It was 4:30pm on a typical weekday around our house and we had no idea what we were going to have for dinner. So my wife decided to go online and order Garbanzo. Garbanzo is a Colorado chain; they are like the Chipotle of Middle Eastern food. They make their pita bread fresh to order and their falafels are delicious. She placed the order and I went to pick it up.
When I arrived they had our digital order printed out, like most restaurants they only have a desktop in the back office, so they have to print out the online orders. Websites are hard to print from in general, and their printer was low in ink, the order page was very hard to read.
The order being hard to read caused them to make one of our plates wrong and when they realized it they tossed it in the trash. The manager was viewing the order on his smartphone telling the cook what to make on the second go around.
The entree’s price is $7.49 assume a 25% food cost and that is $1.87 of food that was wasted. I think it is fair to say the paper bowl and labor cost of the manager and the cook cost .13 cents, and we are looking at a $2.00 loss. Assume that happens once a day at their 25 locations, and that is an annual cost of $18,200.
I get that purchasing tablets and cloud apps cost money, money that restaurants aren’t necessarily used to paying. Don’t believe for a second that restaurants aren’t incurring other costs today by not going paperless or investing in technology.
