Week 2 of Pizza Making
Since my last blog post, a quite a lot has happened at my Domino's store. From OER to being shortstaffed, my second week is only half over for me but a lot has already transpired. This week, I've learned a lot and have already made many steps towards some of my goals. Mainly, our store has lost quite a number of drivers recently, so this past Wednesday, our closing manager did deliveries to cover a callout while I ran the store until we closed. While I haven't fully run the store on my own, I was able to start to get a feel for what it is like to manage the store singlehandedly, especially on a night with limited employees. While I haven't had many interesting interactions with customers to warrant a good story or learning opportunity, I have been able to make progress on my third goal of improving my communication skills. Not only did I run the store on my own on Wednesday, but out of the three insiders I had to help make food, it was the first day for one insider and they were completely new. Throughout the night, I was able to realize how strong communication was so important in maintaining an efficient fast food chain, as it means less mistakes and errors, which at Domino's, equates to remakes and worse service times.
While Wednesday felt busy to me, the past week has been rather stressful, with the looming threat of OER. Before I go further, I should probably explain what OER is. OER is the operations evaluation report, where a corporate representative visits your store and grades the store based off of its performance, docking points for every minor issue, including imperfect pizza (under or over topping a pizza, even if it say, the pepperoni count is off by 1) or a not perfectly clean store. This is why, in the eyes of every store, OER = BAD, OER = EVIL. However, they must hit all of the stores in the region (the entire west coast) and so they can be unpredictable. Most stores are in communication about OER spottings, and so recently, OER has been in the area and our store has been preparing for a possible OER visit. This means when we think OER might show up, we count and weigh out our toppings to a T to give our store the best chance at a good score. This makes our service times much slower, since we have to prioritize making the pizza perfect, not fast.
Not only does the food that comes through the oven need to be perfect, but our customer service must be as well. The phones are not allowed to ring more than twice, and we are supposed to greet customers within 3 seconds of them walking through our doors. In a nutshell, OER is scary. It doesn't help that last Friday, after finishing my blog post and heading to work, the Blazers had their first playoff game. Not only was OER in town, but we had more orders flowing in as well. By the end of the night, our store had a $9600 day (in sales), only a few thousand off from a record sales day, which our store last achieved on Halloween of 2020 (we got cool Baby Yoda hat pins though). While OER still hasn't hit our store yet, we do expect to have an OER inspection within the next few days, and while I have zero clue when it will happen, no one in our store is looking forward to it.
Thanks for the great insight and insider's view to your world, Dylan. I've appreciated reading about the goals that you've set for yourself and how it's played out in your reflections. It's wild how much sales can be influenced by the NBA playoffs and so here's hoping that the Blazers can extend the series for your sales (although maybe you don't want that because of the additional stress of OER and heightened orders?) I've always found things like OER's strange (some of the same systems are in place in every profession) as if the goal is to have sustained excellence, a stressful process where you have to be perfect for some part of the year for an inspection may not completely translate into excellence at all times. I wonder what another model would be, though. Thanks again for your insights, Dylan, and I look forward to continuing to follow.
ReplyDeleteThis was fascinating to read! I had no idea what sort of extra stress a visit like OER's would place on employees themselves. Getting your perspective from the ground is important for me as a consumer. I am excited to keep reading and see what continues to transpire!
ReplyDeleteHi Krystal! I'm glad you enjoyed the blog post. However, since OER still hasn't hit our store, every time they are "in town" (anywhere nearby), our store has to transition from "speed mode" to "perfect mode," which slows everything down and ruins our service times. At this point, most people (including myself) are just hoping that they hit our store so that we can get our inspection over with and then not have to stress about it anymore. The deadline is this coming Saturday (June 6) so we hope they come by then. Then again, we don't really know what the ramifications are if the OER guy doesn't meet his deadline :/
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