Here’s a technology that sounds like a good idea: an RFID-enabled tilt sensor that attaches to a bottle and tracks the time, angle and duration of tilt. From that data the bartender’s pouring style and the volume of each drink poured can be estimated.
The company selling this system is Beverage Metrics and, according to its Web site, “Each pour is automatically reconciled with its ring-up, and an unaccounted pour is clearly marked until it is duly entered. Pour volume, brand and payment information is detailed in the daily reports. This reconciliation makes it possible to balance the revenue ledger at the end of the day, provides the information to assure recipe accuracy and, therefore, consistency of pouring margins.”
Beverage Metrics can supply an optional video system that provides real-time streaming video so that “any event, whether it is the removal of a bottle of wine from the rack, the pouring of a drink, opening of a beer bottle, pulling of a tap handle or the opening of a door, is captured for a few seconds, stored and linked to the event’s transaction log.”
In other words every drink is tracked in excruciating detail at a price of around $5 per bottle (this is expected to fall to around $2 per bottle). Among the businesses testing this system are Hilton, Hyatt, Outback Steakhouse and TGI Friday’s.
I asked my brother-in-law, The Mighty B, who has been a bartender, what he thought of this system: “I was chased by this sort of thing for years. Someone is always trying to make this kind of penny-pinching system work.”
TMB continued: “The premise is faulty. It would be hard for me to reduce the owner’s profit significantly by giving a few drinks away, because of our 300% to 1,200% markup on drinks. The sales pitch seems to be, ‘we’ll show you who to go after.’ But the problem is the thinking that goes behind it: It’s greedy and antagonistic. What do I get out of giving away a $5 drink? An extra buck or two? No, I get a friend who represents the sort of customer we want, likes his bartender, and is coming back tomorrow and the next day, month and year. And that is why you hire good bartenders. You trust them to give a little. To run your bar and make it go. Bartenders are your liquor control system. It is in the mutual interest of me and the owner that we attract and maintain our clientele.”
TMB had lots more to say, but the bottom line is that these solutions substitute data management for business management.
There’s a lesson here: In any business where you use technology to monitor staff behavior, you better have a real, undeniable, unavoidable reason to do so.
Consider monitoring staff communications: If you need to monitor e-mail, instant messaging and telephone calls for regulatory compliance, you have no choice – you’ve got to do it and your staff should understand.
But if you don’t have to monitor and you do it anyway, why are you doing it? Just because it could help you control costs and is easy to do isn’t a reason.
Is it because you don’t trust your staff? If so, you have a huge problem and monitoring – which will be known by everyone no matter how much you try to keep it secret – will just give your staff even more reason not to be loyal.
There are many other business processes and procedures through which it is becoming progressively easier to collect incredibly detailed data in near or real time, and IT is the only group that has the big picture.
Any time another business unit wants to collect detailed operational data, we need to ask why the data is being collected, what its value is, whether and how it will be acted on and how, and what the consequences will be.
If we let every manager who can’t actually manage try to use IT to do his job for him, we’ll be aiding and abetting the creation of the kind of organization we probably don’t want to work for.
Tell backspin@gibbs.com or Gibbsblog what you’re monitoring. Thanks to The Mighty B.
Copyright © 2006 IDG Communications, Inc.