McDonalds Chicken Nuggets
So, I was talking to another business owner that I know. He's like my business coach, because while I know a lot about computers, I don't know a ton about business, so for the last several years running my business, he's been teaching me the things I didn't know (of which there were a lot, an amount that I didn't understand in trying to start my own business).
Anyway, by Business Coach and I had finished our agenda, and were grabbing a bit of lunch at Chik-fil-a. We were remarking on how fast Chik-fil-a can go through their orders, and how fast they keep the drive thru. We remarked how they were the first to start sending people to the front of the store to wait for food, and how a lot of other restaurants were trying to copy their success and speed, and how most were largely unsuccessful.
This inevitably changed into a conversation about how we would run a fast food restaurant, and naturally if it were me, I would try to automate as much as humanly possible. Ideally reducing the number of human errors, turnover, HR problems, and all of the issues that real people cause. With modern AI, creating a system that can talk to customers via the drive through speaker, or even in the store, would be possible, and have a high level of accuracy. We'd still need to have 1 person on staff to take care of any mistakes, and have an escalation path for the AI if it has a problem, or for any customers that didn't get what they wanted. Food production would be entirely automated, in real time. If something went wrong, then the 1 person onsite could reorder the same thing, and if that didn't work, call a corporate resource to remotely fix, or send someone onsite (especially because we're considering a full franchise model, no fast food only has 1 store). We could reduce costs by a significant amount, which would allow us to spend extra money on quality of the food, and still allow us to compete with the other, more memorable chains. Still a lot of kinks to work out, but as far as a bar napkin idea (one we'll never use because neither of us want to work in the food industry) not a bad idea.
From there, we talked about how most fast food franchises work to cut costs and reduce employee mistakes without automating everything, and we got to the idea of how do the different places count their chicken nuggets. See, we're getting to why the title is important! Being at Chick-fil-a, we were able to see that no one in that restaurant was counting anything. They just grab a handful, put it in the nugget box, grab a second, put it in the nugget box, then scrape any extra out of the box. That's when we noticed it wasn't about count, it was about box size. The right amount of chicken fits in the box. So when you get a couple of small nuggets, you get more than the 8 or 12 or however many you bought, when you get those monster ones, you get less.
From there we discussed how different sizes of nuggets, even getting the same volume, would likely be different amounts of chicken due to factors like the amount of space an odd shaped one would take up vs a square shaped one, how some nuggets have more breading than others, and while at an individual consumer level, the changes would be negligible, at a scale of a whole restaurant, it could affect profits. Then I realized that there is 1 restaurant that while I am ashamed to admit I frequent often, in which all the nuggets are the exact same size. That's right, McDonalds! Love them or hate them (and everybody is usually one or the other) those golden, not at all chicken shape or texture, miniature patties of what you hope is chicken, are all exactly the same size, and weight. Even though there are multiple shapes, each on is still the same size and weight.
Say what you want about McDonalds, those guys knew exactly what they were doing. And now I find myself wondering if other seemingly dumb or random decisions others make have a similar intelligence behind them.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, even if things seem random, there may be hidden reasons behind it; now everything I look at, I wonder what the purpose was behind the decisions.