The Wendy’s Deficiency

I don’t want to pick on my local Wendy’s but their service is so often disappointing that I feel compelled to complain. So I choose to complain to the world.

I drove to Wendy’s yesterday and noticed one of the cooks in the parking lot having a conversation with someone in a parked car. I entered the store. It wasn’t busy at all. There was one customer seated and one customer waiting for his order.

As I waited at the register for someone to take my order, the cook that had been outside came in, put on an apron, and proceeded to his workstation. It didn’t escape me that he didn’t wash his hands. I know Wendy’s has rules about hand-washing, so this is a rule-enforcement issue. And that makes it a management issue.

I ordered the Southwest Avocado Chicken Salad. As I waited for my order, I chatted with the customer ahead of me in line. He lives in central Virginia and drives to New York City every week; his mother lives in Brooklyn; he retired from the Army after 23 years of service. And so on. It’s surprising how much you can learn about a stranger while waiting for fast food. Then his hamburger arrived and he left.

Finally, my order was ready and I took it home to eat. Right away I noticed there was no avocado on the avocado chicken salad. That annoyed me because avocado is probably the most expensive ingredient in that salad. If they were going to forget an ingredient, why couldn’t they forget the tooth-breakingly-hard bacon bits?

How do you screw up a salad? Probably by chatting with co-workers while you’re making it.

But other than the missing avocado and the too-hard bacon bits, the salad was tasty. I chewed carefully (I already had a recently broken tooth thanks to an un-chewable bacon bit, so it’s a touchy subject). The salad contained enough diced chicken to get the word “chicken” into the name. There were a couple of squeeze packs of tangy dressing as well. All in all, not a bad salad, if you get everything you paid for.

But Wendy’s needn’t feel picked on. I’ve blogged about several fast-food restaurants in this town. I’m no longer surprised when one occasionally slips up. Now I’m surprised when they get everything right. I’m surprised when the food is hot and reasonably fast, when the fries are salty, when the ketchup dispenser contains ketchup, when the icemaker dispenses ice. I’m surprised when the process works as advertised.

Why is that? It says something about low expectations and the service we’re accustomed to receiving. No doubt many customers leave unhappy about some aspect of their purchase. But they don’t have the time to confront a manager who obviously can’t manage; they have to eat and get back to work or get back on the road. There isn’t enough customer feedback to inform management as to how poorly they’re performing. But management should get a clue when they’re in a good location yet business is slow. They should get a clue when they have to run special offers to entice customers in. They need to take a close look at their store and ask, “Why isn’t this operation working better?”

Or they could read my blog. All the clues are here.