Once you’ve cost them a half hour and didn’t give them the right order, short of giving them a lot more than a sandwich, there is nothing you could have done. You (or your place) fucked up, just let it go.
Probably a lot of things actually. More employees and a bigger and better equipped kitchen.
But I think our food is better than those! (I hope so anyway. :). )
We’re having some growing pains, that’s for sure. I’ve hired a couple more people. Hopefully that will help.
If you commonly have people wait 30 minutes for a sandwich, is there something you could give customers in the meantime? Maybe breadsticks, potato chips, tortilla chips? Have the waitress refill the bowl every 10 minutes or so. I find having something to munch on makes me less cranky about having to wait.
I’ll agree with other posters, just apologize a lot and give them their money back. Beyond that if they still want to be mad at you there’s not much you can do about it.
Part of what you are doing for the ‘offended’ party is a show for the other customers. This can happen in any food service, sometimes people just don’t show up, and they tend to do it at the worst possible time. The key is letting people know about the delay as soon as they order. It’s a tough thing to do, but sometimes you have to slow down the ordering process because the food prep can’t keep up. Sit down restaurants can stagger the seating and order taking to better manage the situation, but a deli is in a tougher spot. One person in line might be ordering multiple meals for people, people standing and waiting lose patience fast, and there’s an expectation that you offer ‘fast’ food. A line of people waiting to order is good for business, it shows your establishment is popular and desired. A line of people waiting for their food is bad for business, it indicates incompetence (unfairly often). It’s always easier to find someone who can take the orders than someone who can make them, so you end up with an imbalance you have to correct by slowing down the ordering process.
This will happen from time to time. Learn from it, be better prepared for next time, and don’t let it get to you.
Love the idea of the wait time signs, that’s genius.
Additionally, a few other tips for expediting: During a rush, be sure that you are using your people wisely. More hands are good, but more hands, working at what they do best is far better. Schedule your phone calls, ordering issues, and deliveries as best you can to avoid having to be away from the line during peak hours. Set up your phone with a message that tells callers that during such times you may not be able to take their call, be sure to respond to each and every message later. Contribute, don’t just manage. Get in there and make sandwiches if you are fast at it, cut meat and cheese, or just walk the queue and schoomze the customers and take their orders on a piece of paper. Have them confirm with the register person and avoid the hemming and hawing as the procrastinators finally decide what they want. Consider a “Short Menu” for peak hours, and offer the customers an incentive like a sandwich club or reduced price for ordering off it. If all else fails, suspend special orders other than things like “no pickles”. It sucks, but it’s better to please 50 and annoy 1 then to let one special snowflake throw a monkey wrench into the whole thing. Alternatively, take those orders yourself and do them outside of the usual line.
I’m going to agree with the others that the real problem was the long wait time, and the lack of communication about it. Offering to remake the meal or provide a free future meal are pretty reasonable offers when you screw up someone’s order on accident. I also agree that for most customers, a big show of a sincere apology and an honest attempt to make them happy makes a bigger difference than the actual fix they receive.
But if it had been screwed up more quickly, then remaking it would have been a better solution. Best of luck 
Is your deli a “sit down at the table and wait for a server to take your order” kind of place, or one of the “wait for your turn at the counter, order, and then take a seat” variety? If it’s the latter, are folks waiting 10-15 (or 30 on a bad day) minutes after they place their order, or are you including the pre-order wait time?
There’s a very popular sandwich shop near my office that routinely has lines out the door at peak hours waiting to place an order. The wait time just to get to the front of the line can easily be 10-15 minutes, plus another 4-5 minutes for a sandwich to be made. Since we’re in a business park, pretty much all of the clientele are local workers, so everybody understands the situation and doesn’t mind the wait; of course you’re in more of a tourist/shopping area so you don’t have that factor in your favor.
I’m glad to hear that business is doing well. **Rhiannon8404 **ate at your place a couple months ago (we’re in Sacramento), and the next time we find ourselves in the area and in need of food I plan to stop in so I can provide an ‘Insider’s Report’ to the board
Those bastards. :mad:
Ran a little kitchen in a bar with my old man for a while. One regular bar patron was… a bit female dog like. She would bring in her own cream, order a white russian, in a pint glass, 2 ice cubes only, then insist that it be brown, for the price of a single drink.
So about the 4th time she ordered food, and it was always wrong, or it cost too
much or blah blah. She got a burger, and she bitched about it, AGAIN. My Dad walked out of the kitchen and in a nice kissy ass way said, “don’t worry about, we’ll take care of it, no charge”, then picked up the plate and did a big old Gronkowski spike into the garbage, plate and all… Then stood right next to her and stared at her until she left. He pulled the plate out of the garbage after she left.
She’d come in twice a week or so and order food after that, and we just wouldn’t make it, the bartender would ask us when its coming and we’d just say it’ll be there shortly, and we just wouldn’t make it.
Then one day she comes in and orders wings, we didn’t cook 'em right so the slip comes back, “wings down in the fryer for 20 minutes”. That was too good to resist, she got her food that day, leather on chicken bones. She never ordered food again.
What a miserable person she was.
To the OP… I don’t envy you, food service sucks, its like retail which sucks, but you are also the manufacturer so you get double screwed. I spent a lot of my younger years there, I’ll never go back.
I would really be trying to figure out why it takes so damn long to get food out. It shouldn’t take that long, ever, anywhere.
And employees suck too. Pay them as best you can and treat them like gold, if they screw you or they suck, get rid of 'em. Dead weight or a toxic personality can take down your entire staff and your business, it only takes one, and most of the time ‘Nobody’ is better than ‘Somebody’ when that ‘Somebody’ is a lazy toxic piece of crap.
Suburban Plankton, please be sure to introduce yourself. We’ll give you extra!
Our business model probably needs work. You order at the counter and then we bring the food to you, whether you sit inside or out in the shared courtyard. It would probably be better to go to a waitress type service, but our configuration wouldn’t make that easy.
But we hired some more help and we are doing some more cross training, so hopefully we’ll improve our time.
This is challenging, but we’ll figure it out. Or we won’t and I’ll lose my mind instead.
Thanks you guys.