Restaurant Waiting Times
November 17, 2010We all know the scenario: you step into a restaurant just to find that all tables are full with customers happily eating their lunch. Now, if you could just know who long it will take until you can have your own table to sit down and have your lunch.
Usually you would look for some of the busy staff and ask the obnoxious question: “how long is the wait time for a table?” The answer you’ll receive will most likely be a very biased one that underestimates the actual wait time by, well, a lot. After all, who wants to loose customers through stating a very long waiting time for a table. As a staff person, you are much better off, giving a shorter waiting time, knowing that once a customer sits down and waits for a while, they are much more unlikely to get up and leave for another restaurant then when they first walked through the door.
A much better approach than asking the staff how long you have to wait is doing your own restaurant waiting time analysis.
To do this analysis, count all the tables in a restaurant in a first step. For this example, let’s assume this is a small lunch place with only 10 tables. Next, look around you and make a good estimate of what you think is the average eating time (the time a person occupies a table) in that place. If it is a typical downtown business type of lunch place, the average eating time is usually about 30 minutes (people have about an hour for lunch, so they won’t spend much more time than that). If it is a more casual type of family lunch place, maybe you need to crank up your estimate to a full hour. Just look around and see what and how much people are ordering, eating and drinking. For this example, let’s say that a table is occupied on average for about 60 minutes per lunch.
For all your data crunchers out there, I am assuming that the average eating time follows a normal distribution. That is some people will take longer than 60 minutes to get off their table and some will take less than 60 minutes, but generally speaking after 60 minutes the average table is free again.
To calculate your average restaurant waiting time, simple divide the time a table is occupied on average (that is 60 minutes in our example) by the number of tables in the restaurant (10 tables in our example).
For our example, 60 divided by 10 equals six minutes of average waiting time to get your own table. Waiting six minutes is not too bad and pretty helpful to know, considering that just a few second ago you where wondering if you should go look for another restaurant, ask the busy staff for help or just sit down and wait for as long as it might take.
How do you typically figure out your waiting time and can you think of other situations where this simple technique might help?
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