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Food & Beverage: The Aramark Era begins

jon81uk said:
As a manager, I would rather hear "I paused making these ice creams to wait for the spoons to come from the store room as they were melting and getting returned" instead of "I had to remake ten ice creams so we wasted ten sets of ingredients". The wasted ice cream has to be worth more than the spoon!
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That can be written off as wastage I guess and they can probably backcharge it somewhere.

Looking at the picture provided it actually looks like a reasonable offering, of course I don't know the price though. Maybe with this and the coach house ice creams they should just sell ice creams and leave the savouries to someone else
 
dave___ said:
That can be written off as wastage I guess and they can probably backcharge it somewhere.
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Having worked in retail, I would have been in trouble if there was significant levels of wastage. I would have rather someone told me "I paused making ice cream because having no spoons was causing wastage" instead of "I had to throw away ten ice creams and refund those customers".
 
jon81uk said:
Given its a touchscreen ordering process, the sales would just keep coming anyway. The sales are coming at all costs with no regard to the practicalities already. The touchscreen might allow way more orders than the staff can handle anyway (which sounds like it is the case).
The employee is just producing the goods and handing them to the customer.
In a way its more like a factory, where they just assemble something and hand it over, but if it was a vital component the production would stop anyway. If they ran out of cups to put the ice cream in, they wouldn't just keep serving it into their hands and passing it over? Therefore similarly I'd hope someone to have enough common sense after making the first one and finding no spoon to pause and think at least.
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In this scenario only a manager would have the necessary permissions to disable ordering on the touchscreen, not the food worker.

The outlet is more likely to be aware that they are running out of serving vessels, and can be ready to temporarily remove an item from the touch screen menu pending stock. One or two people will possibly have ordered in that time and will be refunded, after some dillydallying.

The crucial difference is that not having any spoons doesn't impact the assembling and delivering of the product, only the consumption. It is less likely in this scenario that food workers will be aware of stock levels of utensils. It will take longer to alert a manager, who may not feel it necessary to disable ordering. As the spoon isn't critical to the assembly and delivery of the product the line isn't broken.

From a purely operational perspective, there isn't a problem. From a customer experience perspective, there is a problem.

It is the equivalent of serving you a bottle of beer, but not opening the bottle or having a bottle opener available. It is the equivalent of you wanting sugar in your coffee, but there is no sugar available. You can still be sold the item, given the item and consume the item, it just won't be optimal.

Pret a Manger wouldn't not sell me a portion of soup just because there wasn't a disposable spoon available. That's my problem.

The inherent issue with this particular circumstance is that ice cream, unfortunately, melts. Melted ice cream, in a cup, does solve the consumption conundrum though. You can always drink it when it's tepid.
 
GooseOnTheLoose said:
From a purely operational perspective, there isn't a problem. From a customer experience perspective, there is a problem.

It is the equivalent of serving you a bottle of beer, but not opening the bottle or having a bottle opener available. It is the equivalent of you wanting sugar in your coffee, but there is no sugar available. You can still be sold the item, given the item and consume the item, it just won't be optimal.
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Imagine my surprise when I (eventually) found out that Vans belt buckles have a bottle opener at the back! But here's the difference - for some companies the "customer experience" is everything!! Those are the companies that get my repeat business - that I spend more with, and that I'm happy to pay a small premium (and a higher profit margin for them).

Watch out when Universal arrives!
 
Personally, I have never had a problem with a bottle of beer but no opener, managed every last time, sharp edge surface required.

But I have never, ever, had to struggle with a tub of ice cream with no spoon...never occurred, with fifty years of purchasing such products.

Probably because I don't do ice cream at the towers.
 
GooseOnTheLoose said:
In this scenario only a manager would have the necessary permissions to disable ordering on the touchscreen, not the food worker.

The outlet is more likely to be aware that they are running out of serving vessels, and can be ready to temporarily remove an item from the touch screen menu pending stock. One or two people will possibly have ordered in that time and will be refunded, after some dillydallying.

The crucial difference is that not having any spoons doesn't impact the assembling and delivering of the product, only the consumption. It is less likely in this scenario that food workers will be aware of stock levels of utensils. It will take longer to alert a manager, who may not feel it necessary to disable ordering. As the spoon isn't critical to the assembly and delivery of the product the line isn't broken.

From a purely operational perspective, there isn't a problem. From a customer experience perspective, there is a problem.

It is the equivalent of serving you a bottle of beer, but not opening the bottle or having a bottle opener available. It is the equivalent of you wanting sugar in your coffee, but there is no sugar available. You can still be sold the item, given the item and consume the item, it just won't be optimal.

Pret a Manger wouldn't not sell me a portion of soup just because there wasn't a disposable spoon available. That's my problem.

The inherent issue with this particular circumstance is that ice cream, unfortunately, melts. Melted ice cream, in a cup, does solve the consumption conundrum though. You can always drink it when it's tepid.
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Going back to the first reply to on this where the issue was that food worker had to remake products because they melted before they were served.
The food worker doesn't need to disable the ordering, but just use common sense and stop assembling and delivering the product to maintain the customer experience but also from a cost perspective, to reduce food wastage.
Again, the common sense approach when you have remake things, would then be to stop making them.
 
jon81uk said:
Going back to the first reply to on this where the issue was that food worker had to remake products because they melted before they were served.
The food worker doesn't need to disable the ordering, but just use common sense and stop assembling and delivering the product to maintain the customer experience but also from a cost perspective, to reduce food wastage.
Again, the common sense approach when you have remake things, would then be to stop making them.
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But the orders keep coming through, you HAVE to make them. You have SLAs to hit and are timed between a transaction being taken, an order prepared and delivered.

The customer has the expectation after ordering that they will get the item. As they're not talking to a human they have no idea that there'll be an issue with the order that's been created. A non managerial food worker cannot process a refund.

The set up of a modern fast food service establishment doesn't allow for common sense intervention by standard food workers. Unfortunately they are drones, automating a task. There isn't any wiggle room for them. They can't just stop processing some orders once they've been accepted by the tills, systems start screeching at them. It's an unfortunate position to be in where you have no autonomy.
 
GooseOnTheLoose said:
But the orders keep coming through, you HAVE to make them. You have SLAs to hit and are timed between a transaction being taken, an order prepared and delivered.

The customer has the expectation after ordering that they will get the item. As they're not talking to a human they have no idea that there'll be an issue with the order that's been created. A non managerial food worker cannot process a refund.

The set up of a modern fast food service establishment doesn't allow for common sense intervention by standard food workers. Unfortunately they are drones, automating a task. There isn't any wiggle room for them. They can't just stop processing some orders once they've been accepted by the tills, systems start screeching at them. It's an unfortunate position to be in where you have no autonomy.
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If there is enough autonomy to remake orders that have been sent back (there won't be a ticket from the till for the remake) then there is enough autonomy to pause. Again if they had run out of cups to put the ice cream in to they would have had to stop so the ability to stop is there. Yes the screen may be flashing as the order is late being sent out, but they would have to pause making a new order to facilitate the remakes after the complaints anyway.
 
ChatGPT says you can fork it, or use chopsticks. So the same AI as the staff 🤪 It ain't rocket science! Ice cream, cup, spoon. If you run out of any one stop serving. Otherwise, what when they run out of ice cream?? Just serve the cup and spoon?????
 
jon81uk said:
If there is enough autonomy to remake orders that have been sent back (there won't be a ticket from the till for the remake) then there is enough autonomy to pause. Again if they had run out of cups to put the ice cream in to they would have had to stop so the ability to stop is there. Yes the screen may be flashing as the order is late being sent out, but they would have to pause making a new order to facilitate the remakes after the complaints anyway.
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Remakes can be pencilled in as wastage and target times are still hit
 
jon81uk said:
If there is enough autonomy to remake orders that have been sent back (there won't be a ticket from the till for the remake) then there is enough autonomy to pause. Again if they had run out of cups to put the ice cream in to they would have had to stop so the ability to stop is there. Yes the screen may be flashing as the order is late being sent out, but they would have to pause making a new order to facilitate the remakes after the complaints anyway.
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Surely the systems should realise stocks of spoons etc have run out and automatically suspend sales?
 
jon81uk said:
The system will not be that clever. I don’t think any food service business operates that way.
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Surely it would work the same as any basic warehouse system?
Barcode stock in
Regular stock counts
Usage deducts stock
scrap recorded

I’d be absolutely amazed if nobody has ever thought of this. Otherwise how do they know the reorder points?
 
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