How You Serve Your Chili Says a Lot

Daniel Meyer
3 min readJan 4, 2024

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So, on day 2, I stopped by a local diner. called Penny’s Diner, in Yuma before heading out of town. I love diner that have the old-fashioned feel and serve traditional American dishes. I love a lot of kinds of food, but one of my favorites is a Chili Cheeseburger. Having a big, open-faced burger smothered in chili, cheese and onions is the first thing I look for in a diner and this place was amazing.

I also like to take note of the clientele, which fascinates me. Most diners tend to attract mostly older, white clients and their children who now have families of their own and wanting to recreate that experience they recall from their youth. Which is so the case with me. Both in recreating experiences I had with my Dad and Grandparents as well as at 55, starting to identify a bit more as “old”. LOL

As I suggested in my last blog, demographics fascinate me. The data that makes up people tells you so much where thing have been and where they are going. There are always outliers, but for the most part you can easily see trends when look at demographic data to help a business optimize its marketing and service to its target customer base.

This diner is amidst a bunch of hotels right off the freeway. But chain hotels that skew a bit higher than cheap. So, they are nailing their target market and given how busy it was at lunch time on a Tuesday, its working. Plus Yuma being a magnet for “snowbirds” it’s in a really good spot. Like a lot of cities West of the Rockies, Yuma is pretty spread out and easy to get around.

So why thinking about demographics and marketing, I thoroughly enjoyed the burger. It was perfectly done so it was not under done on the inside nor over done on the outside, a perfect balance for the chili, which must have been sitting in a warm pot for a while because it was warm, full of burger chunks and the bean were not too mushy, but not too under cooked. All in all one of the best chili cheeseburgers I’ve had in quite a while.

Next time I’m on stage or in front of a class and talking about marketing analytics I have story to tell about Penny’s Diner in Yuma. I could even make a case study out of it just guessing at the data. I have to imagine it’s pretty profitable and stays busy pretty much every day of the week.

Dan Meyer Sonic VA, which specializes in matching Filipino Virtual Assistants with American Small Business clients and has been a leader in the outsourcing industry since 2011.

Dan is also one of the top experts in Virtual Staffing and has personally trained over 10,000 Filipinos in areas such as virtual assistance, data analytics, business process outsourcing and social media marketing & management.

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Daniel Meyer

At that sweet spot in life where I do what I love, am really good at it and get paid to do it… helping businesses scale using big data & virtual staffing!