Day 124 - 10 May 95 - Page 47


     
     1        meetings.  I would participate in crew rap sessions,
     2        informal communication sessions with the crew.  I would
     3        review and assist, where necessary, the store manager and
     4        his staff in the preparation of projections, sales
     5        projections, for the restaurant, to make sure that we would
     6        be properly staffed, properly supplied with the necessary
     7        goods to handle the anticipated amount of business.  The
     8        amount of time that I would spend with the store management
     9        would be dependent upon the degree of experience the store
    10        manager would have.  The more experienced store managers
    11        would require less supervision, less direct help.  But,
    12        nevertheless, I would still spend a good bit of time in
    13        that restaurant at different times of the week and of the
    14        day.  On occasion my superior would also spend time with me
    15        and my charges.
    16
    17   Q.   In terms of the goals that you were setting, you have
    18        mentioned about being properly staffed for the rate of
    19        sales, was there a goal of labour costs in terms of a
    20        percentage of sales?
    21        A.  We did not arbitrarily, it was not my practice to
    22        arbitrarily pick a target, a labour target to shoot at.
    23        The analysis that we did was really based on sales per
    24        man-hour.  So, based on passed experience of the
    25        restaurant, we could project what the restaurant would do
    26        for the seven days of the week.  We would break that down
    27        in an hourly fashion, so that we knew approximately how
    28        much business we would do, let us say from 12 to 1 in the
    29        afternoon, or from 4 to 5 in the evening, and based on our
    30        experience we would know how many employees that restaurant
    31        should have.  We would further fine-tune our projections
    32        with maybe non-reoccurring things that we knew were going
    33        to happen than week.  For instance, if we had gotten
    34        notification there was going to be a tourist bus, or
    35        several tourist buses visiting our restaurant from 12 to 1
    36        on Wednesday of next week, then we would try to staff
    37        accordingly, get extra people to come in to staff the store
    38        properly for that additional bit of business, or if we knew
    39        there was going to be a football game Friday night, and
    40        there was going to be a big turn out of kids following the
    41        football game, then we would staff the store more heavily
    42        than we could typically for that time of evening.  So those
    43        are a couple of examples of the additional things we would
    44        do to make sure we would covered.
    45
    46        One other example that I might give you would be if we had
    47        determined that we were not generating, not maximising our
    48        potential for a particular trading area, we might invest a
    49        little more in labour for particular periods of the day.
    50        Typically the peak periods of our business would occur at 
    51        lunchtime from 11 to 2, and in the evening between 5 and 
    52        7.  That would be true throughout the week.  On Saturdays 
    53        and Sundays the business would be fairly steady all day
    54        with, maybe, some peaks during the day and at lunch.
    55
    56        In analysing the sales pattern of a store, if we determined
    57        that there was considerably more potential in the trading
    58        area, that we were not properly tapping the area, then we
    59        would invest in extra labour to try to give an extra degree
    60        of service to the customer, to make an extra impression, or

Prev Next Index