What the restaurant surveillance cams revealed
The owners of a restaurant in New York City were puzzled that even as they hired more and more staff, service seemed to be getting slower and slower, and customers were starting to complain about it. They hired a company to investigate what was going wrong. Eventually they came up with the idea to compare 10 year old recordings from their surveillance cams with recent recordings. The results were pretty startling. It wasn’t at all that the staff had gotten lazy. Rather, the customers behave quite differently now. Specifically, they spend a lot more time on their phones, trying to get the wifi to work, taking pictures of each other and the food, posting on Facebook, etc. And they actually waste a lot more of the servers’ time in these activities, and they end up staying a lot longer. So, even though the servers show up just as fast as they always did, and deliver the food just as fast as they always did, they end up being required to spend a lot more time helping the customers take pictures, waiting for the customers to be ready to order, etc. Quite intriguing study of how our habits have changed and how that messes with traditional business practices. And it wouldn’t have been possible without their cameras.
Full story on Distractify.
July 13, 2014 at 4:47 pm | Culture | No comment