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
