Burger King Sued Over $1 Cheeseburgers?

I just saw this post at the Diet-Blog claiming that Burger King franchisees are suing the headquarters for forcing them to sell double cheeseburgers in a promotion that has them selling at a loss.

Apparently they will lose ten cents on each burger, while Burger King corporate believes that this will drive up patronage by %20, meaning more sales to cover the loss.

I'm torn here, perhaps because our local Burger King has rarely managed to even get our orders right to begin with. My family is still very big on fast food and we'd probably go there far more often if that place could actually get one @#% order correct. As it stands it's good exercise because we go to the drive through and end up having to walk in to get what was forgotten, missed, or given to us by mistake. To my recollection it's the only restaurant in the area we've ever actually called and complained about to headquarters...so part of me thinks that if the restaurant offered a better experience, they wouldn't need to rely on the give away the razor to sell the blades loss-leader sales gimmick. Oh, and there's the creepy King mascot, too. That can't help much for sales when kids have nightmares about the face of your product.

But that's my opinion.

I can see the corporate headquarter's gamble here. Lure customers in, hope they have a good experience and bring friends or come back more often. Kids can come hang out and keep buying stuff like soda and french fries which are crazy profit drivers.

Franchisees are probably scraping by in the tougher economy. They don't want to risk something that cuts into thin profit margins (I'm guessing, since I do know that the soda and I'm guessing fries are big profit, while other things aren't so much). If attendance is down then this is a risky gamble for them.

On the third hand I rarely see fast food as being good for you at all, and don't really weep when people can't get their grease and sodium fix. If people just aren't interested in your product and you fail to deliver a good experience, like our local BK consistently has done to us, then you quite frankly deserve to fail and drive what little loyal patrons you have to give their money to other, better businesses.

Burger King is still a large corporation that will no doubt find equilibrium before they sink. While the recent events with the economy have proven that no one is too big to fail, it also highlights that corporate scum will continue to make due, given the number of businesses that have laid off and fired workers or have been driven into near (or total) bankruptcy while at the same time giving their CEO's millions of dollars in bonuses. If the King goes bankrupt or closes some restaurants down, then the market has spoken and we'll have a small rise in the number of teens without slacker jobs for awhile, until someone else takes up the slack with a restaurant of their own (or a new franchise opens up). If not then this is just going to be another blip on the radar for people who care about this sort of thing.

Where's My Lavosh?? Stupid Walmart...

Most of the time my diet consists of a plain home-made wrap, usually with thin-sliced ham and lowfat cheese and mushrooms, maybe some salsa or mustard mixed in. Small, simple, easy to pack. I estimate that the calories are under or around 300 a pop (the tortilla is 2.5 grams of fat and it comes in at around 120 calories, the cheese is 25 or 50, depending on if I use one or two slices of 2% cheese; the ham is only two thin slices, so I don't think I have a full serving of that and the mushrooms are probably 1/4 of a small can so it would be roughly 10 to 15 calories. Sometimes I put a whole slice of cheese in like swiss...that's roughly 80 calories. So from the numbers let's say it's roughly 120+25+15+80+ham which would be...carry the 4 plus pi...240 plus the ham, I'll venture 50 calories for the ham if that. Less than three hundred.

What's the point? The point is that calorie counting sucks. Which I normally don't do or I'd have it all at my fingertips instead of meandering through my calorie count above. I have roughly three of those plus some peanut butter and peanuts to get me through workouts.

Which has nothing to do with lavoshes.

Okay. Three of those wraps a day...I don't not enjoy it, but I do enjoy breaking it up once in awhile. Often it's by ordering a sandwich at Panera, which gives me two meals (1/2 sandwich per meal). Other times we go to a Super Walmart where I discovered this wrap they have called a turkey lavosh.

The lavosh is actually a kind of flatbread. There's a hard, crisp version and a soft version; I like the soft. At the Super Walmart they make a wrap out of it with turkey and some cheese and pepper mixture...it's good!

the problem is that they rarely have it.

I would go there and if it's near lunch, they're gone. I ask the deli and they refuse to make them; the person working the counter said they make them in the morning and that's it.

I'm thinking...if you sell out every time, why aren't you making more to, I don't know, make more money?

My wife had an occasion to go out of town for training. While in this other town she went to a Super Walmart local there...they had lavoshes! Every time she was there! And...they were cut funny...weird.

The Walmart near us was cutting it into four pieces. The other walmart had six. Same overall amount, just...funny cuts that I wasn't accustomed to. But it was okay, because they had yummy yummy lavoshes!

...until my wife ended her training there.

I got fed up with our Walmart; my wife had some errands to run at a nearby business the next day, so I called that particular Walmart and asked to talk to someone in the deli. I then asked for 2 lavoshes...and they complied. That was nice of them.

Another day I asked my wife to call in because she said she had to go up there for some errands. When I got home I discovered that they "don't make same day orders".

You're a deli. Why is this a challenge to make an effing lavosh?

More to the point...why are you inconsistent? The other Walmart makes them. You guys...I don't know if they actually make them or not. It's like they only make them if it strikes their fancy.

Inconsistency...bad. When I go to a McDonald's I pretty much know what to expect. I don't expect one McD's to offer a double cheeseburger but another to only offer a McNugget, or for one to end breakfast at 10:30 and another at 9:30. So why exactly are Walmart stores doing their own thing?

Annoying. One more annoyance I'd rather not deal with.

Office Open Except For Lunch

This is appearing in the feed many days after the fact, so while it just recently happened to me it actually occurred weeks ago.

I needed to get my bloodwork done as part of my post-operative followup. That day things were already running late; my wife's parents were leaving to drive many hours home but apparently arranged to meet for breakfast after my 9:30 appointment. The doctor's office must have been running behind. I didn't get in until close to 10:00. After talking with the doctor I had lab paperwork in hand but because of the time I said to go to Panera to meet with her parents for breakfast first then we would go back for bloodwork.

Upon returning to the office I found a sign in sheet at the lab with a note telling people that the registration desk was closed for lunch from 12:00 to 1:00; I got there right at noon. I entered my name on the sheet and waited.

Over the span of twenty minutes I saw several people, some I could tell were employees, leave the lab area. Leave. Not come back. Only a few minutes after I arrived someone shut the lab door as they left and I, the only one in the reception room, just got a sheepish grin as she left.

No one coming to even check the sheet...doors closed...I was there alone. After twenty minutes I had the distinct impression that it wasn't just the registration desk that was closed for lunch. At the tail end of that twenty minutes about four or five people in civilian clothes came in through reception and proceed through an "authorized personnel only" door, ignoring me.

I ended up just saying to Hell with it and leaving.

I had taken time off from work to get this stuff done today. I did not relish the idea of stewing for an hour to pay someone to jab me with a needle when I still had half a dozen things to get done.

This isn't the first time I've run into the "closed for lunch" thing, not just here but with other businesses. I can understand if this is some small operation...but when it's a place with several qualified employees available, why can't the employer stagger break and lunchtimes a little? This isn't a pharmacy where the law requires a licensed pharmacist on duty and many pharmacies have one working for the day and several assistants in the shop.

What about people trying to get stuff done over a lunch break? It's horrible to not have time off to do things. I normally can't get things done because offices and stores close just as I get out of work. I would have been three kinds of pissed to have gone over my "lunch time" to do this just to find everyone "out" and realized I had just wasted my time.

Maybe the lab was just slow and there was one guy drawing blood from someone. I don't know. If there was it would have been nice within twenty minutes to have had some sign of life in there. I was the only name on the list that no one had come out to check. The normally open lab door was shut. The room was empty except for me. Not a sign of another soul.

That's not entirely true. At another window on the other end of the room there was some young guy sitting behind the desk of the physical therapy reception window in the corner of the office (not directly behind the window where people would come up to get information or check in, I saw him because I was at an angle to the window) with his face buried in some book or paper while eating a sandwich. He wasn't offering any attention; I toyed with the idea of asking him the lab was just plain shut down, but he was clearly engrossed in his sandwich.

I had grown so pissed at that point that it was better if I didn't have any bloodwork done just then. My patience was just too short by then. It would have been nice to even just have a simple sign saying that there was someone who would be out soon.

All I would ask is for some consideration for people who don't have a very flexible schedule. You never know how much you can help...or ruin...someone's day, and I was definitely fuming for the next couple hours about this.

Enjoying the Experience

There's a topic that is somewhat hard for me to express to others in an understandable way. It's more of a concept than a topic, something that probably takes one of those "eureka" moments to suddenly "get," like understanding derivatives in math and physics or why DC Comics doesn't hold a candle 90% of the time to Marvel or Dark Horse comics. Except sometimes Batman.

Anyway, it's the idea of the feeling the end user gets from your product or service. Whether it's the experience you get from eating at Red Lobster or how a user feels about your wonderful computer application, too often the customer's...or user's...opinions are dismissed because the proprietor feels they are ignorant and ill-informed.

Many times we are. Can't dispute that.

I've never run a restaurant. I read about it. I've considered it. And as you already know I've been obsessed with various cooking shows and such...I'm probably better informed than the average person about certain aspects of what it takes to run a restaurant, but I have never been under the gun and managed a kitchen or cafeteria like some family and friends have.

Does this mean that my opinion is invalid if I loved or hated a dining experience but lack the refined palate of a chef or the management skills of a head cook or kitchen manager?

If my money is flowing into your pocket, no. My opinion does matter. If my opinion is flowing from my big mouth to my relatives' and friends' ears, my opinion sure as heck matters.

What difficulties you run into managing inventory and inspections and training your cooks and fighting waitstaff turnover isn't my problem. My experience matters. And it matters to your bottom line, Mister Restaurant Owner (and to your waitstaff's tips, too, although some studies find that there is contrary behavior to expectation in this regard).

So the view from the outside is very much what your goal, as a proprietor of any service business or vendor of a product, should be to deliver the best experience possible to the consumer without the consumer having to care about how much trouble you go through to deliver it. You work hard so I don't have to think about it.

Why am I bringing this up?

There is a reason, believe it or not. That reason ties loosely to another post I'll make tomorrow. But there's a bigger reason and that is that it offers perhaps a different perspective to you, whether you're a consumer or a person who delivers a product or service to others.

I've had to ride a few school buses in my time both as a student and as a person who has had to share the road with them. I've never driven one before, though. Nor have I worked with a company that works as a subcontractor for the task. But I can say that the personality of buses flows from the driver; how tolerant they are of certain behaviors, how much time I had to sit there, how clean or filthy he kept his bus and my impressions from how the bus was maintained. As a driver on the road with them I utterly despise having to stop what seems like every 20 feet at each driveway for kids when I was used to having to walk or ride to a bus stop so we all congregated like sheep to wait for the bus en mass. And the blinking blue light...AGH! I've almost run into a bus because I've become transfixed by that flashing monstrosity on top of the bus. But despite those negatives there are some drivers who try to go out of their way...and alleviate my misgivings for these negative associations...by doing some simple things like pulling over at the first opportunity to let pent-up drivers congested behind the bus pass and continue on to work. Others do not. So not all bus drivers create equal experiences. Can you kind of see what I mean?

Or take my unwillingness to go to Burger King. Our local BK seemed to screw up our order at least three out of five times. Even simple things like giving me a diet soda was a challenge for their employees. Once these negative biases were rooted in my psyche I began seeing (and thus reinforcing) other issues...their employees at our local restaurant seemed disinterested in their jobs, not caring so much about serving the customer. They sported more tatoos and piercings than average. The uniforms were rarely unstained from grease, let alone nicely presented or tucked in; they looked like they were at the counter fresh from a backyard wrestling match. This made me doubt even more in the quality of their products...or the sanitation of their cooking and dining areas...so I simply declared that given the choice I'm not going there anymore.

Our local McDonald's was different. They get orders mixed up once in awhile but not enough that I have come to expect my order messed up when I go. Sometimes there's a wait...but not much of one. The guy that handles the general maintenance and gruntwork around the store sports a tattoo or three, but he's never short of a friendly wave and a greeting for my son as we go in or drive by. I know the managers have a few small tattoos as well, but usually they're covered up or discrete. I see them cleaning around the store. I leave with a good feeling from the experience, one that a customer is supposed to have when leaving a service establishment. And it's a shame because BK has a menu with things I used to be more interested in. The quality (granted, quality of food itself isn't a strength for most fast food chains) of the experience is usually pretty good. My daughter works there so I get a little of the background on some issues, but not much...she's a teenager. She's lucky to pay attention to anything that doesn't directly affect her. But that's aside from the point...the point is that I know some of the things that go on there and I know they're not perfect and I readily acknowledge that. But the experience overall is a good one.

I hope some of the concept is communicated from this posting. There are things that can be improved dramatically by keeping in mind the experience you want to deliver to your customer or end user but you have to have that mindset in order to have success with it. You have to try to put yourself in the place of your "customer" be it an actual customer to your business, a customer using your product, or even students riding your bus and ask yourself how they're going to feel after experiencing what you have to offer, how you're going to influence their day in some way and how they're going to associate different feelings with your product (or service). Too often too many people lose sight of this or even lose sight of the fact that even if they feel like they're a cog in a bigger faceless machine it only takes one broken tooth on that cog to make things not run correctly...you affect other people and have a place in the business.

I know, it sounds like smoke up your butt. But it is true.

Your superiors have the responsibility up the chain to remember this idea in managing you. You have the responsibility to pass it on down the chain to coworkers and subordinates. I've found this to be a huge factor in how certain buildings, businesses and institutions aquire certain "personalities", by taking a lead from their top manager or boss. The attitude is passed on down the chain, and thus affects end-user experience.

Tune in for another part to this to see how this post hopefully loosely ties with the followup.

Adsense activation

I've been curious about this for awhile...I finally activated AdSense on my blog. I have been curious to see what Google would select to show for advertisements now that the search engine is finally showing signs of indexing the content and analyzing information from it; I've been hesitant because normally ads are SO intrusive and annoying. The account is free as in money cost, but there is an annoyance and user-friendliness cost when you're bugging readers to buy buy buy while hoping they'll read and get some information from the content of your words. The default was trying to stick ads in the sidebar and under each posting...I personally find that it interrupts my reading of a blog when it goes post-ad-post-ad, but that's me and I understand the idea that if you're trying to make money from your site you want to try sprinkling as much ad content as you can without annoying your readers.

In the end I opted to stick one hopefully unobtrusive bar just below the title of the blog. Readable, should get some attention, while not being too intrusive.

I hold no illusions that this will make me money. Maybe once a year I could buy a comic book or something.

At any rate if you have any opinions or feedback please feel free to leave comments. I'm still experimenting and with a small readership I'm pretty sure that the void AdSense will fill is my curiosity of what ads Google thinks fits my content rather than any void in my wallet.

A Business that Just Won't Go Away

I've griped before about our local Burger King. My son had decided he'd like a cheeseburger from there recently; my wife had also picked up something from McDonald's not more than a day before that; I noticed something about the way they conduct business a little differently.

There's the obvious; BK usually got our orders wrong. I'm wary of them because once I would order something simple, they'd get it right, and just as I got confidence in them they'd end up screwing up the order again.

But I noticed something else. The people seemed different; they carried themselves differently, had a different attitude. One that seemed to say, "I can't wait to go home."

There seemed to be more tattoos at the BK. Does that sound biased? I think it sounds biased. But I thought it was unusual that proportionately there were more people with tattoos working at the BK than at the local McD's...I'm simply stating an observation.

The voicebox where you can place an order starts greeting us with a cheerful, pleasant woman's voice...then abruptly turned into a man's voice asking for the order. Huh? My wife said that it's an automatic pre-recorded voice, one that's supposed to greet you right away then the employees are supposed to stop whatever they're doing and take your order.

"You mean, they're supposed to be distracted while trying to fill an order, and probably increase the chances they're going to screw up my order rather than have a car wait an extra fifteen seconds?"

"Yup."

Then they take some extra seconds at the drive through asking if I'm paying cash or credit. Why do you need to ask me that there? I just want to place my order and pull up to pay.

These in my opinion are bad practices for business. They have a sloppy track record for getting my order accurately filled, they have an image of employees that look like they're about as happy to be there as they would be at the proctologist's office (Hey, the McD's employees aren't exactly skipping around behind the counter, but at least they usually don't let on that they hate the customer...), and they annoy me with cheap gimmicks to make me think service is better than it really is while at the same time it's probably increasing the odds they're screwing up my order again.

Barring something else coming up of great significance, this will probably be the last time I rant on about this, so for those few people reading this blog that may be a source of relief. I know it is for me to get this off my chest. Drives me nuts that businesses run in such a sloppy manner manage to apparently still turn a profit...makes me wonder what's wrong with people. I know I avoid this business when I have a choice.

Insurance Companies and Hospitals

I got a bill from the hospital today. This was interesting primarily because I shouldn't owe anything. I already paid the hospital the copay on the operation...a couple grand we've been saving up specifically for the procedure. So you can imagine my surprise when I got a mailing telling me that I owed nearly one thousand dollars that I don't have for "outpatient services".

I called them up and the lady on the other end of the line didn't hesitate one moment before saying, "Yeah, there's a problem with your ID number for insurance." I dug out my ID card, gave them the number, and she typed quickly on a keyboard and asked for my employer and name of insured. Gave that information as well, and she just thanked me.

"So...I shouldn't owe anything?"
"We won't know until insurance gets back to us."
"Okay...I won't have this bill then?"
"I don't know. We'll know when insurance gets back to us."
"Well, do you have an idea how long that will be?"
"No, we don't know when another party will get around to processing the information"

Am I the only one so fed up with bullshit from these companies? I mean, there are people that can get information on my current purchases listed on my credit card, my employment history, what cars I drive...all of this can get pulled up from databases. Yet these gooftards can't seem to keep my insurance information straight, and when trying to get things sorted out, the insurance company takes weeks to figure out how to pull their craniums from their rectums.

Worse I have to wait a few weeks to figure out if I have some kind of thousand-dollar bill outstanding despite the fact I'm not supposed to have any more out-of-pocket. That gives the hospital time to screw up the bill that I didn't pay because I called in the day I got it to be told I have to wait and find out what's legitimate or not for billing, then I'll get a notice saying that I owe the bill plus interest when really I shouldn't have owed anything in the first place!

The whole system is screwed up and the most frustrating part is there's just not much we can do about it. Makes one want to scream. But that still hurts my incision...

Customer Service and Attention to Detail?

Whatever happened to customer service? Or a business that pays attention to detail when serving customers? When a business that ignores one or both of these ideas continues to stumble on, and I'm assuming they're still turning a profit, the only explanation I can come up with is that the customer base is comprised of people with very low standards or have the brains of minnows.

Ideally in capitalism if a business screws the customer over they go bust. Yet it astounds me how many businesses in our area (or national companies in some cases) give the impression that they're run by incompetent boobs but continue to keep their doors open (and I assume are turning a profit).

We have a local Burger King that fits this description. Out of the last ten times we've gone there to pick up a burger or meal, I think we've had maybe two or three orders that weren't missing something or wrong. How can they stay in business? Are they catering to high schoolers and elderly people from the nearby "Home" that don't really care about things like, I don't know, actually getting the order they paid for?

I like to think that we are fairly easygoing when mistakes normally happen. Mistakes happen. Things get overlooked. We go...or went...to McDonald's fairly regularly. Once in awhile they would forget something or a drink would be wrong. Sometimes we overlook it. Sometimes we've gone in and asked to switch with what we actually had ordered. Mistakes at our local McD's seems to happen to us maybe once every ten orders or so.

So what's different? Burger King, McD's...both hire bored highschool kids who often carry responsibility issues. They have turnover. They don't pay very well. But the McD's, in our experiences, have a 90 percent "correct" rate while the BK has an 85 percent screwup rate? And BK is one of maybe two companies in my lifetime that I've complained to the corporate office about. And BK never replied and nothing apparently changed. I actually don't go there anymore, which is a shame because I would have liked some of their menu items more than McD's if they weren't so incompentent (Cheese Sticks!!)

Other businesses just scare me because I wonder about the education level of the people in charge. A local office supply store spent decent cash on an electronic sign outside the store that can be programmed with messages and information. I don't think I've ever driven past the place where there weren't typos or grammar errors. For personal things like blogs, typos are one thing. For a business where it affects how people perceive your business and presumably how careful you are with running your business sloppy signs are a definite no-no.

National companies aren't immune to this. I've known two people who used Vonage. They had legitimate reasons to drop the service; in once case, he moved and simply didn't use their broadband service any more, in the other, his broadband provider wasn't stable enough to provide reliable voice-over-IP. It wasn't a problem with Vonage. But Vonage made it a problem with Vonage. They called to cancel the service and for both of them the company reps argued with them and hassled them to keep them from cancelling. They had to jump through so many hoops to cancel a service for legitimate reasons that I swore I'd never try Vonage and anyone I saw that was considering it I would warn them what a crap company they are to deal with. Another quick lesson for douche companies: if a customer wants to leave you and you hassle the hell out of them, you may end up losing more than that customer...I was a potential customer until I saw how you treated my friends. And I will do what I can to cost you other customers.

Same thing happened with me and Discover. While refinancing a loan I discovered I had a Discover card. News to me. I gathered information from my credit report and called them to close out the card since I didn't even have the plastic in my wallet. The rep argued with me repeatedly about how it was a mistake to close it, how it hurts my credit score, and convince me that I wanted to just request a new card and not close it out. I'm the type of person that just wants no hassle. I probably would have become a customer later on if my experiences with them were associated with fond memories. Instead I utterly refuse to have anything to do with Discover. I don't care if Sam's Club is trying to bully me into their wonderful incentive programs with the Discover/Sam's card. If Discover was such a pain to deal with before why would I want to risk having to deal with them again?

Contrast this with a local auto repair shop. I had a minor collision problem with a bear. I took the car to the owner to have it looked at; he wasn't their "body guy", but he gave an estimate of time and cost and I okayed it. Instead of a couple of hours on the frame bender, it took the entire day. The body guy did an utterly fantastic job...he not only bent the frame back to a condition better than before the collision, but he replaced missing bolts, missing body screws, he repaired rust spots on the frame, and overall simply improved the car beyond my expectations.

I saw the bill and thought I'd crap the bed. "I'm sorry dude...but this is nowhere near your estimate." He said, understandably, that the car had taken a lot of time, and he couldn't possibly only charge the estimate. So he split the difference. No hassle. He dealt with the issue in a fair manner, and he bit the bullet for his mistake. I respected that.

And I have taken my vehicles back to him ever since. He took a loss and took responsibility for it. In return he's made a huge profit from me over time since I'm a loyal customer and I'm confident he won't screw me over.

Funny how a little attention to detail can have a big impact on your customers.