Do Long Lines At Fast Food Restaurants Cost You Customers?

Pretend you’re the manager at a fast food restaurant. Every day for lunch you get busy. Really busy. In fact, most days there is a line out the door. Business is good, right?

You normally staff 2 cashiers, because the CFO wants to keep costs down. They know it costs $12.50 an hour to staff cashier, plus benefit perhaps.

But your restaurant has 4 cash registers, so 2 of them sit dormant…during your busiest time of the day.

Let me ask… how many customers open the door, peek at the line and see how long it is…then decide to go somewhere else?

You don’t know, and neither do I. But for everyone who does, you’ve lost revenue, haven’t you?

What’s the average transaction for your lunch-time customers? Say it’s $9. All it takes is 2 customers in the space of an hour who decided NOT to wait in that line. If you lose those 2 customers, that’s more than the $12.50 an hour your CFO wants to save.

Because of that line that only exists because the CFO refused to staff an extra person.

What’s your lost revenue at lunchtime, due to understaffing and long lines?

That’s your magic metric.

Now, I’m oversimplifying — there’s revenue and then there’s the food cost and the margin and benefits you have to pay the extra cashier.

But how many customers? Is it 2? What if it’s 5? What if it’s 10?

Don’t you want to find out?

A hidden metric, staring you right in the face.

I help businesses discover these hidden metrics. How to find them, measure them, and take actions to implement changes to improve them.

I’m just getting started, and this is a passion of mine. Let’s grow together

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P.s. Yes. There are several ways to measure this one specifically, ranging from no-tech simple to big data implementations. If you’re interested, DM me to ask how