback from the organizers and the venue relented.
Fast forward to the last weekend. The weekend as a whole was brutally SLOW (my numbers were down by at least 40% from previous years) even Memorial Day itself which is a traditionally busy night. Most of us could not understand the lack of business. We began noticing that all of the hotels were half empty which was VERY unusual and the arena/stadium parking lot was EMPTY.. Saturday night I closed and had only 16 runs from 5pm till 2am.
It then dawned on us that the convention was NOT being held in our town this year. Overall our numbers (ie. sales labor and number of carry-outs and deliveries) sucked rocks.
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