Call Don Draper!

We're closed on Sundays!

Speaking of bolt-ons, check out this beauty that a co-worker brought in this morning.  Bolt-ons usually don't end up saving you much (short term), but this example also probably invites some wincing brand damage (long term).

The Bolt-On

On it's paper take-out menu, a restaurant goes into detail about the tremendous reasons why they are not open on Sundays.  Then, when that policy apparently changed they manually edited their stack of menus with the new hours and crossed out the bit on spiritual, mental, and physical benefits to the now-reversed policy.

Short Term Savings Failure

How many menus had to be manually edited?  If it was only a few, then your volume savings is imperceptible -just throw the old ones out.  If there are boxes and boxes that need changed, you'll likely spend more on labor than a re-print.  Either way, just bite the bullet and print new ones!

Long Term Cost

By first aggrandizing the virtues of a policy then clumsily reversing that stance, this bolt-on manages to expose two emotional perceptions that consumers tend to disdain: cheapness and hypocrisy.  So in addition to the immediate cost of you-still-probably-didn't-save-money-on-this-bolt-on is the really pretty horrible brand damage to a place that presumably cared enough about it's image to at one time espouse it's virtues.

Probably should have printed new take-out menus.

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