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According to the original poster, a decline in customer experience ratings prompted the restaurant (which has never been identified despite widespread circulation of the claims) to hire a consultancy firm and audit their practices to discover the source of the poor reviews. The poster stated the consultants concurred with customer feedback about slow service and recommended the restaurant review "old surveillance tapes" to determine which staff practices might have prompted the decrease in diner satisfaction.
The post began by explaining the restaurant's local standing and its recent decline in customer satisfaction:
We are a popular restaurant for both locals and tourists alike. Having been in business for many years we noticed that although the number of customers we serve on a daily basis is almost the same today as it was
10 yearsago, the service just seems super slow even though we added lots more staff and cut back on the menu items.
One of the most common complaints on review sites against us and many restaurants in the area is that the service was slow and or they needed to wait a bit long for a table.
We decided to hire a firm to help us solve this mystery, and naturally the first thing they blamed it on was that the employees need more training and that maybe the kitchen staff is just not up to the task of serving that many customers.
Like most restaurants in NYC we have a surveillance system, and unlike today where it's a digital system,
10 yearsago we still used special high capacity tapes to record all activity. At any given time we had 4 specialSony systems recording multiple cameras. We would store the footage for 90 daysjust in case we need it for something.
The firm we hired suggested we locate some of the older tapes and analyze how the staff behaved
10 yearsago versus how they behave now. We went down to our storage room but we couldn't find any tapes at all.
We did find the recording devices, and luckily for us, each device has
1 tapein it that we simply never removed when we upgraded to the new digital system.
The date stamp on the old footage was Thursday
July 12004, the restaurant was real busy that day. We loaded up the footage on a large size monitor, and next to it on a separate monitor loaded up the footage of Thursday July 32014, the amount of customers where only a bit more than 10 yearsprior.
I will quickly outline the findings. We carefully looked at over
45 transactionsin order to determine the data below.
First and foremost, it's possible (though perhaps not likely) this missive was genuinely written by a person who works for, manages, or owns a busy and popular restaurant in
However, one curious point readers were left pondering after perusing the post's initial claims was this: The writer claimed to represent a restaurant in
Many readers were also skeptical about whether the approach supposedly suggested by the consultancy firm (i.e., to review old surveillance tapes) is one commonly proffered to flagging restaurants, whether restaurants are expected to archive mundane surveillance tapes for a decade or more, whether the reviewing such tapes is a useful tool for assessing staff performance on any meaningful level, and whether the conclusions drawn in the post could be accurately achieved through the claimed
The post's commentary described what surveillance videos from 2004 purportedly revealed and provided an average duration for transactions of approximately
Customers walk in.
They get seated and are given menus, out of 45 customers
3 requestto be seated elsewhere.
Customers on average spend 8 minutes before closing the menu to show they are ready to order.
Waiters shows up and almost instantly takes the order.
Food starts getting delivered within 6 minutes, obviously the more complex items take way longer.
Out of 45 customers 2 sent items back that where too cold we assume (given they were not steak we assume they wanted the item heated up more).
Waiters keep an eye out for their tables so they can respond quickly if the customer needs something.
Customers are done, check delivered, and within 5 minutes they leave.
Average time from start to finish: 1:05
The poster described an entirely different dining experience in 2014, with poorly behaved customers and their infernal technological devices implicitly to blame for creating an average elapsed time of approximately
Customers walk in.
Customers get seated and is given menus, out of 45 customers
18 requestedto be seated elsewhere.
Before even opening the menu they take their phones out, some are taking photos while others are simply doing something else on their phone (sorry we have no clue what they are doing and do not monitor customer WIFI activity).
7 out of the 45 customers had waiters come over right away, they showed them something on their phone and spent an average of 5 minutes of the waiter's time. Given this is recent footage, we asked the waiters about this and they explained those customers had a problem connecting to the WIFI and demanded the waiters try to help them.
Finally the waiters are walking over to the table to see what the customers would like to order. The majority have not even opened the menu and ask the waiter to wait a bit.
Customer opens the menu, places their hands holding their phones on top of it and continue doing whatever on their phone.
Waiter returns to see if they are ready to order or have any questions. The customer asks for more time.
Finally they are ready to order.
Total average time from when the customer was seated until they placed their order
21 minutes.
Food starts getting delivered within 6 minutes, obviously the more complex items take way longer.
26 out of 45 customers spend an average of 3 minutes taking photos of the food.
14 out of 45 customers take pictures of each other with the food in front of them or as they are eating the food. This takes on average another
4 minutesas they must review and sometimes retake the photo.
9 out of 45 customers sent their food back to reheat. Obviously if they didn't pause to do whatever on their phone the food wouldn't have gotten cold.
27 out of 45 customers asked their waiter to take a group photo. 14 of those requested the waiter retake the photo as they were not pleased with the first photo. On average this entire process between the chit chatting and reviewing the photo taken added another 5 minutes and obviously caused the waiter not to be able to take care of other tables he/she was serving.
Given in most cases the customers are constantly busy on their phones it took an average of
20 minutesmore from when they were done eating until they requested a check. Furthermore once the check was delivered it took 15 minuteslonger than 10 yearsago for them to pay and leave.
8 out of 45 customers bumped into other customers or in one case a waiter (texting while walking) as they were either walking in or out of the Restaurant.
Average time from start to finish: 1:55
Yet another aspect that made the story a bit suspect to many readers was the notion that
The first major difference between ten years ago and today the poster cited involved customer seating requests. It's not clear what major change supposedly occurred between 2004 and 2014 which might prompt 18 out of
Next, the post stated the 2004 diners supplied waiters with their orders in a speedy eight minutes, and six minutes after that, food began arriving to their tables; by contrast, an unspecified number of 2014 diners were distracted by their phones before even opening the menu. An additional unspecified number of diners refused to even review their menus before issues about connecting their cell phones to the restaurant's WiFi signal were resolved, with seven demanding their server immediately attend to their table to solve the issue. (It would seem unlikely that seven out of
Given the lack of specificity in the post, it's difficult to assess how plausible the claims are (not to mention how provable they are). Unless the restaurant were located inside the Apple Store and solely served individuals who had just purchased brand new and novel smartphones, it doesn't seem plausible that many (if any) customers would be so entranced by their phones they'd forgo looking at menus or placing orders for an average of
Next, the post claimed, 26 of the 45 diners (parties?) spent an average of three minutes taking pictures of their food, which sounds excessive both in duration and scope. The practice of posting food images to social media sites probably isn't popular enough to involve more than half the diners at a given restaurant, and three minutes is an awfully long time to be photographing a still object. Nine of the
In the complaint's penultimate grievance, 2004 benchmarks are not provided. However, the poster explained, customers in 2014 spent an additional
Finally, the poster capped off his or her rant with a concluding statistic: of the
Ultimately, no restaurant ever stepped forward to own up to the rant. It was never determined to be linked to a specific venue in
Even if the claims presented did stem from an actual restaurant's audit of surveillance video, a number of factors (such as location, management, pricing, or menu fluctuations) went unaddressed in the spotty analysis. An argument could just as easily be made for a positive impact on business due to smartphone proliferation: a number of diners now locate their next restaurant experience on the fly using geolocation-enabled apps and pay for dinner with their phones. Additionally, it's not uncommon for customers to boost a venue's profile or reach by sharing glowing reviews on social media sites and posting images of enticing dishes that basically serve as free advertising. And there's no reason why, if such devices were truly as disruptive as the poster described, this nuisance wouldn't measurably extend into social spaces beyond dining establishments.
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