Before I start my experience with the extra credit assignment, I just would like to briefly talk about a similar experience I had working as a restaurant manager in the Upper East Side, Manhattan. Now this area is 1) highly competitive due to the existence of so many restaurants, serving different cuisines and been there for decades 2) has a special clientele, the salaries of people living in this area represent the highest income in America per district and the most contributors to the political campaigns 3) high level of attendance, a good portion of our clientele visit us once a day every day, sometimes twice a day, since we were open for lunch, dinner and brunch.
Anyway, because of all the reasons above and more, we were very flexible in term of customer service satisfaction especially by allowing customers to change and modify certain ingredients and sauces, which some other restaurant businesses don’t allow: you get what is on the menu “No substitutions”. Let me give you one simple example: you may see something like this on our menu “Chicken cutlet with proscuitto, roasted red peppers artichoke hearts, lemon white wine, served with capellini and mixed vegetables (carrots, broccoli and string beans)”. Now , someone may change this entrée to something like this, for different reasons, “no artichoke hearts, no butter, no white wine, with olive oil, no capellini, angel hair instead and no carrots.
This substitution strategy besides customer satisfaction and profit maximization has some disadvantages such as an increase risk of making mistakes by not getting an order right, due to so many detailed substitutions especially on a busy night as well as creating bottlenecks at the kitchen because changing the components of a meal is time consuming.
Now, let’s go to Astoria, Queens where I got my burger and fries. It was a Sunday afternoon and a very warm day. As I walked in, the line was very long. I waited for almost 20 minutes before my turn to order. While waiting, I can see the frustration of the staff working at the registers; nobody is smiling and keeping the conversations to a minimum. On my right, there was an old Hispanic lady (homeless), sitting with no food on the table but a bottle of water and dirty brown bags scattered around her.
OK, my turn now to order. I approached the lady, greet her and as the assignment states, I ordered as follow: 1 small hamburger with exactly 4 pickles on it and 1 small order of well done French fries with no salt, both orders from the Dollar menu. I had to repeat myself 3 times beside the fact that she looked at me like I have two heads or some type of mental challenge. As I watched her processing my order, she had to tell the cook my order instead of relying on the computer system, and because she was in charge of the French fries station, she walked fro it to the register back and forth at least 3 times and every time she asks me if I wanted salt on my fries and if I wanted them well done. The whole process from ordering to handing me my order took about 4 minutes, since she had to throw in the fryer another bag of frozen potato and wait for it.
I don’t like McDonald’s food so, after I checked it to make sure it is correct, I decided to offer it to the homeless lady I mentioned before, went to her table and asked gently: “would like some food?” Then she started screaming at me, opened the bottle of water that was on the table and threw it on me. I got all soaked in water, stepped away and placed the food in the garbage can.
Today’s fast food market is highly competitive and there is a constant pressure on the market to move to a healthy one in terms of calories, oil and certain ingredients. Businesses and in this case McDonald’s, have to improve their customer service and because of the nature of the business that requires a very interaction between the staff and customers and since the corporation, through its commercials, is advocating for love and happiness( “ I am lovin it” and the smiling face on the logo ) they have to infuse some friendliness, warmth and openness to consumer’s needs as well as to come up with some strategies to smooth the flow of special orders operation. A good portion of the time that took to complete my order was spent on making a new French fries, the one that was already there was salty, so I recommend a basic strategy, adding salt to individual orders rather than the whole pile of fries.
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