Lane Cardwell

Odds and Ends at Week's End

It is Friday night and I am on a flight to Dallas after having spent some time in South Florida looking at restaurants and talking restaurants all day. As has become the norm anymore when traveling the flight will be arriving at least an hour and a half late. For those of you who travel frequently this is like saying that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow. Air travel these days has become a very unpredictable way to try and get from Point A to Point B. A lot is out of the control of the airlines and their employees. Weather, mechanical problems, and flight schedules that domino through the day with the slightest interruption are commonplace situations. How employees react to these situations with customers should not be commonplace.

Problems are inevitable in any industry that deals with large numbers of people on tight schedules on a daily basis. I can’t help but wonder, however, if our industry treated our customers like the airline industry treats their customers, our customers might decide that cooking at home wasn’t such a bad alternative to dining with us. I don’t mean to be smug. We certainly have our own opportunities and challenges every day. Orders get taken wrong, food gets cooked incorrectly, incomplete drive-thru orders given to us, and 30-minute waits turn into 60-minute waits, and so on, and so on. But in my experience we don’t usually ask the customer to just expect that this is the inevitable result of eating with us. In most cases we try to make amends so as to not lose the customer’s business in the future. Or at least I like to think so.

It has been an interesting week. Domino’s was in the national news as a result of two idiot employees who forgot to wear fake mustaches when airing their food tampering crimes on YouTube. It could have happened to any restaurant company, Domino’s just happened to win the bad news lottery. I can assure you that it has been the topic of conversation with many restaurant companies. With the prevalence of social media and “every phone is a camera”, how do you protect your company from being punk'd by the unthinking actions of those who represent your brand with actions that don’t represent your brand?

Seemingly unrelated to our industry, Susan Boyles, a 47-year old woman appearing on the British version of American Idol stunned the judges and the world with a song that moved many to tears. Why was this such a big surprise in a talent contest for singers? It was simply because she didn’t look the part. The judges and the audience were prepared to hate her performance until she opened her mouth and the first notes came out. It never occurred to Susan that looks had anything to do with an ability to sing. How many of our restaurants never get a fair chance with the public because of the way they look on the outside or inside? Unfortunately for us, looks do matter.

The stock market has been smiling on restaurant stocks during the past week. The smart money, unfortunately the same people who make dumb decisions with it, seems to feel that there is mounting evidence that our sales problems have bottomed out and the light at the end of the tunnel is not another train. Time will tell.

What have we learned during this sales downturn? Hopefully we have learned that we are a very resilient industry with a lot more tricks up our sleeves than we had given ourselves credit for. I would also hope that we have learned that keeping a regular full-paying customer is worth a lot more than attracting a new customer with a coupon for a free meal. One is a long term annuity. The other is a tourist. They have come to see the sights, and then are on to their next discounted travel tour. I have an airline that I could recommend to them.

Posted by Lane Cardwell on April 17, 2009 | Comments (2)