RESTAURANT MEMES: Kermit Working Doubles, Broccoli, Shift Meals, Gordon Ramsay Demons & More!
Have a shot of restaurant memes to kick off your week. Today on top we have eating broccoli, Kermit works a double, shift meals, and Gordon Ramsay works for the devil.
DID YOU KNOWS…
Booze Up at Mariposa Saloon
Westworld fans are in for a treat. The show is recreating their location into a theme park at SXSW next month. It’s taking place at an undisclosed location by Austin, TX. Guests will be thrown into a narrative including scenes at Mariposa Saloon, the show’s bar and restaurant. It sounds super cool but no idea if there’ll be robots, though.
Not a Cop
A Georgia woman is facing two felony counts for impersonating a federal agent while at a local Chick-fil-A. She asked for a discount at the drive-thru and was denied. She then went inside to berate the staff and flash a badge. She was eventually arrested. And while this seems like a weird way to look for a discount, it’s more common than you’d think.
Websites See Drastic Decline in Facebook Traffic
According to a new report by Shareaholic, the percentage of website traffic coming from Facebook has declined drastically in the second half of 2017. As you can see in the chart, Facebook’s share of all visits to a sample of 250,000 websites has dropped from 30.9% in the second half of 2016 to 18.2% in the last six months of 2017. Shareaholic attributes the drop to a number of earlier changes that Facebook made to its news feed last year and to a general change in user behavior on the platform. Here’s how Facebook compares to other social media sites.
YELP USES GUEST WIFI FOR SOME INTERESTING ANALYTICS
Why it matters to you: Yelp is digging deep into data analytics, guest WiFi to see how restaurant marketing is working.
Wouldn't it be great to be able to see exactly who your ads were affecting vs who they weren’t?
Yelp is taking steps to be able to do just that on a wide scale. They recently purchased a Canadian company called Turnstyle Analytics whose data analytics technology enables to track e-mail addresses of registered Yelp users as they check in to free guest WiFi at restaurants. While not foolproof, this allows Yelp to have a better grasp with who has seen restaurant ads then visited the restaurant in a certain timeframe. This isn’t a perfect plan, however, since there is always a possibility the guests do not use the free WiFi in restaurant and thus cannot be completely tracked.
The important aspect of new tactic is that restaurants can see exactly how much money per tracked customer they make versus dollar spent on Yelp advertising. The test restaurant, Jack Astor’s, saw $110 per $1 spent in Yelp advertising. Certainly not a bad little trade off, especially when you consider that a number of guests most likely did not sign into WiFi, skewing the results down a bit. The future of advertising is more exciting than ever.
SHOULD TIPPING BE AT ITS’ TIPPING POINT?
Why it matters to you: While tipping is the norm in America should it stay that way?
Having employees rely on “tipped minimum” wages can and has caused all sorts of issues for restaurant workers for a while now. Slow nights and weeks and too many employees working versus not enough business; there are many factors that can contribute to drastically affecting your teams’ bottom line.Tipping was born from indentured servitude and perpetuates the servant and master power dynamic still to this day, but should it stay that way? Some chefs and restaurateurs have gone “no tip” to varying degrees of success which, in the early stages, can anger employees and lead to increased turnover if opeators aren’t careful. We all know the cost of that. Others stick to the status quo, and many are implementing tip-pooling since the Trump administration passed that bit of legislation under everyone's’ nose. There is no doubt that tipping can also lead to bias, racism, sexual harassment, and worker exploitation, so where do we go as an industry from here?
We face a difficult ultimatum in the near future: do we continue as we are or switch the almost- industry-wide model as a whole? There are pros and cons to both and it is, unfortunately, not a very black and white scenario. If we weigh the options, we see no-tipping as the likely future. Paying employees a fixed wage could include benefits and sick time whereas now most employees cannot -- or will not -- take sick days because they can’t afford it. It would also fix the unwanted power dynamic that allows diners to penalize the server if their food was mixed up due to a kitchen mishap or another misunderstanding in service. There are many pros to the no-tip policy and if we can ensure a way to somehow not upset our best employees it is surely the way to go.
