CloverHSQ has never been more popular. I’m not bragging, it’s just fact. It’s due to a lot of things, some amazing food and amazing leadership by Lynn, the manager there. I was taking orders and I could feel the excitement in line. Freshman advisors were bringing in their advisees for iced coffee, sharing this place that they had discovered as freshmen. Kids were bringing their parents after they got moved into their new houses. Students were telling me “this is my one year anniversary of eating here.”

I got a note from a customer at HSQ yesterday. It was wonderful to hear from folks like Jared who care enough about us to write.

I come to Clover 2x a day (at least 20$). I realize that summer is over and the students are back …but I basically stopped coming because I can’t even get in the door. Its great that demand is so high but sad when you can’t get the food without 30mins or 45 standing in line. I’m sure you’re aware of it but want you to know that if you stand at the front door near lunch half the people see the line – can’t even get inside – and leave. Thanks

We’re going to work super hard on killing that line over the next 4 days. I’m serious – we’re committed to super low wait times even now that students are back. Lynn, who manages CloverHSQ, has been adding order-takers during lunch (I think today we’ll be up to 4 order-takers), and she’s working on staffing up her sandwich-makers and prep cooks – so that once you do get in line, we should be able to get to you pretty fast.

Ethan, our systems engineer, just added real-time wait times to our POS, which means we have real data and not just intuition to work from. You might remember this is version 2 of something we started back in 2009. The new calculation takes the average of 3 past orders of any given item, calculates our wait times, and projects it next to the item on the menu board. So you should be able to see how long you’ll likely wait for each item before you make your decision.

I took a look at our stats from yesterday at HSQ. At our peak (12pm yesterday) the average wait time after placing your order was 10.3 minutes. But at 1pm, the wait was only 6.7 minutes. And if you can swing an early lunch, the wait time at 11am is likely to only be 3.8 minutes.