Advice solicited

[Thomas]

Guru, we found that you have to be careful asking customers for addresses. So many are afraid of spam and annoying mail. The way we handled that is by explaining our weekly tasting policy and that if the people were interested in it, they could sign up for the weekly email that told them what we would be tasting. Even then, some people just refused.

Through our POS system I designed a way to record every purchase.So when someone said, "I was here a week ago and you sold me this outrageously good wine, but I can't remember anything else about it..." We looked it up and could find out what the wine was. You'd be surprised at how many people don't take notice of what they buy.

I also designed the POS system to kick out a receipt that gave information about the wine and the foods it matched.

All of that stuff takes work, but it pays off.

[This message has been edited by foodie (edited 04-01-2005).]