For the moment, let us stay with the increasingly popular service of having food delivered to your door. Everybody, including the big supermarkets is doing it - so why not you?
At the same time, let us look at the ancient myth that students never have any money. They do, but just like me and my cronies in our own student days, they still spend it on the wrong things.
It bothers parents that grant money, loan money and the ‘living expenses’, which they provide is spent on booze and music CDs, rather than proper food.
A couple of years ago, we profiled a pair of girl students, who were doing quite well with a weekly delivery round of food to their fellow students. This was a simple service largely to fellow students in the girls’ own lodgings and social circle. On Thursday evening, at the Students’ Union, the girls took orders and distributed goods at the same venue, the following day.
Orders were taken on a printed slip and paid cash with order. The girls’ profit came from keeping a very sharp eye on the prices of basic commodities and taking advantage of price reduction, plus buy one get one free offers and by negotiating staff rates (10-15% discount) with the manager, in exchange for regular orders.
After graduation, one partner stayed on to do an education year and the other decided to stay to keep her company, but to expand the campus delivery venture into a supportive income.
This was done by some very aggressive marketing at the beginning of the academic year but, even before this, they had obtained contact details of a couple of hundred students due to arrive at the start of the New Year. They wrote to as many home addresses as they could muster, pointing out that a 'foodless' Bohemian existence was bad and offering to deliver a weekly/fortnightly consignment of basic foods, fruits and household products. The parents were allowed to choose the goods and paid in advance for a term’s supply.
“This brought us thirty-five customers and – on average – over the term, we made about £40 per head profit. With three terms per year, we were happy with that side of the business.”
The next step was contacting all the students who live in flats and feed on a bizarre arrangement of jointly bulk buying some foodstuffs and individuals buying their own delicacies.
“What we did was to organize it a bit better. We got a super deal on bulk purchase of sugar, cereals, toilet paper and kitchen rolls. We paid one person in each group of adjacent lodgings to take and distribute weekly consignments split from our bulk store and also to take the orders for our Friday morning supermarket run. That also went very well once we got the knack of ‘appointing’ reliable people to coordinate orders and delivery for a group – usually about twenty students. Some of our ‘couriers’ preferred to be paid in goods than cash, which suited us very well.”
The latest G and N scheme is to install lockable mini fridges (from Dometic) and rent them out to students in the university’s hostel accommodation.
Two years on, both girls are now full-time student domestic products suppliers and still expanding.
Until the next time...
George.
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