INVENTORY: The Easiest Way to Prepare an Order [Presented by Orderly]
You've been putting ordering on autopilot for years. After all, trying to change your orders seems like it would involve a lot of time that you just don't have. That's why Orderly is proud to announce the new Order Prep Tool. It will help you order smarter and save money, and won't cost you any more of your precious time.
WORLD CUP DID YOU KNOWS…
Greatest Games
The FIFA World Cup, kicking off in Moscow today, is one of the biggest sporting spectacles in the world. Every four years, soccer fans from all around the world get ready for an action-packed month of competition culminating in the World Cup final, arguably the biggest game on earth. While the Super Bowl, the biggest game from an American perspective, is viewed by more than a hundred million people in the U.S. plus maybe another 100 across the globe, the 2014 World Cup final between Argentina and Germany had an average in-home TV audience of more than 560 million people. So, we’ve established that the FIFA World Cup is huge, but is it really the biggest sporting event of all in terms of television reach? Find out here.
Watching the World Cup
In the days of smartphones, video streaming and binge watching, sporting events are one of the last strongholds of linear, live television. According to a recent Ipsospoll, 62% of all people aware of the World Cup across 27 countries plan to watch parts of the tournament on TV, while just 25% plan to watch the games online and even fewer (13%) plan to use a mobile device. Often referred to as “the global game,” soccer is played and followed in all parts of the world and the quadrennial world cup is the pinnacle of the sport.
Hunger Strike
Talking about taking soccer seriously. Argentinian prisoners are going on a hunger strike because they can’t watch the World Cup. "Cable television is an indispensable right for everyone deprived of their liberty," they claim. To clarify: the prisoners technically have cable, but it’s busted and they want it fixed in time to watch the tournament. Bold move, fellas.
Go here for even more World Cup infographics to share with guests & boost your staff’s soccer know-how. And don’t forget to visit our 2018 International Soccer Central guide to download the Group Play’s TV schedule and build some awesome traffic-driving soccer promotions.
SHARING-SHARING IS NO FUN.
Why it matters to you: Tip-pooling can be more problematic that we all once realized.
Immediately on the surface, forcing your FoH to pool tips so that you can tip-out your BoH staff sounds like a fair way of doing things. Everyone makes a little more money as the business lives and dies as a team. In a lot of peoples’ heads, fairness would mean it would be far less difficult to get and keep staff along with several other benefits. This is, however, not the case. If we have the power to say whether or not our servers have to pool their tips with the BoH, all we are successfully doing is exacerbating a long running and time honored tradition within restaurants: -- underpaying cooks and waiters. It seems odd considering both are solely responsible for the FOOD and SERVICE of our businesses, but it is rare for the average line cook to make over $14(ish) an hour unless in a fine dining scenario; servers make just around $2.13 an hour. Servers really need those tips and the BoH really needs a legitimate and steady wage. Sounds like the world Bourdain portrayed in Kitchen Confidential hasn’t progressed all that much monetarily.
If our servers are the reason why the cooks are making more money than all that does for us as operators is stave off the need to give them actual-legitimate raises. With so much going on in a restaurant day-to-day, if the cooks are quiet about their pay it is super easy to forget about it and move on to the next issue. Plus, tip pooling is a guaranteed way to piss off servers and scare away the best ones. With servers working so far below minimum wage there shouldn’t be a need to siphon off of their tips. Better to give legitimate wages to our workers instead.
LEAD IN RESTAURANT TECH, DON’T JUST REACT
Why it matters to you: Chipotle’s new CEO is making a push to bring their tech to the forefront of the industry and we could all take some notes.
When Chipotle’s new CEO Brian Niccol (formerly of Taco Bell) took over the helm, we knew we could expect some truly innovative changes. He’s already making his mark, leading a push to bring their restaurants’ tech ahead of the pack. This isn’t surprising when you consider their fledgling digital sales prior (only 8.8% of total).
One major advancement is their “second make line,” an additional food assembly line at every restaurant for takeout and delivery orders. Coincidentally, this line is also a great place to try out any new tech without disrupting the rest of their establishments. A huge advancement they’ve made through their second make line is digitizing their ticket process for orders. Now staff have big screens where ticket rails would typically be. The system orders the digital orders automatically by their pickup times and highlight the flow of ingredients for the employees assembling orders. Wow!
While we doubt they will be selling this system, we’re sure someone will come along and create a similar (or somehow better) system to sell to other operators in the very near future. Think of how streamlined your establishment could get with to-go orders. This could really be an industry wide game changer. We should all pay attention to how Chipotle’s newly implemented delivery and to-go system succeeds (or fails), especially with the massive uptick in online orders and delivery as of late.
