STAFF: How to Hire Best Kitchen Manager for Your Restaurant
Hiring a competent and talented kitchen manager it is definitely no mean feat. There’s more to the eye than just preparing some food and delivering it. And that compounds the more your restaurant gets. Bigger the crowds, the bigger the job. So, you might as well go through all the details in this post and check out the best way to hire the most appropriate kitchen manager. After all, your restaurant deserves nothing but the best, right?
DID YOU KNOWS…
Digital Waller Users Could Double by 2020
According to research conducted by Juniper Research, cited by the Wall Street Journal, the global number of digital wallet users could double by 2020. While Apple Pay is expected to stay in the lead through the forecast period, Google Pay and Samsung Pay are expected to see faster growth between 2018 and 2020, when both are expected to hit 100 million users worldwide.
States Where Vaccines are Dropping
27 states are falling short on shots and several experienced an alarming decline between 2009 and 2018. During that period, Georgia and Arkansas saw their vaccination rates decline by more than six percentage points while both Utah and Oklahoma also experienced a decline of more than four percentage points. Three states -- Colorado, Kansas and Idaho -- now have vaccination rates of less than 90% for measles, mumps and rubella which leaves their populations particularly vulnerable to serious outbreaks of those diseases.
Altitude vs. Comcast
Altitude, Colorado’s regional sports network, has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Comcast over their carriage dispute. The lawsuit claims Comcast “wants to extinguish competition from Altitude so Comcast can pocket more of the money it takes from consumers each month for sports programming.” In September, Comcast, DirecTV and Dish all dropped Altitude but DirecTV eventually struck a deal at the end of October. This came right after Colorado’s attorney general announced his office was investigating whether or not DirecTV and Comcast were violating the Colorado Consumer Protection Act by charging a regional sports fee for a blacked-out channel.
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
Why it matters to you: The tip credit will not go quietly into that good night.
Chicago is the most recent city to start the trek to a $15 minimum wage for all employees and is seeing serious pushback from the industry. Ironically, it’s both management and rank and file employees that are joining in one voice to push back on eliminating the server tip credit. Mayor Lori Lightfoot has proposed a path to the $15 minimum wage that only raises the server minimum wage to $8.40. But this fight is ongoing and there are other proposals that nix the credit altogether. This isn’t the first time that servers and operators have agreed on this issue with servers in Maine rising up to support a return to the server tip credit after they had previously eliminated it in the state.
It’s funny how a divisive issue like the minimum wage could create a common interest for two such disparate constituencies. But servers claim that if you eliminate the credit people will tip less. And certainly you can understand the operators concern about the impact on already strained budgets. The truth is that in the states that have no tip credit, no credible study has demonstrated that the tips go down. This fight will rage on, but for sure the days of the $4.35 wages for service staff are already going away. The real question should be, why don’t we just change the tipping culture before it gets changed for us?
[Source: Restaurants Business Online]
BLAST FROM THE PAST
Why it matters to you: The story of McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwich is the lesson all operators need right now.
Normally the story of a legacy sandwich at McDonalds like the Filet-O-Fish would be relegated to our Did You Know section above, but there is such a solid lesson from it we wanted to share more. The sandwich itself was an invention of a Cincinnati-area McD’s franchisee in the late-50s, who was savvy enough to notice that his competition was busy on Friday nights and he wasn’t. At that time, Cincinnati was 87% Catholic and observant folks didn’t eat meat on Fridays. The McD’s franchisee, Lou Groen, convinced Ray Kroc, the legendary founder of McDonald’s, to do a test to determine if a fish sandwich would work at a notorious burger joint. Kroc had his own ideas about a meatless option and suggested they test the fish sandwich against his favored sandwich, the Hula Burger (pineapple and cheese on a bun…yes, that sounds terrible). Well, that test led to a complete route and the Filet-O-Fish was born.
There are several lessons here worth appreciating, starting with listening to your guests. They know what they want. Whether you check out your competition, as Groen did to determine the fish sandwich was viable, or poll your guests, getting their opinion is paramount. Concurrently, Kroc was brilliant for putting it to an A/B test. This is further guest feedback in action and relies on their behavior to determine policy rather than some wild guess the McDonald’s team hoped was right. We often discuss how to develop new products on the strength of testing as specials before launching them as menu items. As you can divine from this story, that isn’t a new strategy. But if testing a product prelaunch delivers a sandwich as durable in its popularity as the Filet-O-Fish, then it’s proof enough to us of its validity.
[Source: Reader’s Digest]
