OK, this is a quick one, and it isn’t really strictly user experience, if you restrict user experience to just digital things, it is just a thought that hopefully will find the right person.
Alex and I live in New York, and New Yorkers are rightfully proud of their bagels. A little less pride, now that H&H is history, but there are still great bagels out there.
I like a plain bagel, Alex likes an everything bagel. Opposites attract, go fig. Unfortunately, about 90% of the time, when we order sandwiches, the bagel shop (that will remain nameless but rhymes with “Benny’s Bandwich Bop”) they are out of everything bagels.
This has been going on for years and eventually we stopped ordering from Len-, um, I mean “Benny’s Bandwich Bop” because they never had everything bagels.
A couple days ago, I decided to try Benny’s again.
Yup, no everything bagels. This bad inventory control has been going on now for at least 7 years.
So here’s the solution: Give your counter staff some brightly colored tennis balls. It doesn’t matter what color, red, yellow, blue (blue has a certain resonance). Whenever someone asks for a bagel that is sold out, drop a bright red ball into the basket that used to hold those bagels. At the end of the day, count them up, average them over the week, adjust your bagel baking for the next week. It’s easy.
You can get fancier, of course, with a spreadsheet. You can count the number of red balls every hour and adjust baking based on granular data.
Yes, this is an imperfect solution since the aware customers will see that they don’t have bagel type x and won’t mention that they want it, so the count will never match demand exactly. HOWEVER, showing the customer visibly that you ARE paying attention to their desires and attempting to meet those needs will encourage the customers to play along. If someone wants a garlic bagel but sees the red ball in the garlic bagel basket, they are more likely to say, “I was going to order a garlic bagel (new red ball goes in the basket) but now I’ll take a sesame bagel.”
If there is no marker in the basket to show the customer that you are paying attention, they won’t mention what they want since it would be a waste of time.
Incidentally, I worked on a high tech version of this waaaaay back in 2000. Amazingly, every time someone orders a six pack of Coors beer, that information is at the Coors HQ within seconds and is auto-adjusting the brewery output. This demand/supply number is adjusted by a number of different factors (current temperature, past trends, economic conditions, day of the week, month of the year, etc.) but to my knowledge it is one of the first outlet-to-production connections made via the internet.
UX UNbound 