Indian Days

Published in Travel Bug 2015:
Nestled in with The Pas along the Saskatchewan River, Opaskwayak Cree Nation is a vibrant northern Manitoba community with more than 4,500 residents and, among other things, a Junior A hockey team called the OCN Blizzard.

As lively as OCN is year-round, it really lights up in August when it hosts the seven days of celebration and competition known as Opaskwayak Indian Days. This year’s festivities run August 17-23.

“It’s a celebration of our community,” Indian Days events coordinator Kirby Sinclair says. “It’s a weeklong event open to everybody and anybody. We’ve had people come from as far away as England and Germany, with good reviews from them.

“We have canoe teams that come from Minnesota and Quebec and B.C. to race in our big Canoe Classic. We have people coming for the square dance contest from Prince Albert (Saskatchewan), Moose Lake, Cross Lake and Peguis. So it’s basically for everybody.

“We showcase our traditions and we open it up for the public so the public can see what we do as First Nations people and they can partake as well.”

This year’s Indian Days is the 50th anniversary edition. It’s bigger than ever before, and far bigger than the first one.

Indian Days started as a one-day event with running races, canoe races and “a little more,” Sinclair says, adding that organizers planned to expand it in subsequent years.

It certainly has grown in participation and scope, with numerous components that now include fishing, jigging, softball, soccer, bicycling, a parade, a scavenger hunt, archery, singing and much more.

Opaskwayak Indian Days 2015 kicks off Monday, August 17, with a pageant to crown Princesses in three age categories: Tiny Tots (5 to 9 years), the mid-level Juniors and the Senior category of 14-18. The Princesses are selected after speeches and talent demonstrations.

Featured on the last day, Sunday, are the finals of slo-pitch and soccer tournaments and a fun fishing derby.

In between, there’s a panoply of activities that appeal to all ages. The agenda for Wednesday for instance, includes bicycle races, canoe races, indoor events at Gordon Lathlin Memorial Centre, and a parade from the Otineka Mall to Pike Lake.

At the parade’s end, everyone’s greeted by OCN’s chief plus dignitaries from The Pas and the provincial government. “They make opening remarks, and then our chief shoots a flaming arrow into the lake, starting off celebrations officially,” Sinclair says.

“Then with that we have canoe races for the kids all day, and a few races for the adults,” he continues. “And on Wednesday evening we go back to Gordon Lathlin Arena, where we have adult and children events going on.”

Other events include archery, flour packing, horseshoes, a youth singing competition, bannock baking and (on Friday evening) a community talent showcase.

And there’s so much more – “at least 40 events in total, and we’re striving to have a bit more every year,” Sinclair notes.

What’s in it for city folk? Why should they consider Indian Days for their summer travel plans?

“Well,” says Sinclair, “for one thing, there’s a weeklong schedule of competitions and culture. People from out of town could see the way we showcase our events, not only with the competitions going on, but with other things like the powwow demonstrations where people can see how our culture is.

“It’s not only for native people but it’s for others as well, and they can partake in the events. It’s friendly competition, not fierce competition. We are opening up our culture to everybody in fun competition ways.”

He adds that “all competitions are basically from the way we live our life.”

Opaskwayak Indian Days saw tremendous growth in its first couple of decades, expanding to a seven-day event by the 1980s. “To this day,” Sinclair says, “we’re still adding events – one or two a year. Sometimes we’ll take some out and put on new ones.”

Asked how Indian Days could develop in the years ahead, he says he’s not sure, “but I think in another 50 years the festival will still be alive, for sure. We’ve gotta keep our traditions alive. If we keep those traditions alive, we know where we stand as a First Nation, as a people.”

Losses on Tap

Published in Bar & Beverage, Summer 2011:
Pour a little more, or give away free drinks: It’s an easy, though unethical and illegal, way for a bartender to win the favour of patrons and get bigger tips.

The practice of over-pouring costs bar owners buckets of money. It can be the difference between profit and loss for any fiscal year, so it’s a problem that has to be addressed.

Fortunately there are some good, reasonably priced solutions in the marketplace. Aids on offer include inventory software, portion-control spouts, meters on beer kegs, tap locks, and auditors who will keep track for you.

The good people of Atlanta-headquartered Alcohol Controls Inc. (ACI) can hook you up with nearly all of these options to reduce beer and liquor “shrinkage.”

“We try to have a little bit for everybody,” proclaims ACI president Mark Flaschner. “We do have quite a range.

“This is what we specialize in, and we’ve been doing this for 20 years now. We’re the longest-running and the largest provider of loss-prevention products that are geared towards the bar industry.”

He says there are “a lot of different ways you can go,” but seems to most strongly recommend the Eclipse system that is an upgrade of the popular Spirit system incorporating portion-control spouts and software that keeps track of how much is poured.

Eclipse tells the bar manager at the end of a shift how much was poured, which can be checked against what the bartender entered into the POS till.

Inventory loss is a “pretty serious” problem, Bevinco marketing manager Krista Dinsmore says from Toronto. “On average, bars are losing 20 per cent of potential sales, so you’re looking at thousands of dollars every week, depending on the size of a bar.”

Dinsmore says some inventory loss occurs due to bartenders unintentionally pouring too much into a shot or wine glass. Other times, it’s because of accidental spillage. Still other times, the loss is due to dishonest practices.

Flaschner agrees, but hastens to add that we shouldn’t get too dim a view of staff. “Think of it this way: When you’re driving down the highway, everybody’s going over the speed limit until they see a cop with a radar gun,” he says. “And the reason is that people will tend to push the edge of the envelope if they fear no repercussions. That’s just human nature.

“It doesn’t mean that there aren’t honest bartenders out there, but typically when bartenders know that their manager doesn’t know how much they’re pouring, they’re going to give away some free drinks. They’re going to over-pour some drinks to get more in tips. They’re also going to pour drinks and collect money and not ring up some drinks.”

He says it’s vitally important for management to keep a vigilant eye on inventory because “if the manager doesn’t know if the bartenders are stealing, then typically you’re going to have an operation where bartenders are cutting into the profits.”

While ACI (www.alcoholcontrols.com) offers gadgets and software, Bevinco has real live people come into establishments for inventory control. For a weekly fee, Bevinco will weigh and count all bottles (opened and unopened), calculate from that data how much was dispensed since the previous audit, and compare that to point-of-sale numbers.

All that data is uploaded into Bevinco’s software system to create a variance report which is submitted to the client establishment.

As part of the service, Bevinco (www.bevinco.com) also puts a sticker on every bottle it inventories to let bar staff know the situation is being monitored.

Bevinco’s auditing service reduces inventory loss by more than three-quarters to less than five per cent, according to Dinsmore.

Flaschner cautions that the battle against shrinkage “doesn’t have to be an us-versus-them type of scenario. I always tell managers, ‘Be nice to your bartenders. Just tell them what your expectations are and then hold them accountable to it.’

“You never have to be upset or mean with them. You just say, ‘Hey, Jimmy, I love you to death, but you poured $1,000 in liquor and you only rang up $700 in liquor sales today. That’s not acceptable. I don’t know what you’re doing, and it really doesn’t matter what you’re doing. I just want you to ring up sales properly. If you can’t do that, you can’t work here.’”

Your shrinkage-stopping options are varied, and include free-pour spouts such as the ones sold by Arizona-based BarVision, which actually transmit data on volume poured to a computer, which records the data in real time.

Whatever your choice, the important thing is that you tackle the problem.

As ACI’s Flaschner says: “The bottom line is, bars should use some type of controls. Whether they get it from us or someone else, they’re going to benefit hugely if they put in controls.”

The Wide, Wide World of Sports

Published in Bar & Beverage, Fall 2009:

Beer, pretzels and wings are three things you might reasonably expect at any sports bar in the Great White North.

On the wide screen, you might expect baseball, basketball, hockey, NASCAR and what we in this part of the world call football.

But how about cricket, rugby or Australian rules football? Hurling, poker or mixed martial arts?

Welcome to the world of niche sports programming, where bar managers cater to pastime preferences and televisual tastes that veer from the Canadian commonplace.

The good folks at Setanta Sports can help a bar manager out with that. The specialty channel’s offerings in early July included All Ireland Football, rugby from Australia and South Africa, and the Leinster Senior Hurling Championship.

Hurling is a Gaelic team sport played outdoors with sticks called hurleys and a ball resembling a baseball. Points are scored by hitting the ball, called a sliotar, between the opposing team’s goalposts.

“You should watch it sometime, because it is one of the most, uh, aggressive sports that I have ever watched,” Setanta spokesperson Andy Shapiera says at his Toronto office. “It’s quite interesting and very popular with the Irish community, as is Gaelic football. We carry Gaelic football as well.”

Setanta Sports has expanded its reach since springing up in Ireland 19 years ago. Its Canadian version was launched two years ago in partnership with Rogers Media.

“Our market has grown substantially since we launched,” Shapiera says. “There’s definitely an appetite, especially among the soccer community, for the type of programming that we’re offering.

“We try and focus on the major competitions when it comes to soccer. We don’t give our viewers things that would be considered Tier 2 events. We give them the Tier 1 events. We show things like the Barclays Premier League. We show things like the FA Cup.”

Setanta is an “a la carte” channel (meaning it’s not packaged with any other channel) available from nearly every major television service provider in Canada. Bars can use Setanta’s Premium service – “almost like a pay-per-view basis,” says Shapiera – to purchase events that residential subscribers don’t have access to.

“We’re serving a market that was grossly underserved prior to the arrival of Setanta,” he says. “A lot of the top leagues, the only way to get access to these leagues here was through the Internet. You wouldn’t be able to get television access.”

Setanta’s sporting menu – which also includes Australian rules football and Major League Soccer – presents opportunities for bar operators to draw patrons who otherwise might not visit their establishments.

Phill Sheckley, manager of the Elephant & Castle on King Street in Toronto, recognizes those opportunities. He has seen how rugby and soccer can brings patrons in, day and night.

“With rugby, for example,” he says, “you’ve just had the British and Irish Lions Tour of South Africa (in July). That only happens once every four years. The games were shown at 9 in the morning on Saturday. And even though we can’t serve alcohol at that time, there were still people coming out to watch the games.”

A native of the British Isles, Sheckley hopes rugby, soccer and the like will appeal to expats in the Big Smoke.

“What we’re going to start doing here is breakfast and brunch when the soccer season starts,” he explains. “We are going be showing games from England that start at 8 o’clock in the morning (Toronto time). We obviously won’t be serving alcohol at this time, it will just be a soccer breakfast. That’s what we’re going to call it.

“That will be every Saturday morning. And then the game on Sunday will start at 10:30, just before we can start serving alcohol.

“It would be nice if our sales could be helped by serving alcohol, but the soccer programming from England on Saturday is in three-game blocks and hopefully by sometime in the second game we can start serving alcohol.”

Sheckley’s motivation is simple: “I want to showcase the pub. And even if somebody is coming here and not having alcoholic beverages this time, they’ll think about coming back for dinner and drinks and what have you.

“It’s an opportunity to showcase our pub, and we’ll still make money on the breakfast, of course.

“Some games will be on weeknights, at about 3 in the afternoon Toronto time. Soccer has a massive profile in the world. We’re a British pub, and it’s the number one British sport. Also, the World Cup in South Africa is coming 2010, so it makes sense to build into that, you know.”

He’s confident the strategy will work. “My room holds 160 people,” he says, “and while I’m not expecting it to be full straight away, I’m pretty confident that it will get very busy because there’s not many places that have the facilities we have downtown and we’re the biggest British pub downtown.

“There are a lot of expats going to smaller and older venues right now. Once the word gets out, I expect many of them will be coming here instead.”

Sheckley says the customer base for the weekend sports strategy consists primarily of people with roots in the British Isles – “a few Australians and New Zealanders, but mainly Brits and the Irish.”

Folks from the West Indies, India and Pakistan figure prominently in the audience for cricket, available in Canada on the ATN Cricket Plus digital channel launched in February 2007 and available from Shaw, Rogers, Bell and Telus.

Rogers Sportsnet, meanwhile, counts poker and mixed martial arts (including UFC) among its somewhat outside-the-mainstream offerings.

UFC has seen a phenomenal rise in popularity and now reportedly garners about 10 million buys for each of its pay-per-views.

Rogers Sportsnet has responded to that popularity by snagging a multi-year deal with UFC and this year creating its own weekly MMA Connected show.

“It’s very strong for us, what can I say,” says Dave Akande, Sportsnet’s vice-president of content. “We’re the network that has taken a stand with regard to UFC programming.”

You can find Sportsnet’s programming schedule for the next six weeks online.

Pay-per-view provider Shaw Direct has a monthly Sports Planner available for download and printout at the business section of its website.

Scoring Big

Published in Bar & Beverage, Fall 2008:

Grey Cup Sunday is always a touchdown for The Wayland Bar & Grill in the south end of Thunder Bay, Ontario.

While no annual event is bigger than The Wayland’s Halloween party, which always has people lining up to get in, the Grey Cup is the blue-collar establishment’s second-biggest event of autumn and third-biggest of the year (behind the Super Bowl).
“The NFL is bigger around here, for some reason – maybe because we don’t have a CFL team around here,” manager Stephanie Henderson says.

A bit of friendly wagering adds to the atmosphere. Patrons organize a Grey Cup pool, which always has a winner’s purse in the hundreds of dollars.

“I always put on a free half-time meal, featuring beef on a bun,” adds Henderson. “People really seem to enjoy that.”

She puts aside promotional items from suppliers throughout the year, and then uses them as prizes on Grey Cup day, with a big prize added on. Last year, that primo perquisite was a flat-screen TV.

“Everybody walks out of here with a prize,” she declares. “I think that’s the big thing. People like getting stuff for free.”

Atmosphere is important, so the bar is festooned with football paraphernalia – but Henderson adds that the Wayland won’t go as far as some sports bars in the atmosphere department.

“We don’t dress our waitresses as cheerleaders or anything like that. This is a family bar, and we want to keep our female customers comfortable.”

Grey Cup is part of a busy fall in sports spectacles that include the World Series, American football, mixed martial arts, NBA basketball and, of course, the Oct. 4 start of the National Hockey League season.

Rogers Sportsnet’s four regional channels will keep you well-supplied with NHL games, spokesperson Daniel Zaiontz says from Toronto.

“We’re regional broadcasters for five different Canadian teams. Those are our biggest properties, bar none.

“Without a doubt in Canada, the biggest sport is hockey, and we’ve certainly got live hockey covered.”

One of the most exciting new things for Sportsnet this fall is that Hockey Central and Soccer Central are now in high-def.

Knowing what the next hot event is, and how to plan for it, is a crucial part of any sports bar manager’s job. Star Choice, one of Canada’s leading satellite TV providers, can help you out on that with the monthly Sports Planner available for download and printout at the business section of its website.

The NHL and National Football League packages are hot sellers for Star Choice at this time of year, says Nadia Routhier, the company’s national manager of major account sales.

Star Choice offers more HD channels for free than any other satellite or cable provider, Routhier says from her Calgary office.

Star Choice has a dedicated commercial team that’s available by e-mail or phone 12 hours a day, five days a week. And, of course, there’s a system in place for response to issues that might arise during off-hours.

Star Choice is offering incentives for new commercial customers to come on board, Routhier adds.

Asked what the hottest selling brand in pay-per-view is, she replies without hesitation: “UFC, definitely.” Its popularity has been growing every year for several years now, and it likely will be even more popular next year.

Boogies Diner and Sports Lounge in Winnipeg is jam-packed for every UFC card, reports owner Derek Campbell.

“We were the first bar in Winnipeg to have UFC,” he adds. “It caught on and now it’s available in a lot of places.”

Campbell says UFC posts its events three or four months in advance, so planning for them is easy.

The lounge seats 110 and has three 60-inch plasma screens, plus several smaller TV sets. The diner also seats 110 has a few TVs too. Boogies has a 65-seat patio as well.
Campbell has the place set up with six receivers from its satellite TV service, so up to six events can be playing simultaneously.

To promote the bar, Boogies sponsors local boxing cards. Campbell himself is a former pugilist.

At Boogies, Grey Cup day “is traditionally big, depending on who is in the game,” he says. “If it’s Toronto versus B.C., the crowd’s not so big. Last year, when it was Winnipeg-Saskatchewan – now that was a big day for us!”

A few kilometres away, Doug Romanik is looking forward to a busy Grey Cup day. He owns Bleachers, a 100-seat sports pub in downtown Winnipeg.

There are just a few special-event days annually at Bleachers, he says. Otherwise, it’s just whatever patrons are asking for. “My bartender loves golf. I gotta caution him that it’s not his TV.”

Bleachers doesn’t display pay-per-view events as the pub’s size makes it difficult to host such events profitably, Romanik says.

Keeping up with the NHL, UFC, NBA, NFL, CFL, NASCAR and all the rest of the alphabet soup of sports organizations is important, but it can also pay off to keep an eye on the local scene. Like how The Wayland responded to customers’ interest in a local soccer team.

The Thunder Bay Chill went for all the marbles in the Premier Development League championship tourney late July in Texas, and T Bay soccer fans were clamouring for a chance to follow the action in a social setting.

“I was surprised at how many (patrons) were asking us if we would have it,” Wayland owner Joanne Kushnier remarks.

She put the action, broadcast by Fox Sports, up on the big screen and had a packed house watching the Chill blank the Kalamazoo Outrage 4-0 in the final.

On top and in control

Published in Bar & Beverage Business Magazine, Winter 2010:

An online dictionary defines inventory control as "supervision of the delivery, availability, and utilization of an organization's inventory in an attempt to ensure adequate supplies and at the same time minimize expenses caused by theft, spoilage or excessive stock."

For bar operators, the term can be defined more simply as knowing what you’ve ordered, what you paid, and how much you've used.

Knowing those things is the key to maximizing efficiency by seeing that, as near as possible, the volume of product you bought equals the volume sold.

Any shortfall between inventory and volume sold is reflected in your establishment's profit. Or, as Fraser Brooks of InfoSpec Systems (maker of Profitek software) so succinctly puts it, "Anything you can do to reduce that shortage goes right smack dab on your bottom line."

So inventory control includes keeping track of purchases, keeping track of your bar’s sales, knowing when to order more supplies, and trying to prevent “slippage” in what you have in stock.

You might say it’s a mighty tall order. Fortunately, Canadian companies are ready and able to help out with products and services to make inventory control much easier.

In and out

CLR Concepts’ Leena Lowe distinguishes purchasing control – knowing what you've bought and when to buy more – from the rest of inventory control. In fact, she thinks of them as pretty much separate things.

Purchasing control is obviously crucial to running a successful business, she says, as "you never ever want to be in a position where you’ve purchased too much, because that’s just costing you money. And you never want to be in a position where you haven’t purchased enough, because then you’re losing sales.

“Inventory control is tied into it,” she continues from her office near Vancouver, “but it’s kind of a different question.

“When I hear people talking about inventory control, what I’m really hearing is them saying ‘What am I going to do to make sure that my inventory is not walking out the door?’ That’s a whole different question.”

Inventory loss can come in other forms, of course. Some may be lost to everyday spillage, for instance. But industry research has shown theft and fraud to be taking a sizeable bite out of bar and restaurant revenues.

Lowe often hears bar operators express concern about how much profit is being lost due to employee dishonesty.

“I guess the question then is, How do you control your inventory? And the only way you can do that is by monitoring the usage. And that’s where it ties into purchasing, because if you purchased 30 cases of Budweiser and you, according to your computer, have sold five cases, you should have 25 cases left. If you don’t, you have an issue.”

Lowe says Clear POS, made and sold by CLR Concepts, has proven a useful ally in inventory control.

Clear POS includes inventory control as “an integral part of the program,” Lowe says. “When you have a choice between buying our POS system and somebody else’s, often ours is not necessarily the cheapest. The reason people go for ours is quite often the inventory control. It tracks inventory very well and very simply.”

On guard

By keeping a record of what your business has sold, all POS software – whether the brand name is Profitek, Clear, Squirrel or what have you – helps with inventory control. Aloha goes a step further with its Restaurant Guard, a supplementary product which analyses transaction patterns to find possible fraud and theft.

Bill Tischner of Edmonton-based Time Business Technologies points out that studies indicate about five per cent of bar and restaurant revenue is lost to theft by staff.

“That’s five per cent of their gross sales," he underscores. “Not their net – their gross sales. That’s a significant dollar amount that’s going into the bartenders’ jeans and the servers’ jeans through what you call industry scams.”

Tischner relates that when he operated restaurants, he observed significant inventory gaps that he chalked up to spillage and the like – honest mistakes.

“Now that I work on this side of the fence I can see that it is mostly staff theft. So the bartenders are getting rich and the owners are going broke.”

Aloha Restaurant Guard, which got its Canadian launch last year at a trade show in Vancouver, is a web-based product sold by Time that forensically audits transactions for potentially fraudulent activities.

Restaurant Guard monitors transactions and analyses them for signs of such common fraudulent practices as the “wagon wheel” scam. In that style of theft, a server collects in full on a bill, then subtracts a commonly ordered item (say, a fountain drink) before putting cash in the till, then transfers that item to the another table’s bill. The process is continued throughout a shift so that the server collects several times on the item but the establishment gets paid just once, with the server pocketing the rest.

Clients get weekly reports on suspicious activity.

Tischner says one client estimates Restaurant Guard is saving his Alberta restaurant chain as much as $500,000 annually in losses. “The monthly fee that he’s paying for Restaurant Guard, he saves in one day in what would have been losses.”

The product also spares the owner from spending a lot of time every week auditing transactions in an effort to spot theft and fraud.

Another effective tool for minimizing slippage is a liquor control system such as those made by Azbar Inc.

Azbar’s product line includes the AzGun, which dispenses up to 18 liquids according to pre-programmed portion sizes, and the AzJunior control station for small operators, as well as cocktail towers and draft beer dispensers. The Quebec City-based company also has a POS system.

The AzGun can let a bar’s inventory control system know to subtract from the volume level for each product, so that management knows which products should be replenished soon.

Company founder and president Robert Blouin says Azbar has, in its 20-plus years, became a North American leader in liquor control because of the high quality of its products.

“We’re the best in the world right now,” he proclaims, “and I want to stay that way.”