Deal Hours: Put a Price on Your Quiet Period

Every venue has hours it would rather not have. The room is open, the staff are paid, the kitchen is warm, and almost nobody is in.

Deal Hours puts a price on exactly those hours and nothing else.

A rule, not a promotion

A Deal Hour is a pricing rule with a window. You set a discount — a percentage or a fixed amount — the items it applies to, and the days and times it runs. Inside the window the price is lower. Outside it, nothing has changed.

There is no code to give out, no ticket to buy and nothing for a customer to remember. The menu simply costs less at four o'clock on a Tuesday, which is the version people actually use.

Choose the items, not just the venue

A blanket discount on everything is usually the wrong instrument: it discounts the dishes that were selling anyway. A rule can apply to specific items, which lets you do the thing that actually works — put the margin-rich item, or the one that uses up what you already prepped, on offer and leave the rest alone.

Choose the channel

A rule can run in the venue, on collection, on delivery, or any combination. A quiet dining room and a busy delivery queue are different problems, and a discount that fixes one while eating the margin on the other is worse than none.

Ten at a time

A venue can have 10 active rules. That is a deliberate ceiling rather than a technical one: past about ten, the pricing stops being legible to staff and customers both, and the venue can no longer say what anything costs on a Wednesday.

Finding your actual quiet period first

Most owners can name their quiet period and a good number are wrong. It is usually narrower than remembered, or a different day, or the gap between lunch and dinner rather than the whole afternoon. Your analytics measure it from your own trade — look before you discount, because a rule pointed at the wrong window costs margin at a time you were busy anyway.

Setting one up

1. Open Analytics and find the window that is genuinely quiet.
2. Pick the items. Start with the ones that use what you already have prepped.
3. Set the discount. Percentage or fixed amount, whichever reads more clearly on your menu.
4. Set the days and hours to the real window, not a rounder one.
5. Choose the channels — in-venue, collection, delivery.
6. Tell people once. A rule nobody knows about is a discount to customers who were coming anyway.

What it connects to

• Get discovered — deals are a thing customers search for, so a live rule is a discovery surface.
• Order Ahead — a quiet-hours collection deal is the cheapest order you can take, at 1.5%.
• Loyalty — a deal brings someone in once, loyalty is what brings them back at full price.
• Analytics — where you find the window, and where you check whether it worked.
• Outreach — tell the customers who have not been in for a while, rather than everybody.