Yeah, I gotcha.
As I said above, I have gone both to Sweet Frog and to the Falun Gong Chinese place. Neither corresponds to my own religious orientation, but neither impinges on it either. Why should I, or anyone who doesn’t actually have a gripe with Christianity per se, be steered elsewhere?
Sacrilege! Nothing is better than a Blizzard at DQ. I think – it’s been years since I’ve been to one. 
But, yeah, no explosion here. We’re just now getting an Olive Garden only 30 minutes away and not 70.
If you’re not, fine. Extensive marketing research shows it to be the case, a double-edged sword: you have to decide which edge serves you better, the attractiveness to one group vs. the perceived rejection of others. I’d bet businesses that make an issue of being Mormon do bang-up biz in SLC, not so much in other places.
Or you can avoid the whole problem by not putting a (wholly unnecessary) religious front on a secular business.
That reminds me of an episode of Big Love where the owner of a large Utah hardware store was going to run TV commercials. He hired a consultant who showed him exactly how to use props and other devices that would send a signal to the Mormons in the audience that “I’m one of you” but that wouldn’t be recognized by non-Mormons. It was actually very clever and I can say that I would never have recognized the clues on my own.
Have you tried the McFlurry at McDonald’s? It’s like the Blizzard, only right-side up.
Thanks for the tip. I think the closest I’ve come is the shake (Frappe maybe) with pulverized chocolate chips in it.
It seems obvious to me how they haven’t run each other out of business:There must be enough demand at that location.
The demand could be met by one shop with, say, 12 yougurt machines. Or two shops with six machines each.
I’m curious: How do you put together a solid business plan for a new thing?
If you are a mom-and-pop couple who want to open the first froyo place in town, and you have no way to measure the public’s demand for your product? Other than your gut feeling…(“hey, there’s a high school nearby..good for walk-in traffic. There’s a shopping center across the street , lots of mothers with kids there, maybe they’ll stop in”, etc.)
Sure, you can compare yoghurt shops in other cities; but maybe in your city there are 10% more snowy days, or 10% fewer teenagers with driver’s licenses, or 20% more Baptists, and your location is a strip mall next to a liquor store.
You can estimate your fixed expenses precisely, but estimating your income seems like it would be very imprecise and not quantifiable. Mostly a gut-feeling, let’s-take-a-risk-and-see-if-capitalism-really-works type of thing.
(now you can see why I’m not an entrepreneur—no guts 
)
If you’d ever written a business plan, you’d know the answer.
One of the points of a business plan is to set up the methods you’ll use to evaluate success and profitability, and how long your reserves will last in any given period of non-profitability. Without doing that and the other simple exercises that help establish the viability of the business and how you will respond to different scenarios, throwing all your savings at opening day and crossing your fingers means you might as well just take an expensive vacation on the money. It’ll be blown either way.