Understanding the Impact of COVID-19 on you market

       Traditionally on Cinco De Mayo, I would have taken the family to a Mexican restaurant, had a margarita and accepted a long wait for dinner. This year my option was carry out, so I chose a chain that was close and has online ordering. I placed an order and was given a pickup time 20 minutes later. I had a suspicion that 20 minutes was not accurate, but I arrived to find that I had a 2 hour wait. While this was an inconvenience to me there were about 30 drivers from delivery services waiting; they were losing money. 

             With two hours to wait, I critiqued the situation in hopes of learning from it. The five-person kitchen staff was hard at work and appeared to be both efficient and woefully understaffed. The 2 hour delay was a result of sales app not accounting for the capacity at the local restaurant, and the local management not understanding how COVID-19 was going to drive up their demand. It’s an age-old argument, the “sales liar” over-promised and the “slugs in production” under-delivered. Logistics is all about open and honest collaboration and there were a lot of missed opportunities for collaboration. The three that most standout are: 1) The ordering system did not take into account throughput based on staffing, 2) management did not anticipate how busy it would be, 3) management didn’t (or maybe couldn’t…this is the era of COVID-19 staffing and planning challenges) react quickly to bring in more staff. 

Properly executed this could have been a big win for the restaurant. Unfortunately, it was at best a net neutral, with a lot of delivery drivers who will avoid them in the future. The major takeaways are for all logisticians are that we all need to put some serious thought into how COVID-19 will affect our business models (both positive and negative), and I can not stress enough OPEN AND HONEST COLLABORATION BETWEEN SALES AND PRODUCTION.