The same stand on a JV night

Nobody warns you about the second kind of game. The big home nights are what the job sounds like when it is described to you, and they are the ones everybody plans around. Then there is a Wednesday, or a JV game, or a night the weather is bad, and the stand opens exactly as it always does and takes almost nothing.

Twenty games with sales recorded: nine big home nights and eleven JV or Freshmen nights. The gap is bigger than people guess.

Night	Games	Share of takings
Big home nights	9	89%
JV and midweek	11	11%

More than half the games, about a tenth of the money. The worst big night of the two seasons — one that sat through a rain delay — still took more than four times the best JV night. Nothing about the stand changed between them — same menu on the board, same fridge, same two hours.

Why this is an ordering problem and not a trivia fact

If those nights were a tenth of the work it would not matter. They are not. You open, you staff, you count, you clean, and the ordering decision in front of you looks identical to the one you made for the big game, because it is the same list of the same items.

So the failure goes one of two ways, and both are expensive.

Order as though it were a big night and you spend the following week with a fridge you cannot close and a freezer full of buns that will be stale by the next home game. Hot food is the worst of it — you cannot un-thaw, and the pretzel you did not sell on Wednesday is not a pretzel you can sell on Friday.

Order as though every night were small and you run out at the one game that was actually going to pay for the season. That is the more painful mistake, because the people who queued and left are the ones who tell everybody else the stand is not worth bothering with.

Order per head, not per event

The fix is boring and it works: decide what you sell to a hundred people, then multiply.

A rate per attendee is stable in a way a total never is. Roughly the same fraction of any crowd buys a drink; roughly the same fraction wants something hot. Those fractions do move — a cold night sells more coffee, an all-day tournament sells more of everything per head because people are there through two meals — but they move gently and predictably compared to the crowd size, which is the thing that actually swings by a factor of ten.

So the question stops being “how many hot dogs” and becomes two easier questions:

• How many people are coming? You know this better than you think. Last year’s same fixture, what the athletic director expects, whether it is a rivalry, whether the band is travelling.
• What does a hundred people buy? This is the part that is worth measuring once and then reusing all season.

Two things worth knowing about the second question

The first: you only need to record actual sales for a couple of events before your own rates beat anybody else’s. A stand that knows what it sold at two games knows more about its own crowd than any published figure can tell it, because the mix depends on your school, your weather and what is on your board.

The second: this is one club’s football season, and a ten-to-one gap is the shape of the thing rather than your number. A school where JV plays on the same night as a home volleyball game will not see ten to one. A school whose big nights are band competitions will not either. What carries over is the principle — that the events differ enormously, that the difference is almost entirely crowd size, and that ordering per head is what makes one order sheet work for both.