Every Penny Counts: Why Restaurants are Squandering Valuable Resources on Printing Paper Menus

By Jun Wu

On a recent dining trip to my neighborhood Chinese restaurant, Great Wall, I focused my attention on their restaurant menu while waiting for the waiter to come take my take-out order. Have you ever looked at one carefully, it is an editor’s worst nightmare. This menu and others like them are riddled with errors – Geneal Tsao’s Chicken?? What is that? And to make matters worst, the price on the menu are absolutely not updated properly. Less so if you consider white-out and pen as updating. Alas, I ordered only to be then told that some items on the menu are no longer available for ordering and that the prices were incorrect. UGH! They waste so much of my time and patience.

After that nightmare, I became more aware of such errors on menus and pondered why restaurant owners waste so much money printing paper menus anymore. I noticed that many other restaurants fall for that fallacy. I know that the printing press was one of mankind’s greatest inventions… but only for writing a history book – not for publishing a menu for a business that is in constant flux. I dug a little deeper and found that menu printers were charging these restaurant owners THOUSANDS of dollars to create their menu, and that is without much customization. Worst, they require that the restaurant owners print boxes and boxes of these, magnifying and giving long life to typos and price errors. Bigger restaurants may waste up to $10,000 for the whole printing package. More money to waste even as more and more residential places are putting up “No Posting / No Menu” signs on their entrance ways.

Still Printing Menus?

Enter the Internet and the cure to money wasting and menu printing. What if you can have you menu listed and posted for only $100? What if you can change the menu items on the fly and even add your own specialized pictures into it? What if you can tell you customers to go to the internet to look at your menu for delivery? They’re on the internet surfing and emailing endlessly already.

So my recommendation to all you restaurant owner who have money to waste is this: give it to the volunteer food drive. But if you want to save money and add to your restaurant’s bottom line, my recommendation is to post your menu on the internet and allow your customers to view it on-line. It will even do some good-will for your business when customers see that you are trying to save paper, and hence, the environment!

If you still need to persuade your restaurant’s business partner to stop doing menu printing, here’s a bulleted list:

  • No more printing mistakes. You, the restaurant owner, can easily update your online menu and in real-time.
  • No more costly updates. You, the restaurant owner, can update the prices and pictures whenever and however you like.
  • No more wasting of paper. The internet can survive millions of page views without ever fading or crumbling.
  • It is cheap. Getting your restaurant onto the internet is easy. www.onlinefoodmenus.com does it for $14.95 per month. Try it to see if you like it. Their number is 888-679-8089.
  • It is easy. Send Onlinefoodmenus Inc. your menu and they do all the legwork of posting it online for a small fee.
  • It makes your restaurant appear modern. Have a web-site, especially a functional one where the customers can order directly on the internet enhances your restaurant’s image.

Good luck and happy profits.