Covid has shifted demand. Covid in some areas means limited seating and increased prep costs. Pizza is more popular in the winter. 10 to 15 sounds like a Covid related increase. This is the summer of the gauge where everyone is making back the profits they lost.

If think it's because minimum wage workers are making $50.00 more a week then this would only apply if the shop was selling less than 10 pizzas a day and had about 10 employees which sounds overstaffed and in an area with no demand.

A pizza shop with 1 - 3 employees working making 80 pizzas a day would only need to raise prices by pennies.

Is this a joke comment? I'm starting to lose the ability to see sarcasm I think. Why would you have expected them to have been busy in the last six months?

Maybe I’m misunderstanding your comment, but why does the expectation of growth in a pizza parlor come across as absurd? Dominoes had 13-14% Q1 same store sales growth over 2020 numbers.

https://ir.dominos.com/news-releases/news-release-details/do...

sorry, it just seemed a bizarre comment: you said it was less busy when you visited it, at a point in time when everywhere was less busy, nothing to do with overall sales

Edit: sorry not OP

I’m not the original poster, but I would expect sales to correlate with “busy-ness”. To your point though, I guess if everyone was doing takeout, sales could still go up and the place could be empty. Where I’m located though, it seems like businesses have been open for dine in for months and people are filling the dining rooms

Yeah, fair as does depend on country (and region)

They were busier (for pickup) this winter than this summer. I checked my own order history at our previously favorite pizza place. We ordered about 5x/month from Nov ‘20-Mar ‘21 when large cheeses were $9+tax and there was often a line for pickup. We now order around 1x/month (at $13+tax) and walk directly to the counter.

If anything, CV19 is much less a safety concern now than before.

sorry, it just seemed a bizarre thing to comment on: yes the sales may have been higher, and anecdotally you may have seen longer pickup lines (at what times?), but you gotta understand why it reads as a joke, because regardless of above, in-person business is almost universally likely to have been lower, restricted to pickups clustered at specific times

As a VP does that $4 difference really mean anything to you?

We've switched many of our family's Friday night pizza nights to "make pizza at home". Can I afford $4 more? Of course. Do I see the same level of value in a ~50% more expensive pizza? Of course not.

What you actually need to do is keep your prices the same while everyone else raises their prices and collect all their business, then you can afford to pay your workers more. But the end effect is the same, less work for people.