Young Hawker Gives Up 6-Year-Old Prawn Noodle Stall Due To Rising Operational Costs & Lack Of Manpower

[The_King]

Covid-19 has disrupted our local hawker scene, with a few young hawkers calling it a day after struggling to stay afloat during the pandemic. Another stall to announce its closure is Ming’s Prawn Noodle, which has been serving excellent prawn mee at Alexandra Village Food Centre for the past six years.

It was opened by At-Sunrice GlobalChef Academy graduate Cai Jiaming, 31, who had interned at defunct Spanish restaurant Catalunya. After learning how to make crustacean stock during his training stint, he was inspired to start his own prawn noodle hawker stall using the same fine cooking technique to make prawn soup. His efforts earned him an invitation to the Prime Minister’s Chinese New Year Garden Party in 2017, where he showcased his dish alongside six other young hawkers.

 

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  Closing his stall next week

  But come January 31, Jiaming will shutter his stall for good as he has decided not to renew its lease, which is ending in March. He tells 8days.sg that there were several reasons behind the closure, including a drop in business and rising operational costs. “The market has been quite volatile and the [hawker centre’s footfall] is definitely not like in the past. My income has been affected due to the pandemic, and it’s difficult to gauge the demand,” he explains. “My stall is ultimately my baby. I thought the light at the end of the tunnel was coming, but everything seems to be uncertain for now.”
  
  Despite the current five-pax dine-in rule, Jiaming does not foresee his business being sustainable in the long run. “[Dining in] can go back to two pax anytime if there’s another outbreak, to be honest,” he points out. He also shares that it has been challenging to run his stall when “the cost of goods are increasing for seafood and all. Even prices for oil rose.”
  
  While he acknowledges that things might get “better” in the future, he reckons that “knowing suppliers, the prices won’t go down for a while”. This presented a headache for Jiaming, who was forced to “increase my price by 50 cents half a year ago” to cover his costs. “Not all received it well,” he laughs. “If I have to [keep resorting] to increasing my prices, customers may not be understanding enough to accept it. Some still think I want to earn more off them.”

   
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  Manpower woes

  Jiaming also cites a lack of manpower as “one of my biggest challenges”, having hired a few stall assistants who didn’t stay “more than a month”. He says: “I was paying them $1800 to $2000 and they found their pay too little, working six days a week from 7am to 3pm. That’s the life of a hawker.”
  
  In his six years of running a hawker stall, Jiaming had only taken MC once. “This year was the first time, ‘cos of tonsillitis,” he says. “Each day that I don’t operate means there’s no income.”

   
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  Planning to sell prawn mee online

  Next, Jiaming is “working out a model to take in limited orders through mingsprawnnoodle.com”. He also doesn’t rule out opening a standalone prawn mee shop “if there’s a good opportunity and location”. He muses, “I’ll probably wait till things get better, then I may go back to hawkering or maybe get a shopfront. But probably shopfront if possible, so [hiring] manpower would be easier.”
  
  Ming’s Prawn Noodle is open till Jan 31, 2022, #01-01 Alexandra Village Food Centre, 120 Bukit Merah Ln 1, S150120. Tel: 9616-0495. Open daily except Wed, 7am-3pm. www.facebook.com/pg/mingsprawnnoodle

[socrates469bc]

jin kumgong.

 

shld do ghost kitchen earlier and not wait until now.

 

wahahahahahah

 

54 minutes ago, The_King said:

 

• Next, Jiaming is “working out a model to take in limited orders through mingsprawnnoodle.com”.

 

[The_King]

15 minutes ago, socrates469bc said:

jin kumgong.

 

shld do ghost kitchen earlier and not wait until now.

 

wahahahahahah

 

 

ghost or no ghost, i cook myself

[Bigbird]

Dreams got woken up (pawn) by Reality! 

 

If his friends willing to work for him with that pay then thats a working salary model.

[Standing Birdy]

SG F&B needs to learn how to improve processes from Japan where a typical small store with 1 or 2 staff can serve a constant stream of pax. They just focus on cooking and plating. Ordering and payment is done through machine/app. Drinking water or soup self serve from machine or covered containers. Customers self collect food and return the whole tray after eating.

Simply moving the ordering and payment to machine will cut down lots of time wasted on counting money and reduce cognitive load of remembering orders. Instead of thinking about how to improve, sinkie mentality is always to throw bodies at the problem by hiring more workers, preferably cheaply.

[aaur4man]

24 minutes ago, Standing Birdy said:

SG F&B needs to learn how to improve processes from Japan where a typical small store with 1 or 2 staff can serve a constant stream of pax. They just focus on cooking and plating. Ordering and payment is done through machine/app. Drinking water or soup self serve from machine or covered containers. Customers self collect food and return the whole tray after eating.

Simply moving the ordering and payment to machine will cut down lots of time wasted on counting money and reduce cognitive load of remembering orders. Instead of thinking about how to improve, sinkie mentality is always to throw bodies at the problem by hiring more workers, preferably cheaply.

 

who needs an expensive system when u got cheap foreign workers to do that and everything else?

 

Edited January 24, 2022 by aaur4man