Hey everyone!   We're excited to introduce our latest set of tutorial videos designed to help you streamline your point-of-sale setup and operations, showing you how to set up printers and KDS (Kitchen Display System). These comprehensive guides walk you through the critical hardware and software configurations that will make managing your restaurant's technology smoother and more efficient.     Our new video series covers four essential setup tutorials:  Create Printer Profiles and KDS Device Codes for Order Tickets  Set Up Your Kitchen Printer Set Up Your Kitchen Display System Set Up Your Receipt Printer & Cash Drawer Each tutorial is carefully crafted to be concise, practical, and user-friendly, featuring real-world demonstrations by a Square expert. You'll learn how to connect devices, create printer profiles, set up network connections, and configure your POS system to match your restaurant's unique workflow. These videos are more than just technical guides, they're your roadmap to creating a more efficient, tech-enabled restaurant environment.   Ready to level up your restaurant's technology game? Check out these new tutorial videos and let us know your feedback! Drop a comment below sharing which setup was most helpful for your business, or tell us about a tech challenge you're looking to solve.   We'd also love to hear your thoughts! Reply with your own tips, tricks, and set-up best practices for hardware in your restaurant. 🖨🍲 ... View more

Hello F&B community!   As is shown in the headlines nationwide (at least here in the US), restaurants are seeing some significant cost pressures. Closures have been announced at a staggering pace. In fact, here in Colorado Springs, over 10 restaurants and breweries announced their closure in just the last two weeks!   We can sit here and discuss the reasoning behind the pressures: increased rents, payroll costs out of control, cost of raw goods, paper costs, utility costs, insurance costs, etc. etc. etc. We all live in this purgatory right now, we don't need to focus on the problem.   Let's focus on the solutions: what cost trimming measures have you started working on in order to survive this crunch?   For me, my first big leap was to close my cafe in late 2023. My landlord and I could not come to an agreement on rates, and I took it as a sign to run away. In hindsight, I realized this was the best for the survivability of my business. I was able to focus my menu on just the coffee roasting aspect of things, find a brick and mortar where the rent and utilities are a third of what I was paying, and for now work it just by myself. I'm not saying that drastic of a cut would work for everyone, but maybe you could figure a way to subdivide your space: do you need that big of a dining room anymore if the majority of your service is to go anymore?   After that, it's been a constant monitoring of what is and isn't selling, and making tough but necessary cuts to the menu. If it's a profitable item, it stays. If it's consistently in the bottom 10 of sales volume, it goes. Does it take extra prep time that takes a team member away from something else?   Pricing: when I first entered the manager stage of my foodservice experience, the number I was told to always keep an eye on over everything else was the Food Cost. At that time, the labor dollar wasn't nearly as important in my market: servers were still making $2.13/hr. Nowadays, I've found that if I don't continually monitor the cost of the labor at least as hard as the food cost, things get out of control very, very quickly. So I've changed my thinking to ask what is the prime cost for the menu items? Prime being the cost of the product plus the cost of the labor to make it. Hopefully the prime is below 60%. Don't forget to factor in the cost of the dishwasher who washes the plates and line tools! You may end up finding out that your pricing strategy needs to improve. I know I did the last time I looked at these numbers!!   I'm curious to hear what innovative tricks you've come up with to keep costs as low as possible without affecting the customer experience! ... View more

Waitrose Drops Online Flower Sales to Focus on Wine and Food Gifting: Does This Signal the End for Luxury Perishable Deliveries, or Is There Still a Gap for Specialist Florists? As a florist with 30 years of experience, I find Waitrose’s decision to stop selling online flowers and shift focus to wine and food gifting quite intriguing. In fact, I was even employed by Waitrose to train a member of staff in each store to merchandise their flowers, because flowers are one of the few products that multiples can’t just “planogram” — you can’t predict which specific flowers will sell out, like red roses for example. My own business has always thrived on the idea that floral products don’t “fit into a trolley,” and I’ve carved out a niche in the luxury perishable delivery market. Does Waitrose’s move mean the end of this segment, or is there still room for a specialist market? What do you all think? ... View more

Hi sellers 👋!   We are considering a feature that would allow you to decide when to enable specific features on your devices. During an introductory period, you’d be able to see more information about the feature and enable it when it is most convenient for you and your staff. The objective is to give you and your staff time to learn about a feature so that you can enable it on your devices at the most appropriate time. This will only be available for some of our largest feature launches.    We are considering the following names for this feature and we’d love to hear from you about which name fits best: Update Manager Feature Manager Release Manager Update Guide Change Guide New Feature Guide Release Guide Release Notes Update Notes   Thanks! ... View more

We would like to know how important is for the restaurant community the TV Menu Installation Process:   Please share with us what would you like a Digital Menu Company to do when is time to get the menus done.   From design to implementation.     ... View more