Apr. 16, 2018 "Will diners bite on prepaid reservations?": Today I found this article by Alexandra Gill in the Globe and Mail. It's about reservations at restaurants, and I work at one so I have to read it:
Vancouver's Cacao is a small, 25-seat, pan-Latin restaur ant that specializes in modernist cuisine made with weird and wild ingredients - things like ant salt, seaweed foam and mole made with a 50-year-old starter.
And now, as one of the new Canadian clients of Tock, a reservation software company co-founded by Chicago restaurateur Nick Kokonas (Alinea, Next, Roister, Aviary), it offers a booking system as innovative as its food.
Customers coming for the $85 tasting menus must pay upfront when booking online, the same way they would for a theatre performance, concert or hockey game. Those dining à la carte are charged a $10 deposit. Both types of payments are non-refundable, but can be transferred to another night with 24-hours notice.
Many restaurant owners love the concept, but some industry insiders are skeptical that diners be willing to change their habits.
Many restaurant owners love the concept, but some industry insiders are skeptical that diners be willing to change their habits.
"Imagine you're going to a restaurant for the first time and you're asked to pony up $150 before even stepping through the door," says Alex Fraser, vice-president of western operations for the 15 Group, a hospitality management and consulting company.
"I'm not sure how many restaurants in Canada would want that to be someone's first interaction with the brand. From a service perspective, you haven't done anything for the customer except guarantee a table."
Cacao co-owner Jefferson Alvarez says the practice of asking diners to pay for their seats in advance makes sense for a small volume, chef-driven restaurant such as his, where one or two tables of no-shows (customers who don't bother cancelling) can turn a profitable night into a loss.
"It's definitely keeping the non-committed diners away and I don't mind," says Mr. Alvarez, who estimates that before implementing the Tock system in February, his weekly rate of no-shows was 30 per cent to 50 per cent (the industry average is 10 per cent to 15 per cent).
Since he began asking for prepayments and deposits, his nightly seating numbers have remained consistent, but the noshows have dropped to zero.
Since he began asking for prepayments and deposits, his nightly seating numbers have remained consistent, but the noshows have dropped to zero.
"We know how many customers to expect - only about 10 per cent are walk-ins," he says. "We know how many people we need on staff, how many people will be drinking the wine pairings and how much food we need to buy.
We try to be a no-waste restaurant and it helps reduce that, too."
When Tock launched amid much hype in 2015, the company focused on high-demand, Michelin-star-rated restaurants similar to Mr. Kokonas's Next, which offers a new themed menu every few months and has been using a prepaid ticketing system since it opened in 2011.
Early Tock adopters included London's the Clove Club, San Francisco's Coi, Napa Valley's French Laundry and New York's Per Se (Thomas Keller, chef-owner of the latter two, was also an investor, along with former Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo and venture capitalist Kimbal Musk).
Tock includes a detailed customer-service management system that keeps records of previous visits and tracks things such as dietary restrictions, mobility issues and whether a diner is left-handed.
Early Tock adopters included London's the Clove Club, San Francisco's Coi, Napa Valley's French Laundry and New York's Per Se (Thomas Keller, chef-owner of the latter two, was also an investor, along with former Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo and venture capitalist Kimbal Musk).
Tock includes a detailed customer-service management system that keeps records of previous visits and tracks things such as dietary restrictions, mobility issues and whether a diner is left-handed.
But now that the company is growing worldwide - at the rate of one to two new partners a day, with approximately 330 in total - it is marketing to more casual operators such as Cacao, along with wineries, pop-ups, bars and breweries.
In Canada, where there are nine active partners, most are small, experiential, tasting-menu restaurants such as Edmonton's The Alder Room, which was the first to sign up around this time last year. Some, including Victoria's Nourish Kitchen & Café and Vancouver's Tempranillo, use the web-based software system for traditional (zero-deposit) reservations, relying on prepayments only for special events.
My opinion: I wrote about this before, the Alder Room closed down.
Toronto's Alo, with its high-priced tasting menus and forever-long waiting lists, is the only traditional, fivestar restaurant in the Canadian Tock roster.
My opinion: I wrote about this before, the Alder Room closed down.
Toronto's Alo, with its high-priced tasting menus and forever-long waiting lists, is the only traditional, fivestar restaurant in the Canadian Tock roster.
Patrick Kriss, chef-owner of Toronto's Alo, which charges a $50 deposit for the dining room tasting menu and fully paid, $150 tickets for the more exclusive kitchen counter, says he's had far fewer customer complaints - and none regarding prepayments - since transitioning to Tock last December.
"Previously, it was a disaster and it was our fault. We took too many types of reservations - phone, e-mail and OpenTable.
We'd open 30 days out and would have four or five people in the office doing e-mails and taking calls. They were getting screamed at. We'd have 50 people on hold and seats were being filled before we could even speak to anyone.
How are you supposed to manage that? Now, we just use Tock and it's much more streamlined."
For all its advantages, Mr. Kriss and other restaurateurs still can't see Tock taking over the online reservation industry or going head-to-head with OpenTable, the online-reservation industry leader, which counts more than 45,000 restaurant partners in 20plus countries.
"It's very hard to break that network," says Brandon Grossutti, owner of Pidgin Restaurant in Vancouver, which has been plagued by no-shows, but still doesn't see Tock working for a medium-sized (74-seat), primarily à la carte restaurant like his.
Mr. Grossutti isn't opposed to leveraging demand for restaurant seats or penalizing customers for their "frivolous" approach to making reservations. As a more practical solution, he points to DINR, a Canadian mobile application that offers only same-day reservations, yet penalizes customers with a $30 credit-card charge if they don't show up.
"If OpenTable did that, if they took a credit-card number for all the millions of diners in their network and charged for no-shows - I mean if they really showed they cared about restaurants, they could change the restaurant business overnight."
Special to The Globe and Mail Canada's top entrepreneurs share their strategies for success at the 2018 Globe and Mail Small Business Summit. Full lineup and early-bird tickets available at tgam.ca/SBS18
Aug. 24, 2018 "Planning for university? Take a look at career prospects for 2020 and beyond": Today I found this article by Peter Caven in the Globe and Mail:
Founder and director of Launched Careers, Toronto
A federal government report in 2015 found that 56 per cent of university graduates under the age of 24 were underemployed – working in jobs for which they were overqualified – and 40 per cent of the 25-to-34-year-old segment were similarly underemployed.
While the study has yet to be updated, given the trends reported in it there is little reason to expect that this situation has changed. We all know of a university or college grad working as a barista or living in their parents' basement.
In 2016, the World Economic Forum (WEF) published “The Future of Jobs – Employment, Skills and Workforce Strategy for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.” The report identified demographic, socioeconomic and technological drivers of change.
The impact of those changes in the 2020s is expected to be primarily technical and will include advanced robotics and autonomous transport; artificial intelligence and machine learning; and advanced materials, biotechnology and genomics.
The impact of those changes in the 2020s is expected to be primarily technical and will include advanced robotics and autonomous transport; artificial intelligence and machine learning; and advanced materials, biotechnology and genomics.
These drivers of change will result in changes in employment in existing job families, and also the emergence of entirely new careers.
Winners and losers
The biggest winners are expected to be business and financial operations; management; computer and mathematics; architecture and engineering; healthcare; and sales and related.
The biggest losers are expected to be office and administrative; manufacturing and production; construction and extraction; arts, design, entertainment, sports and media; and law.
New and emerging job categories include data analysts and specialized sales representatives.
The former is self-evident; the latter is driven by the need for organizations to become skilled at commercializing their offerings.
The former is self-evident; the latter is driven by the need for organizations to become skilled at commercializing their offerings.
Obviously, the big winners are science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), and the losers are the liberal arts. STEM fields offer more opportunity and superior compensation.
According to Statistics Canada, the highest starting salaries for university undergraduates are for engineers, and the lowest are for those with liberal arts degrees.
According to Statistics Canada, the highest starting salaries for university undergraduates are for engineers, and the lowest are for those with liberal arts degrees.
Mathematics skills are critical as they are a fundamental element of all STEM educational streams and professions. As Professor Anna Stokke pointed out in an article in The Globe and Mail last year, the Ontario Education and Accountability Office’s 2016-17 results showed that only 50 per cent of Grade 6 students met the provincial math standard, down from 61 per cent 10 years ago.
The Ontario report also indicated that the percentage of Grade 3 students who met the standard was higher than that of Grade 6 students. Mathematics is cumulative in nature; that is, basic skills must be mastered before new ones can be acquired. Obviously, that is not happening.
The trend toward what is referred to as student-centered, experiential, inquiry or 21st-century learning is not serving students well. These techniques are not backed up by solid research evidence, which shows that explicit instruction by a teacher followed by student practice nurtures better understanding and stronger mathematical problem-solving. In addition, it has been documented that many elementary teachers feel uncomfortable teaching math.
Guidance counsellors, who are supposed to provide educational and career advice to students, are unable to do so. In Ontario, there is one guidance counsellor for every 600 or more students in public high schools, and their attention is increasingly focused on behavioural and mental-health issues. These statistics are likely similar in all provinces and territories.
Canadian universities and colleges must also accept some ownership for this. The evidence indicates that Canadian educational institutions rank helping their students find employment as only eighth in a list of 10 priority areas.
Of concern is that one in five Canadian employers reported that they had no interaction whatsoever with education providers and 70 per cent said they “occasionally” interacted with providers. In Germany, more than 25 per cent of employers reported interacting “monthly or more” with providers – whereas in Canada only nine per cent report engaging in this interaction.
If elementary and high-school students are not taught the skills or given appropriate guidance by their educators or parents, they will miss out on university or college degrees that can serve as a foundation for a career in the 2020s.
What to do?
- Ensure that your elementary and high school students take mathematics and science courses. Do not give up on these courses. Yes, they may be more challenging. Calculus reduced my daughter to tears, but she is now completing her PhD for which she had to complete a number of challenging statistics courses.
- Do your due diligence with your son or daughter when considering university or community college programs. There is a plethora of research about career options for graduates of specific disciplines. LinkedIn is a powerful tool for doing this; you can enter the school and program names as search parameters and see where graduates are working and what they are doing. In a similar search for one community college program, I discovered that only 10 per cent of program graduates in the last three years were working in their related industry.
- Talk to experienced professionals in the field and get their point of view on careers in their field.
Informed decision-making can lead to a great career and finding one’s calling.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/careers/article-planning-for-university-take-a-look-at-career-prospects-for-2020-and/
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