Hangry by Mike Evans

Author:Mike Evans [EVANS, MIKE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2022-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

Eventually, once it’s allowed to exist on the website I invented (grumble grumble), raising the tip suggestions works. People usually have no idea what to tip, so they tend to thread the needle between feeling either guilty or fleeced. Furthermore, no newspaper is ever going to print an article claiming our tip suggestions are too high. As a society, we have too much collective guilt to suggest such a thing. So, we can make the tips as high as we want, benefiting both the company and the drivers, and nobody will say boo about it. Accordingly, tip amounts go through the roof and the drivers are ecstatic.

It works like a charm. High-end restaurants—who are providing more expensive food, like sushi shops and French bistros—suddenly have a huge advantage when hiring drivers. Tip suggestions, which are based as a percentage instead of a flat fee, can be ten bucks for one of these high-end restaurants, instead of the more typical three or four for a pizza. This difference drives a greater availability of varied cuisines across the nation, shifting the mix away from pizza. And to be perfectly honest, since GrubHub takes a percentage of the order, these higher ticket cuisines are great for our bottom line.

Angry software developers aside, I’m on to something. The industry is changing because we changed it.

A while back we did some customer surveys and the results were confusing. Apparently, when the food tastes good, GrubHub gets the credit, but when it tastes bad, GrubHub gets the blame. There’s no logic to this. I can understand us getting the blame if the food is late or cold, because we had some influence on the accuracy of delivery estimates, and setting expectations is a big part of beating them. But the flavor of the food itself? This stumps me.

So, if diners expect us to be responsible for the actual taste of the food, what if we leaned into that, even though we’re not the ones cooking it? Because that’s what waitresses do—they answer for the quality of the food, while the chef stays safely in the kitchen. Is GrubHub so different?

I wonder if an actual restaurateur can help us out.

The manager at Pompeii restaurant in Lakeview, David Morton, offers to give our team an education in service.

The Lakeview location has a dining room that can seat well over one hundred customers. The red vinyl booths are fresh and clean, with no cracks in the upholstery, no stuffing spilling out. The ambience is half American diner, half soda shop. It’s the kind of place that is equally busy on a late Saturday night after the bars close as it is on a Sunday afternoon for kids’ birthday parties.

Importantly for our purposes, their food isn’t great. It’s not bad, it’s just not spectacular, at least not compared to legendary places in the city like Leona’s or Giordano’s. Given that other restaurants have arguably better food, it follows that Pompeii must be winning customers by being good at service. (I don’t tell David that this is why I asked him to help us.

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