Their manual for their entire process from order to deliver, is half an inch thick.
They use a grid system on their order pads, with dozens and dozens of letters.
So when you want to queue up how much of an order you need, say eggs or bacon, and you ask all your waitresses, they tell you 'order, single, double, triple' etc, and you have to convert that.
For every single one of them.
Instead of just stating the absolute amount of eggs or bacon.
Seriously.
See if you can put this together in 12-15 seconds or less:
waitress 1: "order bacon." w2: "triple bacon" w3: "plate with bacon burger (incidentally, a 'half' order of bacon, which is actually TWO THIRDS of an order)" w4: "three orders, one double, one crispy."
Did you add all that up the 12-15 seconds? How much bacon is that?
And if any plate automatically includes bacon, they're explicitly NOT supposed to tell you. It's reasonable to assume a cook that knows the recipes, already knows this. But then it makes it impossible to cue up the individual ingredients for a whole set of orders, in-order of cook time. Because then if you ask all the waitresses for JUST their egg orders, you either skip the non-omelette plates that include eggs, or you have the waitress tell you the whole order.
Fucks the newbies up, who end up making too much or too little and pisses off both the customers who wait longer, or end up with cold food, and the waitresses who end up with smaller or no tips because of it.
Calculating your all-days (the total amount of an individual ingredient or food) is backwards. This isn't just because of what I wrote above, but because some of the plates (such as plates with default inclusions, such as bacon burgers), WHEN conveyed to the cook, must not be included when called. The type of burger itself is conveyed, but the waitresses, even if they calculate it for you, are explicitly, if they convey this information, supposed to exclude the subingredients of those additional plates, from the total.
So even when you have the waitresses do their job, and calculate the sub total of an ingredient you need to toss down (especially when its busy)--and you add together each waitresses order to get a grand total of what you need to cook (bacon, eggs, waffles, etc), you still end up having to do the conversions--on the fly--individually.
And what ends up happening, in practice, is, custom orders either get fucked, or are delivered cold.
Their training culture isn't bad though. Their process is just retarded.
I'm just a pleb line cook who has worked a lot of other jobs. And in the hundred odd experiences where I suggested some improvement, be it to management, or above them, it was ignored all but a few times. Worse, many places sideline you, punish you, or 'retrain' you, if instead of making a suggestion, you simply go ahead and make the change yourself. Most managers are hostile to process change and incapable of making a single significant decision. And the consequence of this is things that are immediate problems, or offer immediate improvements, don't get implemented locally. It's looked at as either competition, or stepping on toes. Any case, can't change anything. Once I realized how retarded it was, I just left.
"Pay your dues" is ingrate-culture, the opposite of galt's gulch.
outlaw 3 points 2.8 years ago
I left wafflehouse about a month ago.
I worked there less than a week.
Their manual for their entire process from order to deliver, is half an inch thick.
They use a grid system on their order pads, with dozens and dozens of letters.
So when you want to queue up how much of an order you need, say eggs or bacon, and you ask all your waitresses, they tell you 'order, single, double, triple' etc, and you have to convert that.
For every single one of them.
Instead of just stating the absolute amount of eggs or bacon.
Seriously.
See if you can put this together in 12-15 seconds or less:
waitress 1: "order bacon."
w2: "triple bacon"
w3: "plate with bacon burger (incidentally, a 'half' order of bacon, which is actually TWO THIRDS of an order)"
w4: "three orders, one double, one crispy."
Did you add all that up the 12-15 seconds? How much bacon is that?
And if any plate automatically includes bacon, they're explicitly NOT supposed to tell you. It's reasonable to assume a cook that knows the recipes, already knows this. But then it makes it impossible to cue up the individual ingredients for a whole set of orders, in-order of cook time. Because then if you ask all the waitresses for JUST their egg orders, you either skip the non-omelette plates that include eggs, or you have the waitress tell you the whole order.
Fucks the newbies up, who end up making too much or too little and pisses off both the customers who wait longer, or end up with cold food, and the waitresses who end up with smaller or no tips because of it.
Calculating your all-days (the total amount of an individual ingredient or food) is backwards. This isn't just because of what I wrote above, but because some of the plates (such as plates with default inclusions, such as bacon burgers), WHEN conveyed to the cook, must not be included when called. The type of burger itself is conveyed, but the waitresses, even if they calculate it for you, are explicitly, if they convey this information, supposed to exclude the subingredients of those additional plates, from the total.
So even when you have the waitresses do their job, and calculate the sub total of an ingredient you need to toss down (especially when its busy)--and you add together each waitresses order to get a grand total of what you need to cook (bacon, eggs, waffles, etc), you still end up having to do the conversions--on the fly--individually.
And what ends up happening, in practice, is, custom orders either get fucked, or are delivered cold.
Their training culture isn't bad though. Their process is just retarded.
I'm just a pleb line cook who has worked a lot of other jobs. And in the hundred odd experiences where I suggested some improvement, be it to management, or above them, it was ignored all but a few times. Worse, many places sideline you, punish you, or 'retrain' you, if instead of making a suggestion, you simply go ahead and make the change yourself. Most managers are hostile to process change and incapable of making a single significant decision.
And the consequence of this is things that are immediate problems, or offer immediate improvements, don't get implemented locally. It's looked at as either competition, or stepping on toes.
Any case, can't change anything. Once I realized how retarded it was, I just left.
"Pay your dues" is ingrate-culture, the opposite of galt's gulch.