The subject of this study is a moderately priced 175-seat restaurant in a downtown area. It is open from 6.30 to 1.00, Monday through Saturday. The normal staffing is as follows:
- early shift, 6.00 to 14.00: 12 servers
- middle shift, 14.00 to 22.00: 6 servers
- late shift, 17.00 to 1.00: 4 servers
Everyone gets a one-hour meal break and works a seven-hour day. The schedule requires a total of 154 server-hours a day.
During a typical six-day week, the restaurant serves 10,040 covers, with an overall server productivity of 10.9 per server-hour. When Saturday activity is excluded, productivity is slightly higher: on average, 1,705 weekday covers are served, or 11.1 covers per server-hour (Table 3). These figures indicate that Saturday productivity is lower than average and is pulling down overall server productivity. The largest volume of business is done during the week, however, and affords a greater potential for savings. In Table 3, the Monday through Friday activity is broken down by meal period. Afternoon productivity is higher than the overall average, but on a very low volume of business.
- 816 reads
