Battling restaurant no shows

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article on one of my favorite topics: people who don’t keep their restaurant reservations (Knives Are Out for No-Show Diners, Mar 14). Given slim margins, people not showing up and the resulting loss sales can be a significant problem. The impact of an empty table can be a significant in [...]

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Starbucks gets ready for Christmas

It is time for the gratuitous holiday post. Here, courtesy of Businessweek is a timeline of how Starbucks gets ready for the holidays (Starbucks’s 12 Months of Christmas, Dec 8): And here are some of the things they are managing:

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Pulling the plug at Starbucks

This summer I added the Starbucks app to my phone and can now pay for lattes with it. This has had the unfortunate consequence of driving home just how much my family can spend on over-priced coffee as I now get multiple emails per week as the card paired with my phone gets reloaded. So far, [...]

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A table tablet

So how far can we push self service? That’s an interesting process design question. There are clearly instances in which (at least some) customers prefer to do the work for themselves as opposed to waiting for a staff member to serve them. But just how far that be taken? A California start up is now [...]

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Does American manufacturing expertise now reside at fast food restaurants?

So if you wanted to demonstrate to a foreign guest that America still has true manufacturing prowess where would you go? What firm would you hold up as the epitome of American manufacturing know how? BusinessWeek makes the case for Taco Bell or, indeed, any of the major fast food (excuse me, quick service) chains [...]

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The Next big thing: Scalping restaurant seats

OK, a story that combines to pet topics: restaurants and ticket scalping. As I wrote last week, Next is back in the news and is now set to open. This the new Chicago restaurant that plans to have customers pay in advance — buying a ticket for a meal as opposed to merely making a [...]

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Restaurant round up

OK, today we have a sampler of stories on one of my favorite topics, restaurants! First up, BusinessWeek has a story on Next, a new restaurant opening in Chicago that will sell tickets in advance (Next Up in Fine Dining: Pay in Advance, Mar 31). Because you pay up front for a prix fixe menu, [...]

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Better ways to manage waiters

It’s been a tough couple years for restaurants. When the economy goes south, dining out is something relatively easy to cut from the family budget. Throw in rising food prices, and you gotta brutal business. Thus it is not surprising that firms are looking to save a little cash on the labor front. The Wall [...]

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Would you text your waiter?

Do you think playing with a smart phone at the dinner table is rude? Would your answer change if you were at a restaurant that encouraged texting? More specifically texting your server.  That is the idea behind TextMyFood — a Cambridge, MA, start up that is selling systems to restaurants to support just such a service (Chk [...]

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Cutting down the beer line

My colleague Kyle Cattani sent me a link to a Yahoo! Sports story about a proposed solution to a persistent operations problem at many sporting facilities: Long beer lines! (The Death Of The Beer Line, Jan 18). The trick is to pour beer faster — I mean a lot faster. Check out how quickly these [...]

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