Short staffed restaurants

[Knight]

Went to Chipotle in far South Reno today... there were 4 employees in the building, one working the counter, and three in the back. The three in the back kept looking at the line and walking away. I finally asked the manager what was going on since there were a bunch of us in line. He said that corporate only scheduled one employee to work the dinner shift, and we could complain to corporate, but they would not care. He said that all the staff were leaving for the day, including the one person scheduled to work the PM shift. They served the five of us who were there, and locked the doors afterwards - no note whatsoever. Not sure what is going on with this place, but it is not good.

The location provided reasons why it needs new management or needs to close outright.

[Knight]

I placed a mobile order at Burger King and it was closed when I got there. They must have all left early before 9 PM. This restaurant used to be 24 hours for years. Now it says it closes at 11 PM. I do not even know how to get a refund.

Staff members bailing out before closing is a bad idea. I would expect terminations and new hires at the location.

[Brian Lutz]

https://www.businessinsider.com/checker ... nes-2022-1

As a result of staffing shortages, Checkers and Rally's will be deploying voice recognition bots to handle order taking in drive thru Lanes at 267 restaurants, thus freeing up employees to do other jobs.

[storewanderer]

https://www.businessinsider.com/checker ... nes-2022-1

As a result of staffing shortages, Checkers and Rally's will be deploying voice recognition bots to handle order taking in drive thru Lanes at 267 restaurants, thus freeing up employees to do other jobs.

I do not see this working. I think other chains have tried a similar program in the past and it did not work.

These mobile apps are the way of the future here, or the order kiosks.

One concept I think may make sense in the COVID environment is the "call center" based drive through ordering. I know some McDonalds franchisees use this. Basically when you pull up to order the speaker is hooked up to a call center (someone not at the restaurant). They take your order in the same way the restaurant employee inside would, and transmit it to the unit (register is hooked up between the call center and the location). As the business tries to reduce employee exposures due to wide/fast spreading Omicron variant, having 1 fewer employee on site in the location can make a little difference.

[Brian Lutz]

Call centers for drive thru ordering is nothing new (I've heard of this being done as far back as the 1990s), I'll reserve judgment on AI ordering until I try it, but in my experience most kiosks are pretty terrible, with way too many layers of menus to get through to find items. Most mobile apps I've used aren't much better aside from being able to recall previous orders if you tend to order the same thing each time. I think an AI model could work here because it would only need to be trained to recognize a relatively limited vocabulary of words to be able to order any of the items on a typical fast food menu. And if the alternative is closing your restaurant for not having enough staff to keep the lights on, you'll take what you can get.

Here's another article from earlier in 2021 that implies that several chains are already using this:

https://www.today.com/food/may-i-take-y ... ve-t210791

Even if the AI isn't taking the entire order, I can see this being used as a supplement to a human order-taker, being able to recognize keywords from speech and automatically populate items in the order.

Another article (that reads a bit more like a press release) can be found here that goes into a bit more detail:

https://voicebot.ai/2022/01/11/checkers ... staurants/

One claim made here is that in testing, it was found that 98% of orders could be handled by the AI with little to no need for human intervention.

[Alpha8472]

Perhaps there could be an ordering kiosk at the drive thru?

[storewanderer]

Call centers for drive thru ordering is nothing new (I've heard of this being done as far back as the 1990s), I'll reserve judgment on AI ordering until I try it, but in my experience most kiosks are pretty terrible, with way too many layers of menus to get through to find items. Most mobile apps I've used aren't much better aside from being able to recall previous orders if you tend to order the same thing each time. I think an AI model could work here because it would only need to be trained to recognize a relatively limited vocabulary of words to be able to order any of the items on a typical fast food menu. And if the alternative is closing your restaurant for not having enough staff to keep the lights on, you'll take what you can get.

Here's another article from earlier in 2021 that implies that several chains are already using this:

https://www.today.com/food/may-i-take-y ... ve-t210791

Even if the AI isn't taking the entire order, I can see this being used as a supplement to a human order-taker, being able to recognize keywords from speech and automatically populate items in the order.

Another article (that reads a bit more like a press release) can be found here that goes into a bit more detail:

https://voicebot.ai/2022/01/11/checkers ... staurants/

One claim made here is that in testing, it was found that 98% of orders could be handled by the AI with little to no need for human intervention.

I think the Taco Bell kiosk is excellent. Really easy to use and does an excellent job for customization options. Quick also. The biggest issue I have with it, is that it has no receipt printer... that is kind of a big problem... but most people don't care about a receipt. Wendys has two models of kiosk and I find one to be pretty good and the other to be not great. No receipt printer on those either. McDonalds kiosk- terrible; slow, cumbersome, so slow it seems to "lose" offers I scan when I walk up to redeem, between the time I pick the items and get to payment (I must be spending 5 minutes or something). I gave up on their kiosks; they should just scrap them entirely.

Also have those places back east Sheetz and Wawa with kiosks for food orders, also Quik Trip in the midwest. All of those kiosks are very easy to use, fast, and do a great job.

The kiosks if done right, can be very good. There are just a lot of poor implementations.

As for kiosks at drive through, I think Subway had or has something along those lines. The one I am surprised does not do kiosk ordering is Sonic, at the drive in stalls. I think their boards must not be touch screen.

[veteran+]

I REALLY dislike the NO receipts trend.

[Brian Lutz]

Taco Bell kiosks don't print receipts, but they do offer the option to have a receipt link texted to you. The main problem I've had with the Taco Bell kiosks is that there are too many layers of menus to go through to find items. For example, the last time I used one I was trying to find the Chips and Nacho Cheese item from the value menu, and went through four different sections and couldn't find it anywhere until it suddenly popped up as an upsell item after selecting some other items.

Come to think of it, this might be a good topic for a separate thread.

[Super S]

Oregon and Washington are some of the last states to still have indoor mask restrictions, but this will end in both states by the end of March (unless they reinstate them again which happened last time). I have noticed that more restaurants are opening up the dining rooms. Notable is Arby's, where it has been closed almost the whole time since the pandemic started. But I did notice last night that the local Jack In The Box was drive-thru only. But at least that location, which had an extensive renovation a couple years ago, had a well-lit parking lot and looked like they welcomed you, unlike some I have seen which don't even have the parking lot lights on let alone the restaurant and you can't tell if they are open or closed.

This is something that has varied from one area to the next in Oregon/Washington with different franchise operators etc. It's a given that some locations have taken a hit during the pandemic, but the ones slow to return to normal hours hint at other problems brewing, and I will not be surprised if more locations end up closing down.