A Chain Opened With 45p Fish and Chips. The Chippy Across the Road Sold Out by 2.30pm.

The 35% problem

Caroline High named the number most operators avoid saying out loud: commission of up to 35% per order on delivery platforms. On a £20 order that is up to £7 gone before a single potato is peeled. Run a meaningful share of turnover through those channels and it is entirely possible to be busy, exhausted and losing money.

The aggregators are not worthless — they deliver reach, and for a new customer that first order has real value. The mistake is leaving the customer there. The job is to convert them into a direct customer on the second order:

• A card in every delivery bag with a better offer for ordering direct next time. Cheap, and the highest converting marketing most takeaways ever run.
• Your own online ordering site with no per-order commission, so the saving is yours to split between margin and a better price than the platform.
• A loyalty scheme that only works direct, so there is a running reason not to reopen the app.

None of this is glamorous, and all of it compounds. Ten direct orders a day at £20, at 30% commission saved, is roughly £21,000 a year that stays in the business.

Speed is the other price

On a Friday at 7pm, a customer choosing between two chippies is not comparing menus. They are looking at two queues. Every order you can take, pay for and fire to the range faster is a cover you keep.

That is a till problem more often than a staffing one. Saved customers and repeat orders recalled in two taps, card payment on the same screen, and kitchen display screens instead of handwritten tickets — those are the seconds that add up across a two-hour peak. Add pre-order and timed collection and part of the peak is smoothed out before it arrives.

Know the numbers before the chain does

Fish prices move. Energy prices move. The chain across the road knows its gross margin per portion to the penny and reprices accordingly. Most independents know their weekly takings and little else.

At a minimum, an operator should be able to pull, without a spreadsheet evening: gross margin by portion size, sales by channel, sales by hour, and the top ten items by profit rather than by volume. If your current system cannot produce those, the reporting gap is a competitive gap. Our guide to POS for fish and chip shops covers what to look for.

Is a chain opening nearby actually bad news?

Not always. A chain opening spends money telling a town to think about fish and chips, and not everyone who thinks about it walks into the chain. Middleton Fish Bar had a record day on the back of a competitor launch, because 28 years of goodwill turned free publicity into its own queue.

The chain will still be there in March, though, and goodwill alone does not cover a gas bill. The independents that come through this are the ones that pair the loyalty they already have with the operational kit chains have used for years: fast service, accurate kitchens, their own ordering channel, and numbers they can actually see.

Middleton showed up. The job now is to give them a reason to keep showing up in month six.