What is the best equipment to buy?

In about 99% of the cases, the best equipment to buy is not the cheapest. About the only time the cheapest equipment is the best buy is when you are going to sell the restaurant.

Please consider the following. I make my living (and have for about 20 years) fixing broken restaurant equipment, refrigeration and ice machines. Or to put it another way, I make a ton of money on poor quality equipment.

If you are someone who wants to save money on your equipment, first, don’t buy the cheapest piece of equipment you can find. In addition, do not assume that if you buy the most expensive equipment, this is not going to break either.

As an example:

Church’s Chicken has in the past purchased a brand of fryers that cost them around $28,000.00 and I could never understand why they would spend so much on one piece of equipment. For that amount of money, they could have gone to a local company here called Ace Mart and purchased some Pitco fryers for around $800.00 or less which means that they could have purchased 35 new fryers instead of 6 new fryers.

Don’t get me wrong. I understand things like recovery and BTU but still 6 fryers for $28K compared to 6 fryers for $4,800.00 seems a little off. Don’t you think? Not to mention that the Pitco’s are faster and cheaper to fix with a bunch of parts that are a lot less expensive parts cost.

In truth, the equipment you want to buy is the one that never breaks or when it does is fast and easy to repair. You also want to consider the life span of the equipment.

Here is an example:

Most ice machines cost pretty much the same price but if there was one that lasted for 7 years and one that lasted for 20 years and they were the same price. Which one do you think would be the better value? If you were to combine that with the fact that one of these ice machines is fast and simple to repair and the other one is not, then what do you think?

All equipment is like this. Some is good and some is crap. (Or is that crepe? Excuse my French)

There is a lot of equipment out there, so it is not possible for me to make you a list. But when the time comes, you can provide me with a list of what you want to buy either through fax or e-mail and I will give you my professional opinion. This service will not cost you one penny.