Metropol

A bit of an odd one, but Frankie and Benny's have gone back to the old logo that they changed in January 2018 - and seem to have toned down some the new, more playful branding they introduced at the time. It was a bit jarring at the time and didn't really fit with the old New York diner theme most of their restaurants have.

The rest of the BT monolith appears to have taken in the new letters-in-a-circle branding - at least it's on BT.com now.

woah wrote: Thu 17 Oct, 2019 21.03 A bit of an odd one, but Frankie and Benny's have gone back to the old logo that they changed in January 2018 - and seem to have toned down some the new, more playful branding they introduced at the time. It was a bit jarring at the time and didn't really fit with the old New York diner theme most of their restaurants have.

What a peculiar, but welcome, backtrack. I used to visit my local F&B quite regularly but when they changed the branding I noticed the menu had shrunk dramatically. A lot of my favourite dishes disappeared and I couldn't help but feel that I was suddenly dining in a Little Chef. They ditched the playlist of New York/Ratpack classics and replaced it with something that sounded like Heart. Whilst not a massive fan of the soundtrack, it was at least in keeping with the decor.

Perhaps they realised it would have cost them an absolute fortune to rebrand all of the restaurants to the new theme and abandoned it on that basis? I've not actually seen one with the 'new' brand anywhere.

I wasn't entirely sure it was an improvement either, but then I've kind of gone off Frankie & Benny's in the last decade or so.

Nothing on their menu is particularly brilliant, and all of it is overpriced.

It’s pretty good for breakfast and lunch. They’ve upped their veggie game recently.

Wilko have installed new Nixdorf POS in my local store, replacing the god awful Fujitsu ones that constantly broke down.

They seem to be slowly rolling it out rather than a blanket swapout. I'm hoping it means the introduction of self service checkouts in time - they trialled them in Sheffield around 2008 before the rebrand when they still had IBM registers, but they ripped them out when the Fujitsu ones were introduced shortly thereafter.

From my experience today, staff were able to get through the transactions a lot faster, although there was one trade customer who asked for a VAT receipt and had to ask a colleague how to do it.

Having a monitor to see the all of your goods is a nice touch, but could do with increasing the font size. The staff log-in interface looks a lot nicer too.

Certainly an interesting approach to a rebrand – it appears that the former Thomas Cook staff re-employed by Hays Travel have been told to create their own temporary signage!

(Pics are from various local news sites over the last few days)

Still, it's mightily impressive that Hays are delivering on their promise to reopen all 555 of the Thomas Cook shops in such a short space of time – as of today they've already reopened 413.

I really want it to do well. I do. But I just don’t know.

So they’re reviving the unprofitable part of the business, but not the profitable bit. I don’t see it working out well. TA margins are wafer thin these days, especially for airlines.