In order to protect the guilty, I will describe how I spent most of the time during the Super Bowl today. Thanks to a deal, I went to a particular place for lunch where I watched most of the Super Bowl (about which I have little to say, not being a fan of either team). It was, however, quite an adventure to even get to the place, and judging from what I can see, the restaurant is not going to be around for a long time, so I figure I had better write about it now while the company still exists. If this company is not on someone’s list of companies about to go bankrupt, it should be, as I have now been to two different locations of this restaurant during lunch time for this deal, once during the Super Bowl, and in both cases business was minimal. One wonders how they are going to pay for their staff.

It may be determined that if a company feels the need to draw customers using discount programs that they are probably suffering for business. One of the notable aspects of companies that are doing well, relatively speaking, is that they do not show up on apps or in programs that provide a lot of discounts. By that standard, a lot of restaurants and gas stations are in a substantial amount of trouble, it seems. I have even seen restaurants doing well enough in their business to decline to honor old coupons that had been placed in various shoppers. Not all businesses, though, can show such confidence, if the low amount of their customers while I have been reading books for hours is anything to go by.

In both cases with the restaurant I am talking about, the location of the place has something to do with the problems that they have had in attracting customers. Given the fact that the location that was closest to me is apparently closed down (which should be a sign of trouble given that locations are already being contracted), the next closest location has been pinned on inconsistent places on maps, which suggests a problem at getting map apps to properly locate the place, which again indicates a bit of sloppiness. When one adds to this a difficult time getting the app to recognize one’s purchases because of a lack of bar codes and receipt numbers, it is also clear that there are some issues in the way that different systems are implemented as far as a company’s business is concerned.

All of these pale in consideration, though, to the shortcomings such companies appeared to have when it comes to their food products. For one, I witnessed the sight of being the only person for a good long time in the restaurant while the staff, which included quite a few people I could see cooking and cleaning as well as running orders, making basic mistakes concerning the procedures of preparing food, including making people wait for pickup orders while neglecting to start cooking the food. While I was reading and at least somewhat interested in watching the game, during the excellent (if all too short) halftime show one of the staff members turned off the main television and its sound and went outside to take a cigarette break, disrupting the enjoyment the rest of us were taking in the show and causing us to miss a couple of minutes of the show until a different tv was turned on. 

It was said by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy that every happy family was happy alike but that every unhappy family was unhappy differently. Yet the truth is often somewhere nearer to the reverse. To be sure, happy families do a lot of things right, but it is in unhappy situations, including badly run companies, where you run into the same monotonous issues over and over again. A problem with the coordination of work between departments, so that marketing tries to drum up business that operations cannot handle, and where people who are customer-facing staff are clearly not ready for prime time. By the time such problems become evident, they are probably not very easy to solve, and a company may lack resources to do better than the staff they currently have. One wonders what could be done about it, but to recognize that there are problems is easy enough.