Tue 30 April 2013

Efficiency

I went to Potbelly for lunch today. This one is on 44th street and Lexington Avenue (New York City). There was a long queue extending all the way out of the entrance – mostly office crowd. The line moved pretty quick though. A lady with an iPad took the order. Three people standing next to each other at elbow width were making sandwiches. Another employee at the adjacent counter was taking care of payments.

I must have spent a grand total of 10 seconds in the store from the time I first spoke to the lady making my sandwich.

Connecting

At the end, when I was walking away from the payment counter with my sandwich, it felt weird. In the process of making the whole process super-efficient, I think that they lost the human touch.

The whole experience felt like walking into a super market and picking a sandwich from an aisle. The counter where the food was being prepared was tall and one cannot see the preparation of the food or the ingredients at all. It was like standing in front of a machine, pulling a few levers and pushing a few buttons and out comes your sandwich in a few seconds.

Sandwich was good though. Am sure with such an efficiency and food, they are selling a good number of sandwiches and will continue to make money. But, I don’t think I will go there for lunch again. I would rather wait a few more minutes and come out with a feeling that I have interacted with a real person.

Hope?

Who am I kidding again though… it is a food chain after all. Somewhere in his bed, the CEO is rolling, obsessing about where he can wring an additional second of efficiency from the whole process… maybe even thinking, why can’t he just have a sandwich-making-machine with levers and buttons instead of humans.