New asinine corporate directive...

My current Red Lobster is in the lowest (ranking) 100 stores in the USA for tracking our uses of condiments. That means at the end of the month, we have far less actual than theoretical products. We basically should have 10 tubs of butter but only have 4 tubs of butter. How does this happen? It is because we are giving good service to our customers. How does Red Lobster see it? They think we are wasteful, or if we aren't wasteful, we must be stealing it. Really though, after spending a night being coated in filth from tartar sauce, drawn butter, and ranch dressing you don't want to take any of it home. So the solution is that we have now been told that we must ring in everything extra. Rather than just allowing a manager to go ahead and divide the missing amount by the number of ounces per serving minus an acceptable amount of waste (stuff dropped on floor, bad product etc.) they require us to log onto the computer system and manually enter each of these things. I suspect that there are 40ish waiters in our store (I'm too lazy to look it up at the moment. On any given night I am asked for a MINIMUM of 25 "extra" things, but to be conservative let's just say it's 10 for the average server (accounting for fewer "extra" requests at lunch). That is potentially 400 new transactions at our computer terminals. Even the fastest of waiters will require 10+ seconds to complete each one of these transactions because to enter these new "extras" you must go through 4 different computer screens and then find the condiment you want and enter the correct quantity. 4000 second = over an hour a day more where servers will be standing at computer screens instead of giving service. This also worsens our problems with already congested computer terminals. We have 5 computers for our servers to use, and on a busy night it is not uncommon to wait a minute or two before you are able to get onto the computer because of the servers ahead of you. This is further worsened by Red Lobster's insistence on a "Ring it then bring it" order of service, we are not supposed to bring the stuff out until we have first rung it up (which is mostly logical, I'm not complaining about that method). Now remember, there are over 650 stores that may eventually be impacted by this. If only 25% have to do this - say 160 stores - you have wasted 58,000 hours of your server's time as a company. I suppose if they paid us more than a percentage of minimum wage as our hourly wage it might be more expensive for them.

This is what happens when corporations are led by people (see picture above) who have little to no first hand experience, or are so far removed from their actual experience that they no longer understand the ramifications of arbitrary stupid assed decisions. Rather than trusting your local management teams to do the math and to run a tight ship they choose to dictate impractical things that sound good on paper but never live up in practice.



Related Tags: Red Lobster, Darden, GMRI, Corporate management, Corporate leadership, Server, Waiter, Waitress, Customer Service, Food Service, Restaurant, Seafood, Lobster, Condiments, Tartar Sauce, Cocktail Sauce, A/T