shaz said:
The problem I ran into with my meat store is we were selling individual cuts. we had 7 chest freezers to separate cuts. We also had 3 freezers on a trailer.
This kind of operation appeals to the steak crowd. Mostly men who liked buying meat for the grill. Within a year or two we had very little steak but 3K lbs of hamburger. This is obviously a cash flow problem and we didn't have enough restaurants to ease the problem. We never had more than one person working the store at any given time.
To mitigate the inventory problem we ended up buying steaks from a wholesaler in Nashville to resell. This is clearly not what our customers wanted.
If you can only sell 1/4, 1/2 and whole beef you can bypass this issue but there's no reason to have a meat store if you do it this way.
I expect you are correct. I highly doubt I get past the trailer stage. Our processor seems to be a good marketer and warned me of the same thing. His answer to the problem was what he called meat bundles with prices ranging from $75 to $300 containing fast and slow moving items.
I have often been accused of being stubborn. I do know I have to sometimes take a punch on the nose to learn a lesson.
I appreciate your words of wisdom, and experience. Thank you