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My local Red Rooster at Arana Hills and I have a chequered past. We stopped going to it about 12 months ago when we were served some desserts that were 3 months out of use by date and were met with some Basil Fawlty style of problem resolution by the manager.

Last night after hearing that Head Office had been in and had changed the Manager and been working on systems in the store we thought we would give them another go.

So about 7m, we pulled into the drive-through, wound down the window and ordered a chicken and chips family pack. “We don’t have any chicken”.

I was a bit taken aback by that. “Pardon”?

“We don’t have any chicken”.

By this stage I felt like I had joined a skit of Monty Python.

“So just to check - this is Red Rooster and you don’t have any chicken?” “That’s right”.

There was no offering of any other menu options, such as chips, chips and chips, chips chips chips and chips (Monty Python’s spam skit was starting to play through my head). There was no apology. No we are cooking some and it will be ready in 10 minutes, it was just “we have no chicken”.

So I did what I observed every other car do that night - drove through to the drive through and go straight to Hungry Jacks next door. Which is a whole other saga as that store had one frazzled team leader and the entire rest of the employee team were all wearing the little red badges saying “Hi I’m in training”.

On talking with one of the team members it was all of their first nights working there- so a 30 minute wait for the order gave us and all of the other customers time for a lovely chance to chat, bond, get to know each other’s children, get to know all the people from drive through coming back in the store after their orders were incorrect, sing a few verses of Kumbya and watch the cars drive quickly through the next door Red-Rooster drive through without stopping.  One of the returning customers mentioned that it was the second week in a row that Red Rooster had no chicken.

So what can businesses learn from this? Yes, all businesses sometimes run out of items. You can do it once and get away with it, twice is just getting silly and shows you are not learning from your business reporting.

You need to train your employees what to do in those situations - offer alternatives, discount vouchers or some other way to get people back when you do have your stock back in.

Oh yes … and never never never only roster trainees on a shift.

I now know why the local pizza shop is always busy!

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

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