On pizza and queues

Di Fara Pizza is a small, single-location pizza place in Brooklyn. According to its Wikipedia entry (yes, it has a Wikipedia entry), it has been named to many, many lists of the best pizza in New York City. The place’s secret sauce is Dom DeMarco, the shop’s owner, who essentially makes every pie. He opened the shop in 1964 and is now 79. He doesn’t work too fast and really does everything right down to slicing basil on to each slice. Consequently, the lines can be a tad long. It is one of the principle things that on-line reviewers comment on:

It’s nice to see that the original pizza making man still has the passion to make pizza. But the wait is ridiculously long and people in there are just too pushy. “Next! What do you want?”

So how does that kind of wait affect their business and the customer experience? That was the topic of discussion of a recent episode of The Gist podcast (Your Food Will Be Ready When You Look Hungry Enough, Oct 12).

The guest of that episode is Dan Pashman, who describes his visit to Di Fara as well as the research he did to put together an episode of his own podcast, The Sporkful (Is This Pizza Worth Waiting For?, Aug 11).

Some of that reporting also ended up in an episode of Freakonomics Radio (What Are You Waiting For?, Aug 10)

That’s right: The man made one trip to Brooklyn and it resulted in three podcast episodes.

The Sporkful and Freakonomics episodes are worth a listening. Both talk about different aspects of managing queues. The former emphasizes more psychology and physiology (especially how waiting affects hunger) while the latter puts more emphasis on the economics of queue.

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Pooling and queues

Queuing has been in the news lately. First, the Wall Street Journal’s most recent The Numbers column was on queuing theory (The Science of Standing in Line, Oct 7). The story is in someways disappointing since it emphasizes the history of queuing over its current applications or general insights. However, it does feature this rather spiffy graphic contrasting service systems in which several servers pull from a common queue as opposed to each server having a separate line.

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Allocating escalator capacity

I have been teaching the MBA core operations class this quarter. This week we just wrapped up talking about bottlenecks and capacity. I consequently found an article in The Guardian rather timely (The tube at a standstill: why TfL stopped people walking up the escalators, Jan 16). TfL in the article title refers to “Transport for London” which runs the Underground. The article reports on an experiment run at their Holborn station.

The experiment in question gets to a bit of escalator etiquette. Specifically, when using an escalator, should people stand to one side so those in a hurry (or in need of a work out) can walk up the escalator or should people patiently stand two abreast? Now if you prefer to chug up the stairs, you clearly lose under the second scenario. However, can it be the case that accommodating the walkers cost the system as a whole an unacceptable amount of capacity?

It’s all very well keeping one side of the escalator clear for people in a rush, but in stations with long, steep walkways, only a small proportion are likely to be willing to climb. In lots of places, with short escalators or minimal congestion, this doesn’t much matter. But a 2002 study of escalator capacity on the Underground found that on machines such as those at Holborn, with a vertical height of 24 metres, only 40% would even contemplate it. By encouraging their preference, TfL effectively halves the capacity of the escalator in question, and creates significantly more crowding below, slowing everyone down.

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Banning restaurant tips

The big news in the restaurant world this past week is that Danny Meyer, one of New York City’s most prominent restaurateurs, is going to be abolishing tipping at all his establishments. He discussed the move on CBS.

(He also had an interview on CNBC that covered a lot of the same ground plus a few other points that I will mention below.)

Tipping — at restaurants and in hotels — is something we have covered before. As much as I like the idea of linking pay to performance, I think that tipping is a pretty miserable custom. Meyer touches on some of these points in explaining why he is banning the pourboire. But he also highlights a completely different issue: Attracting and retaining talent.

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Scheduling workers at Starbucks

We have written in the past about some of the challenges of staffing retailer operations. Given competitive markets and an ample supply of labor, many firms have employed staffing models that may be kindly described as aggressive — although some might prefer to call them abusive (see, for example, here, here and here). In essences, firms want to avoid overstaffing but also don’t want customer service to suffer. Employees are caught in the middle of those goals as employers demand more and more flexibility from them.

But to some extent that has been changing. Labor markets have tightened and regulators have begun asking questions. Consequently, firms have backed off some of their more noxious practices (at least in some jurisdictions). Among the leaders here has been Starbucks. Last year it committed  to posting worker’s schedules at least 10 days in advance and to giving workers more consistent schedules. Further it said it would no longer have workers doing “clopenings” — closing the story one night only to have to be there for the opening the following morning. As the New York Times tells it, the transition hasn’t been so smooth (Starbucks Falls Short After Pledging Better Labor Practices, Sep 23).

But Starbucks has fallen short on these promises, according to interviews with five current or recent workers at several locations across the country. Most complained that they often receive their schedules one week or less in advance, and that the schedules vary substantially every few weeks. Two said their stores still practiced clopenings.

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Managing line shoppers

I must confess that I have never really been enthralled by Trader Joe’s. I have never lived close by one so it was a convenient option for shopping nor have I ever been desperately loyal to their private label products. But there certainly are people who love Trader Joe’s and their stores can be quite busy. As consequence, the check out lines at some locations can be a special sort of experience. McSweeny’s offers a parody “Trader Joe’s Waiting in Line App” asking user to rate their overall shopping experience on the following scale:

• 4 stars: Took a while, but got what I needed.
• 3 stars: Eerily friendly cashier weirded me out; there was hardly any bagged lettuce left.
• 2 stars: Constant gridlock. Teeth gritted the whole time.
• 1 star: Anarchy. Like the ending of Lord of the Flies.

What does the ending of Lord of the Flies look like? Check out BuzzFeed’s “The Nightmare Of Shopping At Trader Joe’s In Manhattan.” It’s one thing to have to mark where the line starts; it’s another to need a sign marking the middle of the line so clueless (or super-aggressive) shoppers don’t cut the queue.

What then is a shopper to do? According to a recent Slate piece, the answer is to shop while in line (The Six Rules of Line-Shopping at Trader Joe’s, Aug 24).

Not long ago I was waiting in line at the smaller-than-average and perpetually mobbed Trader Joe’s near Union Square in Manhattan when I noticed the shopper in front of me had come up with a clever, possibly devious solution to the crowd problem. Upon entering the store, she claimed a shopping cart and staked out a spot in the checkout line (which snaked around almost the entire perimeter of the store). She proceeded to do all her shopping from her place in line: picking up produce as the line crept through the produce aisle, frozen goods as it passed by the freezer case, cereal when it neared the cereal section.

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A little more on running queues in reverse order

A quick update on Wednesday’s post on running queues last-in, first-out. First, the Washington Post had a story on this as well (Researchers have discovered a better way to wait in line, and you’re going to hate it, Sep 9) and to their credit they get the gist of the model right; the fact that customers value getting served early is key to their results.

Second, I was asked to speak about this article on an NPR station out in California (AirTalk, KPCC, Sep 10). You can hear it here.

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Would we be better off if queues ran in reverse order?

Suppose you are waiting in line for something. How would you expect the service provider to take people out of the line?

Unless you are at some place like an emergency room where different customers have clearly different needs and different levels of urgency, you might expect that customers are served in the order of their arrival — that is, a first-in, first-out discipline is used. That’s a natural and common assumption (at least in the US). It is also makes headlines like “Have we been queuing all wrong? Lines move faster if the person at the back is served first, study finds” (Daily Mail, Aug 14) or “Danish researchers have an enraging proposal to speed up queues: Serve the last person first” (Quartz, Sep 7) attention grabbing . Here is the crux of the Daily Mail article:

A group of Danish researchers have discovered a rather unexpected solution to the long lines of people that can appear ahead of new iPhone launches or to get into sporting events.

They say serving the person at the back of the queue first can actually make lines move faster – something which may horrify British and Americans who adhere to the strict etiquette of waiting your turn.

Instead it suggests people like the Italians, who often frustrate other tourists with their lack of regard for the order of a queue, may have been on to something after all.

The findings could put an end to traditions which have become almost British institutions such as queuing to get tickets for Wimbledon or the Proms.

So what is going on here? Is serving customer last-in, first-out really the answer to queuing woes?

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Incentives in scheduling service

When should phone calls go to front-line service personnel and when should they go to a call center? The best arrangement obviously is going to depend on the setting so let’s consider the case of a car dealer considered in a recent Automotive News article (Call center keeps the service bays packed, Jan 23). The dealership in question has two stores — a Honda dealership and an Acura dealership. The status quo had service calls going directly to the service advisers, i.e., the folks who speak to customers when they drop off their cars or call them with news about what problems were found and how much it would cost to fix it. The proposal would route inbound calls looking to schedule appointments etc to a call center instead of the service advisors.

Now, it seems upfront that there are some real benefits of pulling these calls out of the service department. The call center would keep advisors from having to ditch in person customers to take call. It would also allow for some pooling across the stores. However, these efficiency gains are not what sealed the deal for the dealership. Rather, it was the opportunity to gain better control over scheduling.

“We were able to regain control of scheduling appointments in the service drive, and that’s important because we’re only open a certain amount of hours, so we want to load our shop,” says Proctor, managing partner of Metro Honda and Metro Acura in Montclair, Calif. “The service advisers didn’t see it that way.” …

By creating the call center, Proctor took service scheduling away from service advisers. They are often reluctant to book small jobs, such as oil changes and tire rotations, because they earn smaller commissions on those jobs compared with, say, a three-hour brake repair, he says. …

Proctor’s inspiration for the call center came about 21/2 years ago. He was listening to recordings of randomly selected inbound dealership calls, and one especially disturbed him.

“A customer wanted a warranty-repair appointment, and our associate said no appointments were available for three weeks,” Proctor says.

The customer wanted it done sooner. Proctor listened in shock as the service adviser gave the customer a competitor’s phone number to do the work, he says. ..

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The pros and cons — OK, mostly cons — of tipping hotel maids

Marriott has been in the news this week for launching new program to prod its guests into leaving tips for its cleaning staffs. The hotel chain is not acting alone on this. It is working with Maria Shriver’s non-profit called A Woman’s Nation (AWN) to highlight the difficulties faced by hotel cleaning staff. Here is a bit from AWN’s website about the program.

A Woman’s Nation (AWN), together with Marriott International (NASDAQ: MAR), announced today that Marriott International will be the first partner in AWN’s The Envelope Please™ initiative, which is designed to encourage and enable hotel guests to express their gratitude by leaving tips and notes of thanks for hotel room attendants in designated envelopes provided in hotel rooms.

Hotel room attendants often go unnoticed, as they silently care for the millions of travelers who are on the road at any given time. Because hotel guests do not always see or interact with room attendants, their hard work is many times overlooked when it comes to tipping. The Envelope Please makes leaving them a gratuity simple and secure.

Or as a headline in New York magazine summarized the program: Multi-Billion-Dollar Hotel Chain Encourages You to Tip Its Workers

There is a no question in my mind that being a hotel maid is a hard way to make a living — particularly at nicer hotels like the typical Marriott. Guests want their room serviced on their schedule; management wants workers to be efficient and service rooms as quickly as possible; and if all goes well, the room attendant gets no real recognition. Combine that with low entry requirements (basically a clean background check and the ability to do physical work), and you get low pay. Tips then would be much appreciated. Even if a maid only gets two dollars per room and services just two rooms an hour, that extra four bucks would be a significant percentage increase. According to the Washington Post, “maids and housekeepers earned a median salary of $19,780, or approximately $9.51 per hour, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.”

But is tipping room attendants a good idea?

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