An Open Letter to The Future of Our Chain and Industry

Johnathan Hales

PREAMBLE To Whom It Concerns, It is my hope that this small letter finds its way into the majority of hands within this company. King’s has many employees, both at the operations level and the corporate level, some of us who view our vocation as a way to pay the bills and others who view this job as something more. This letter is addressed “To Whom It Concerns”, because it does not concern those of us who view this job as simply a way to pay bills until something better comes along. Some of us see serving, and managing a restaurant as a lifestyle and an entity that we’ve come to love and respect.

This letter is for those of us who look forward to coming to work and getting “our butts kicked” by a massive rush of guests. This letter is for those of us who see serving, hosting and bussing as a challenge to be conquered and enjoyed, not simply endured until the end of the shift. This letter is for those of us who deeply care about the future of our chain and industry and watch with foreboding the unfolding of future events on the horizon, knowing two things;

A. the decisions which affect our individual futures and that of our collective

industry are made at a level which looks more at numbers rather than the individual environments we work in and our guests dine in; and

B. we, as hourly and management-salaried employed workers are powerless to stop them.

This letter will present a few arguments about the nature of the business we are in,

and suggest ways to improve our service obligations not only to our guests, who our bread and butter, but to our staff and employees, who are not just the backbone of our collective business, but the eyes and ears as well. Eyes and ears which to my estimation, have been vastly underutilized in such a customer-service oriented business.

This letter is not an attempt to give offense to those policies and changes that I

disagree with, but simply to put these changes and policies under the microscope of someone who has viewed every on-the-ground aspect of this industry, from management, to serving, to bussing and everything in between. Hopefully instead of criticism, you see just scrutiny and genuine concern.

“ONE SIZE FITS ALL”

Recently, I have been made aware of some menu changes that were billed to us servers as “minor tweaks”. When I learned of these “tweaks” I discussed them with some of my best guests and asked them for candid feedback. The results were a bit disheartening. For example, the omission of the Hot Pot Roast Sandwich (which accounts for me personally probably a decent 3-5% of my total sales) was reacted to with quizzical looks and variations of “What the hell would they do THAT for?” The Strawberry-Banana Stack Jack met with similar criticism. My advice to them was to contact corporate office about the omissions, and urge that they be changed and avoided.

One guest even went so far as to give me advice concerning that. She said to me,

“Why contact corporate when it’s much easier to just find another restaurant?” I don’t think this is the kind of attitude we want our guest to have about our locations nor our menu.

Our coming omission of the 7oz. Ranch Steak was met with similar concerns and

reactions. The fact is, in order to find a decent steak around our location (Barkeyville, PA), King’s is the only place in this town to do so. The Eggel Bagel, the Steak Tips and Noodles and most of the rest of the coming omissions all met reactions that were seemingly indifferent (“Well, I guess I have to find another place to eat.” – regarding the 7 oz. steak) to downright angry (“Seriously, that is the only f**king reason to come here!” – concerning the Strawberry-Banana Stack Jack) and just about every permutation in between. These are actual reactions to customer feedback that I have witnessed with my own eyes.

When I asked my manager in Grove City about why this was happening, his

response was essentially that corporate looked at the numbers as a whole from the top down, disregarding the individual performance of the locations. If the numbers were not as well as they would have liked, the item is discontinued. I am simplifying his answer, of course, but essentially the individual performance of the location was quite simply part of the whole. This logic is fundamentally flawed, as the performance of the individual locations is all that should matter.

With respect, the top down approach to corporate management of any sizable

franchise has never produced viable results which benefited the chain as a whole with a “one-size-fits-all” methodology, and certainly not by eliminating products that our customers have come to rely on.

If omission of certain items on our menu has to be done on any kind of equitable

level, it should be done purely at the location level only. Certain items do well in certain areas. For example, at the Grove City location, King’s is adjacent to Eat –n Park, a Primanti Brothers and Elephant and Castle restaurants. All of these locations offer specialized fare that their chains have been almost famous for. Eat –n Park is the closest in comparison to the “Mom and Pop” atmosphere promoted and provided by King’s. As such, the steaks and other fare we offer that are concurrently offered by ENP do

significantly worse than say, our Strawberry-Banana Stack Jack. ENP does not offer anything comparable to the SBSJ, and neither do the other mentioned restaurants, which is why in that location, I sold quite a bit of them during my tenure there.

In the Barkeyville location by contrast, there are no local restaurants to speak of,

so the allocation of the best and worst sellers has its own internal cultural logic. I sell quite a bit of “Country Breakfasts” (another one of the items on the chopping block) and considering the rural and agricultural nature of the surrounding areas, I’m not surprised.

General Managers need direct control over which items appear on their menus

and which items, when poorly selling are to be stocked less, or omitted altogether. The infrastructure to do this is already in place and with small modifications, would be easily available to tackle this problem and increase our annual sales, chain-wide. (Upon request of someone with the authority to sanction such a study, I could draw up alterations to said infrastructure to accomplish this end.)

KING’S AS A BRAND

Every King’s I’ve worked at thus far has their regulars. King’s has become as

much of a part of their lives as it has to those of us who work there. King’s is a brand. Our regulars understand that we offer the right mix of down home cooking and a “Mom and Pop” atmosphere that you’ll only find in locally owned and operated diners and restaurants. We are doing a disservice to our guests by disallowing our locations the autonomy of growing around the local cultures and offering what those cultures want.

Instead we’re currently endeavoring to offer only the best of what sells, and

omitting those items that may have psychological significance to our regulars as well as our occasional and traveling guests, based solely on statistical company-wide performance. It is this myopic thinking that I believe will drive our company value downward.

Those items which may in fact cause a significant downslide in company-wide

revenue by their very omission, would cause little to no additional cost to maintain and have stocked in the event that our guests want them. Our brand touts us as a “Cheers” of the restaurant scene. Our brand touts us as a place where night and day, you can get breakfast, the way you want it and with the best service from the best people who WANT to remember your name, and have you come again to hang out with us.

This brand stands for more than a good meal. It stands for excellence in the face

of daily declining standards and practices in an industry that is defined by our guests’ acceptance of those very standards and practices. It appears to me, and to most of our guests, that King’s and the King’s brand represents the last truly informal restaurant setting in the area where you truly get what you pay for.

By the very inclusion of the menu changes based on corporate performance accounting fiat alone, we are endangering the very brand we are trying to propel into the forefront of our industry.

We need to give our guests choices and options, not tweaks and additional costs.

When they see that we are willing to accommodate their dining needs and wants, they cease to become guests and instead become welcome additions to the King’s family. They become our greatest source of information and advice on the best way to make our brand even more valuable. When we deny them what they want based on what sells and what doesn’t on a company-wide scale, we look at them as a number and not the collection of individual tastes we all came to serve. We dehumanize an industry that above all, is a human industry.

The tendency of King’s to humanize our guests is what makes us unique. ENP

doesn’t do it, Primantis just cares about pushing sandwiches, most of the chains in the United States, Denny’s among them, only care about bottom line via numbers. We are the human element of our industry, and as such should care more about the bottom line of our guests. When this is taken care of, the monetary bottom line will take care of itself.

Our full name is “King’s Family Restaurants”, not because we serve families, but

because our guests ARE our family. By changing what we offer, we change our relationship to our guests and without a strong relationship with our guests, we as a company cannot hope to have the kind of future for our franchise that we want.

The rigidly centralized approach of this chain is the biggest folly of our franchise.

There needs to be a balance that I don’t think we as servants of our industry have achieved yet. We need oversight, not restriction. We need the room to grow to our local cultures, not demand that our local cultures conform to us. We need ideas, not mandates from those of us who have never set foot in a bus room, never donned an apron, nor manned a server station.

We can have standards without scripted mandate. We can have profits without

cookie-cutter tactics.

So, okay John, you’ve berated us on how we run this business, what would you

do differently? This answer is quite simple. Our General Managers have their heads in the

trenches every day, shoulder to shoulder with the servers and other front of house employees, dealing with the realities of the industry and making things right with every guest that comes through our doors. They can tell you what works, and what doesn’t. They can show you what items are vital to our individual success and which items we could easily do without.

Give them the autonomy to deal with their own menus (with regional and district management approval, of course, hence oversight). Listen to what they have to say. Listen to our servers and our hostesses. Listen to our guests. We are the best asset and information gathering apparatus available for determining what the future of our chain should be. We need to make decisions concerning our individual stores on an individual basis, not on a top-down approach that will only lead nowhere. What works for Grove City will not necessarily work for Barkeyville and vice versa.

I hope this letter will be viewed as a plea from the heart, and not a blasting

criticism of the way we do things. My intent is to help us make the best decisions for a company and lifestyle we all love, and to shed light on the operations standpoint from the viewpoint of someone who is in the fight every day trying to make every single guest happy. Understand that I am not being deliberately provocative, if it is perceived as such, I’m simply worried, and this letter is essentially me worrying out loud. I’m a firm believer in this company and that when we make our guests happy, we make our company profitable.

And by making our company profitable with our guests as the primary

consideration, we all win. I welcome any suggestions, dialogue and criticisms from anyone in the industry. I

am happy to elaborate on these points and expand on them to any audience, in any setting and answer any questions posed. I find that when we all share ideas and viewpoints, we can make better decisions for the greater good and to much profit.

Always, Johnathan Hales, Server Barkeyville, Pennsylvania Phone: 724-988-9344 Email: theoneandtruebane@gmail.com