(from left: Pierson and Co BBQ, Houston; Food truck, Austin; Franklin’s – best BBQ in US?, Austin)
Sold out signs from Texas. We encountered a lot of these at the top BBQ joints and food trucks. Look familiar?
Well maybe my handwriting isn’t as clear, but we’ve written the big “OUT” more than a few times. It’s one of the issues I hear the most complaints about. I’ve addressed this before, but not recently, so here you go. The official word on why Clover runs out of stuff (even though we know it makes people mad at us).
Imagine the world in which you never run out of food. It means your restaurant is either:
(a) Heating up frozen stuff
(b) Serving old stuff
(c) Throwing a ton out every day
That’s it. Those are the only possibilities. I can tell you, in this industry, where we’re earning just above minimum working very hard it’s NEVER (c). So you’re talking a world of frozen or a world of old food. We’re not OK with either. We’re so not OK with those options we’re willing to piss some people off by running out. Instead of serving old stuff or heating up frozen stuff we run out at the end of the day. A perfect day for us is running out 30 seconds before we close. But we don’t always run it quite that tight. So sometimes we have waste (which we try to avoid) and other times we run out of some popular items. Does that all make sense?
