give-away /crunch the number
Fourth of Julyの日、EnDoughの住んでいる家の近くにある米軍基地は花火などの祭典で盛り上がってましたが、同じ日に日本国内で展開を開始したケンタッキーも一日限りのall-you-can-eatをやるという事で大盛況でした。(ちなみに向ケ丘遊園前店も行列ができ、2時間半ほどで終了したそうです。)
Was KFC’s great chicken give-away a success?
This past Fourth of July, while Kentucky Fried Chicken was celebrating Independence Day in the U.S., KFC Japan was busy commemorating the anniversary of the fried chicken chain’s entrance into the Japanese market.
On this day they held a one-day all-you-can-eat sale where customers could get 45 minutes of non-stop chicken for 1,200 yen. A very generous deal but how much did KFC stand to lose on such an offer, or did they lose? Let’s crunch the numbers and see.
According to quick estimates received by various reports, approximately 34,000 people bought the all-you-can-eat chicken from the 381 participating KFC’s across Japan. Among these people a total of 257,000 pieces of chicken were doled out.
Compared to the same day the previous year 1,050% more pieces of original recipe were moved amounting to a total sale of about 40,350,000 yen. This sounds great, but let’s take a look at the same amount with a regular price.
If you break the total amount given out into 3-piece sets of original recipe chicken, then you’ll have about 86,000 sets. At their regular price these sets would cost approx. 71,000,000 yen.
Comparing that to the sales they did on this 4 July, you can easily see that they lost about 30,000,000 yen in chicken sales. Although a considerable amount of money, KFC Japan is content to write it off as their way of saying “thank you.”
We can derive another fun fact from this data. With a time limit of 45 minutes to eat as much chicken as you can, the average person could eat 7.6 pieces of chicken at a rate of one piece about every 6 minutes. Who said math isn’t fun?
http://www.japantoday.com/category/food/view/was-kfcs-great-chicken-give-away-a-success
.ここでのgive-awayはみなさん御存じの通り、PVがそのまま名詞になった単語で「景品、サービス品」「ただでやること、安売り」という意味(『ジーニアス英和辞典』、第4版、大修館書店)です。イメージ的には売り手が「もってけドロボー！」とした商品という感じでしょうか。
crunchは「〜をポリポリ噛み砕く、踏みつぶす」という語義が思い浮かぶ単語ですが、ここではもうひとつの語義である「〜が大量の計算をする、迅速に対応する」という意味(ibid)として用いられています。「計算をする」は他にもcalculate, compute, reckon figure out, と様々ありますが、ここではKFCのサクサクのフライドチキンについて言及しているので、crunchはまさにピッタリの表現です。
この表現は以前Sugiuchi先輩が'number-cruncher'として取り上げておられますが、興味をそそられたので取り上げてみました。(EnDough)
