veteran+ wrote: ↑March 19th, 2023, 7:29 am
I do not know what to tell you but from the inside, via my friend, it is not what you say. Ordering is totally discombobulated. This results in many orders being thrown away and re-ordered. Making changes per customer requests causes problems and defaults back to the original order and strange things like that. Employees waiting to use the milkshake machine and having to rinse in between different flavors is crazy.
He has never worked in a fast food business before, so he does not have a bias for or against. Maybe this location is an outlier. He finds it very chaotic, not efficient, and employees stepping all over each other doing the same thing in different ways. Also several "leads" giving conflicting direction. Despite the above and MORE, he says everyone is happy and nice.
Yes, they do pay their employees more than any of their competitors and their Store Managers do very well. The store is always busy and the weekends are insane. So I guess all of this works for them
Yes, that is a system issue with modifications to orders. Common to many restaurant point of sale systems if you modify an item then have to go back and "modify the modification" so it is like you start over again.
For example let's say I go to In N Out and I tell them I want a Hamburger, Well Done, Grilled Onion, Green Chile, Pickles, and Light Mustard. In N Out can serve you a Raw or Grilled Onion Slice... the order taker screws up and just punches my order as Onion (so that will be raw, not grilled). I see this mistake on the screen and bring it to their attention. They have to start all over with my screwy order and I have to repeat all of my customizations back to them.
The order takers sound like they are the weak link here and need to be trained better on the register in order to ensure orders are punched accurately. The system is a bit odd, but as long as the time is spent by the order taker and customer ordering to get it right, then everything else should be fine. Whoever is managing the location probably needs to put some significant pressure on the order takers to ensure they are listening to the customer and also repeating back the order in the end for accuracy, and put the best communicating employees into the order taking position (many younger employees are not very social anymore I notice and order taking very much requires someone who is comfortable communicating verbally and quickly).
In the past in the fast food business the standard procedure when a customer ordered food was for the order taker to repeat the order back to the customer for accuracy. What I am noticing when observing locations lately is often employees do not bother to repeat back orders. In the circumstance where an employee actually does repeat the order back to the customer, the customer does not seem to even listen to the employee and is either waiving cash at the employee or has their credit card out and wants to put it through the card reader rather than listen to the order being repeated and confirm it is accurate.
The fast food business is responding the best it can to the level of order customization that occurs today (like the screwy In N Out example I order that I use above). Frankly with the level of customization the current customers expect of the coffee, burger, and mexican concepts, app or kiosk based ordering is the best solution for those situations.