Playing whack-a-mole with the value points, because when something has to give we must decide what that something is.

We were in a restaurant in Malta having a pizza and some pasta, and everything was going well. The food was good, we were seated quickly, our order was taken quite rapidly for drinks and food, the staff checked on us during our stay, and we enjoyed the friendly atmosphere of the place. It was a lively restaurant with loud voices and personality, and the front of house staff were attractive and smiley as you might expect. The meal didn’t cost too much, and the place had filled up by the time we ate, tables bustling with couples and children having parties. overall a fine experience, so why this post, why have something to write about, what got my brain thinking?

Em noticed, in a sort of finally becoming your parents way, that all the youngsters had devices, and the first question they asked was “what’s the wi-fi password?”. Noticing that the next gen is quite different to the last gen, and our gen, the X variety, is an almost certainty when you get to our age. I said becoming your parents because I remembered the fact that my elders )I like this word better than the alternatives) did not understand me or my pals in any fashion, and it seems that this is a repetitive happening. We got into how we thought that something as being missed about the experience if the device is the link to the real world, and how we didn’t see the world through a created lens that was manipulated by persons who wished to splash content mixed with Pavlov’s dog type human programming. Then we revised, maybe we just hadn’t noticed? But this isn’t the interesting part, just an aside.

Here’s the central theme of the piece , the crux, what we arrived at after spending a good 15 minutes trying to pay our bill… We simply couldn’t get the staff to bring it to us. Now why would that be?

I have a theory I often do. I call this one the whack-a-mole effect. We could also call this the something has to give effect, that would work just as well. If you are running a business, and you have let’s say 8 stages in the process of completing the task of feeding a table of folks, and you have resources that are flexible and dynamic combined with resources that are fixed and purposeful, then triage is continual for the dynamic resources, determining where they are best suited, but not for the fixed staff. The fixed staff do what they do, in this case they make the food, then inform the dynamic staff that those orders are ready, their stage is in the middle.

The dynamic staff greet the customer, take the order, place the order, respond to the order being made ready, deliver the order, check on the patron, clear the table when finished, and deliver the bill. These flexible employees overlap these actions between tables so as to maximize their utility. The stages may be in order for each table but they are not for each server. A server may take three orders then deliver two meals, then clear a table, then deliver a bill and take a payment. So our dynamic staff are performing quite a difficult task, spinning many plates at the same time.

Now they may have direction from a senior person, a coordinator, or they may not need that, but what is clear is that with a fixed number of these resources there are going to be times where all is not possible to achieve at the same time. Like when the restaurant fills very quickly and many orders are placed in close proximity. At this point there must be a thing, or things, that take priority over other things, and a breakdown is incurred. The smart plan is to allow the breakdown, or breakdowns, to happen in the the areas where they are likely to have the least impact to the business in terms of what is financially wise.

This is where we, Em and I, experience the delay in paying the bill, and this is not accidental I suspect. The level of busyness of this restaurant had increased very quickly in the time between our arrival and planned departure, and the staff were taxed to the max in getting orders secured and placed so as to get the greatest utility from the customer. Knowing that the customer would seek to pay their bill and likely act to mitigate any delay themselves rather than to wait, they shifted the burden of doing so onto us. We queued at the till rather than waiting for the first server we had asked to get us the bill, or the second one when the first did not arrive and was observed taking an order from a table. The second could be observed seating another couple that had just arrived and then placing their order. So we solved their resource problem for them, and so did a few other couples. I think this is actually quite impressive because we could not be the most optimal focus for the time of the servers, their best option was the potential spender, not the persons who had consumed and were then outstanding a fixed amount of money.

If we assume that there are four people who may be disgruntled, the person waiting to be seated, the person waiting to order, the person waiting for food, and the person waiting to pay. And we assume that we have three available resources (persons) to address them, which one will you choose to delay in addressing, which will have the least effect? It’s obviously going to be choice four, the person waiting to pay, because he/she is not likely to give up and walk out. There is an optimality of resource management on display here, and it is further made understandable if we take into consideration that since this business caters for the tourist mostly, then each customer is potentially a one-time deal, so dissatisfaction can happen in the payment stage without repercussion.

Em was slightly annoyed, I was impressed.

Paul S Wilson