Japanese restaurants are Leaner

You finished your meal, and would like to pay the check and leave.

 

At a typical American restaurant:

1. You asked a waiter for a check.
2. The waiter went away for a bit, and then came back to leave you a bill, and then went away again.
3. You verify the bill had no error, and then you left your card on the table.
4. The waiter came back to pick up your card and went away to swipe your card.
5. The waiter came back with your card and a receipt.
6. You signed the receipt and you were done

 

Totally 6 steps involved. There are overhead associated with each step. There are wait time for customers between each step. The wastes here are both for the restaurant and the customers. For the restaurant, they can not give your table to other waiting customers while you are waiting for the payment to be done (Remember the return on asset formula Return = Margin x Velocity ). The resource is not optimized either. The waiter taking care of your payment may get “distracted” by other dynamic customers request as well, which will certainly slow down your payment process, even when there are idle waiters. For the customers, you paid for the food and their service, but you still had to pay for their inefficiency with your time, which is very unfair.

 

You might say “come on, who cares how much time these steps take, it is just a couple of minutes” I agree with you that it is not that big deal when the restaurant is not busy. But when it is busy, you can be as unlucky as I was the other day at a busy restaurant. It took 10 minutes for the whole process to get done when all I wanted to do is to leave quickly because my parking ticket was expiring.

 

So what is the solution? Hire a dedicated person to take care of the payment? That is one solution. But that also means you increased your headcount, and the resource is still not optimized.

 

Let’s see what happens at a Japanese restaurant.

 

At a typical Japanese restaurant:

1. You picked up the bill and walk to a money drawer to pay. (A waiter at Japanese restaurant uses a hand-held device to generate the bill the moment you finish your orders, and dynamically modify it to reflect your additional orders if there is any. So the bill is always up-to-date)
2. Either a not-so-busy waiter spotted you moving to the money drawer and immediately understood your intention. He stopped what he was doing, and walked to the money drawer to swipe your      card. Or you are spotted by a very busy waiter. He just couldn’t stop what he was doing. This really-busy waiter would shout out a greeting which signals all other waiters that a customer wanted to pay now. A not-so-busy waiter caught this signal then immediately came to the money drawer to fulfil your payment request.
3. You signed the receipt and you were done.

 

From the above we can see not only the steps involved in handling a payment request are a lot less, which leads to reduced total overhead, but also it employs just-in-time resource management. The payment request is dynamically fulfilled by any idle waiter. Lean is about eliminating waste. These simplified steps and the just-in-time resource management help eliminate the waste here, that makes Japanese restaurants a lot leaner.

 

 

Comments

[Karl]

I think that you are on to something. There is a lot of wasted time in restaurants. I have started a company to address some of these inefficiencies, but it is still a ways off. Have you thought of doing anything about the problem?