NRA Chicago 2006

We just got back from the NRA show in Chicago. As usual the show was very busy. And as many of you may already know, President Bush came by for a speech.

Days 1,2 and 3 seemed even busier than last year as far as foot traffic down the aisles. From our perspective (we were not near food which draws the most foot traffic) Tuesday was off by nearly 50% foot traffic from last year. Overall most vendors in the North and South upstairs were happy. Vendors downstairs complained of light traffic overall.

As usual you see a lot of new products. The best one I saw was from someone who wasn't even exhibiting. Payam Lavi of convenience enterprises came by our booth and showed me a picture of an automatic silverware/napkin wrapper. A good idea considering that job is typically done by a server towards the end of his or her shift. Aside from being typically unsanitary, the labor savings of using a machine to perform this job function seem obvious.

Big restaurant companies are still growing strong

You may have grown up with some of the chains I am about to mention. But don't think because you've been there a hundred plus times they are getting complacent. In the past four months we found the following growers over the last four month period:

1. Papa Johns. 2903 to 2924 units.
2. TGI Friday's. 778 to 806 units.
3. Outback Steakhouse. 914 to 926 units.
4. IHOP. 1228 to 1252 units.
5. Chuck E Cheese. 507 to 522 units.

Point of Sale systems and Food Distributor changes

New field additions POS and food distributor were added to the RestaurantChains.net directory over the past 18 months. The first sweep through (calling all chains to find out who and what they were using) took 10 months, the second sweep through (quality control) almost eight months.

Now it's come time to re-verify (annual re-verification) and we began two weeks ago. So far we're through 150 company records and found 3% of companies changed their food distributor and 3% their POS.