[Sca-cooks] Adjusting your Feast budget for Comps

Terry Decker t.d.decker at att.net
Sun Apr 17 16:30:09 PDT 2011


You're doing a feast for 250 people on a $750 budget and they want you to 
comp 125?  That's nuts!  And I suspect that it is against the SCA financial 
rules.

I have done a number of Namron Protectorate feasts where it has been 
tradition to comp the feast for members of the Protectorate and their Queens 
of Love and Beauty.  Since we're going on 35 years, that could be 70 people, 
which would overwhelm any feast we did.  To make life easier on us, we send 
each of these people an invitiation (RSVP please) to join us at our 
Protectorate Tourney.  If we have a sudden influx of former Protectors, 
etc., we get some advance warning of the problem.  I plan for 24 comps 
whenever I do the Protectorate feast.  Even with the Crown and Royal 
Highnesses, I seldom get that many and we sell the excess.

When you have a lot of comps, controlling costs and proper pricing is 
essential.  I don't think you can control the situation you are describing. 
The last feast (16th Century German) I did was for 160 with 24 of those as 
comps.  I budgeted $5 per plate and priced it a $8.  I was fortunate in the 
buying and brought the feast in for about $750.  We sold the extra comps and 
cleared about $300 profit.  Without tight controls, it could have been a 
real fiasco.

On a practical level, you would need to sell out at $6 per plate to recoup 
the expenditures.  Or if you priced the feast at $8 per plate, you would 
reqire 94 plates sold to break even.  Anything under $6 per plate loses 
money, so let me guess, they have this priced a $5 or less.

For what it's worth, you made the right call in emailing the Kindom 
Seneschal and the Kingdon Exchequer even though it may cause you some grief 
with the locals.  If they say this is fine, then you can either bite the 
bullet and do the job for the loss or tell the people in charge that they 
have rejected your proposal by their actions, so here are the supplies, the 
bills and the honor of doing the feast.

Good luck getting this resolved.

Bear

> Today I received a partial list of people who will be comped for 
> Coronation
> in May. Only the in Kingdom people so far, no visiting royalty is 
> included.
> It amounts to $375 of my feast budget of $750.  I will absolutely confess 
> it
> is taking a forklift to lift my jaw off the ground.  Coming from a small
> shire who has done Kingdom events before, and never comped this many 
> people
> before....I am at somewhat of a loss.  Has anyone else here had to deal 
> with
> this deep of a cut?  How did you manage it?  I have already published a
> menu, and started buying supplies.
>
> For background, the past two sets of Crown and Coronation have been
> "centralized" by a royal decree.  So they are taking place in two 
> baronies,
> but other individuals/groups are actually "doing" them.  Kingdom is
> financing. This will probably change at this Coronation, going back to a 
> bid
> system.
>
> Aldyth The more than slightly peeved





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