Walk into any casual full-service chain and count the friction points before you’ve ordered your first drink.The menu — laminated, multi-page, every surface covered in promotional pricing and limited-time offers. The QR code that sends you to a mobile ordering...

You’ve seen crabs in a bucket. Just when one gets close to the edge, the others grab hold and pull it back down. Not out of malice — out of instinct. The result is the same either way. Nobody gets...

Domino’s Pizza built a system for handling customer complaints that requires no human contact. An order arrives late and cold. The customer goes to the website, selects their excuse from a dropdown menu, chooses a resolution from a pre-approved list,...

There is a hiring practice so deeply embedded in corporate America that questioning it gets you looked at like you just said something dangerous. It has consultants, certifications, and decades of institutional momentum behind it. It is also largely useless...

It does not appear on the P&L. No accountant will flag it. No audit will surface it. No lender will ask about it. But it is the single largest expense most independent restaurant operators are running, and it compounds every...

The word loyalty has been hijacked. In the restaurant industry it has been redefined to mean a discount that rewards a Guest for dining with you or incentivizes them to return at some future point. The result is a system...

I have never believed in bad employees. I believe in bad hiring processes. Bad training systems. Bad performance standards that were never defined precisely enough to be held. Bad cultures that subsidize mediocrity because conformity is easier than standards. Bad...

After four decades in this business, one contradiction still amazes me: operators say they want teamwork and collaboration, then design every incentive system to produce competition and individual performance. Employee contests are an anti-teamwork tool. They pit cast members against...

There is a pattern so common in restaurant management that it deserves a name. A manager hires someone. After a short time it becomes clear the hire was wrong. The person is terminated. And instead of asking what went wrong...

Every Shift Is The Only Shift That Guest Will See There is a scheduling philosophy in the restaurant industry that sounds like operational efficiency and produces operational failure. It goes like this: slower days are lower priority. Lower priority days...